It's bedrock liberal feminist teaching that when a male in a superior position in the workplace has sex with a female in a subordinate job, the sex is non-consensual. The male is using his position to extort the sex. Every time. No exceptions. Many a male has lost his job over this. Don't think this applies to you? Consult your workplace "sexual harassment" code.
On his national TV program the other night, David Letterman admitted having sex with (much) younger female staffers in subordinate jobs in his production company "Worldwide Pants, Inc." We shoulda known by the name.
Letterman still has his show and his job. In fact, his confession got a loud laugh from his New York studio audience.
They're the same laughs Dave gets when he makes fun of the Palin family – or of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Dave reacted to news that Arnold had once groped eight women by remarking "He's presidential material."
Liberal rules don't apply to liberals.
Apparently neither does liberal philosophy.
Dave also disclosed why he was confessing on the national show. A "48 Hours" producer had tried to extort $2 million from him, threatening to expose Dave's indiscretions.
As the story was told, when Letterman heard the producer's demand, he immediately called his attorney, who went to the Manhattan district attorney. The attorney then, wearing a wire, met with the blackmailer. A grand jury was convened, an indictment handed down, an arrest made. It all happened in a short period of time.
The "right response" you say? Yes. In my opinion, it was exactly the right thing to do. But not according to prevailing liberal thought.
Letterman, a New York liberal, endorsed President Obama and specifically praised Obama's rejection of Bush unilateralism and Obama's willingness to join allies and meet directly with dictators who are developing nuclear weapons in North Korea and Iran, "extending our hand if they will unclench their fist."
Yet when he was faced with a determined adversary equipped and willing to nuke his career, Dave dropped the hammer on him.
Where was the understanding, the empathy? After all, the producer had found out about Dave's activity by reading his girlfriend's diary.
Why didn't Dave consider consulting his talk-host colleagues? Wouldn't a meeting with Leno, O'Brien et. al. produced a more nuanced response?
The harsh unilateralism, the swift and brutal destruction of the threat – it's all so Bush, isn't it Dave?
The Letterman confession came just days after the arrest of Roman Polanski in Switzerland on a 30-year-old warrant issued when he fled Los Angeles for Europe to escape sentencing for admitting to forcing several kinds of sex on a 13-year-old girl.
Once again, at least some liberals did not want to apply long standing liberal rules to another liberal.
The rules against domestic violence and sex with minors have been toughened considerably since Polanski's 1978 crime. They were toughened by liberal California state lawmakers and by popular ballot initiative.
Notwithstanding liberal orthodoxy on these matters, Harvey Weinstein urged Polanski's release describing the long ago rape as a "so-called crime." Whoopi Goldberg dismissed the incident. It wasn't "rape-rape" she said on "The View."
Other Hollywood luminaries, Woody Allen among them, have spoken out in defense of Polanski and signed petitions for his release. A high-powered Washington lawyer (and friend of Attorney General Eric Holder) has been retained to fight Polanski's extradition.
Even the victim urged Polanski's release, although by last week it had come out that Polanski had paid her a huge sum to dismiss a civil lawsuit over the matter.
But even liberals had second thoughts about Polanski when the grand jury testimony of the victim, in all its exploitative and X-rated detail, was published.
Turns out that the Polanski case, even for liberals, is not as clear cut as, say, the innocence of cop killer Mumia abu Jamal.
In the Letterman and Polanski cases, it certainly looks like liberals are telling us, "Do as I say, not as I do."
But is this a pattern?
Well, consider the troubles afflicting ACORN. Indicted in some 13 states for voter fraud arising out of stuffing the 2008 ballot box with phony voters, this liberal "community activist" organization loudly denounced the 2000 Florida presidential vote count as fraudulent.
And consider the silence of the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council and every other "environmentalist" organization when Mexican drug gangs set up pot plantations in more than 40 national forests, terracing land, using fertilizers and pesticides banned on legal farms and stealing irrigation water.
The cooking fires for illegal workers in one such plantation started the recent forest fire which incinerated 88,000 acres of habitat in a national forest near Santa Barbara.
Silence on all matters critical of illegal immigration is required of liberal groups. Environmentalists stand mute as the great forest areas they helped set aside and preserve are destroyed.
Finally, consider the liberals astonishing sell out to corporate America.
How else to describe the health-insurance "reform" now working its way through Congress in several forms. In every version, Americans will be required to buy health insurance at premiums set by insurance companies, with poorer folks getting a subsidy to help pay those premiums. If this isn't welfare for the insurance companies – what is?
In what area or on what topic are liberals willing to live by the rules they've been preaching and laws they've been enacting for the last 40 years?
