Last week National Review legal blogger Ed Whelan compared Solicitor General and Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan to a prostitute for her decision, while she was dean of Harvard Law School, not to openly defy a Supreme Court ruling that would have denied millions in government funding to the institution, despite her public opposition to "don't ask, don't tell."
Whelan dismissed the subsequent criticism, telling everyone they were overreacting:
I see that some lefty bloggers...have taken, or feigned, offense at my use of the Bernard Shaw quip. Set aside the fact that the broader point of my post is that Kagan surely doesn't believe her own extremist rhetoric (not that she believes it but is willing to sell her principles away). The Bernard Shaw quip is widely used in political discourse...to criticize someone for selling out; it obviously doesn't carry (and in my case certainly wasn't intended to carry) the particular stigma that a narrowly literal understanding would convey.
Right. He didn't mean any insult; he just wanted to say Kagan was a sellout, and he just happened to pick the whore example. It is a complete coincidence that for centuries, accomplished and professional women have been compared to whores by men who don't think they deserve the recognition.
But Whelan's original argument is weak and hardly warranted the disrespectful hyperbole he employs. The fact that Kagan was unwilling to gamble with millions of dollars of other people's money in order to take a personal moral stand against DADT doesn't make her a sellout -- it makes her a responsible administrator who isn't reckless enough to deny the entire Harvard student body resources because she thinks it's wrong that the government discriminates against gays and lesbians in the military. It wasn't her money, it wasn't going in her pocket, and so even on the merits, the whore example doesn't even fit. Perhaps Whelan's grasp of logic and arsenal of metaphors is really this limited, but since in the past he's shown himself to be resistant to more noxious kinds of political criticism, I suspect he just thought he was being really cute with the whole prostitute thing.
Now Kagan's decision was a perfectly understandable one. A man as smart as Ed Whelan is surely capable of understanding it. Had Kagan chosen to play roulette with money meant for the education of students at Harvard Law School, Whelan would be attacking her as a reckless activist and moral monster willing to gamble on her students' education and defy a Supreme Court ruling out of mere vanity.
Kagan, who would not have been my first choice, has a scant record and therefore little to criticize beyond the fact that she has a scant record. So in order to feed his audience the red meat they desire, Whelan had to rustle up some chum by attacking Kagan's personal integrity and playing up a gender stereotype or two. In the absence of any real culture-war ammunition, all Whelan has to offer are dribblings squeezed from the brain stem of a reptile.
I suspect, sadly, that he has set the tone for the next few months. Here he is attacking Kagan for not learning how to drive until her late 20s. Did you click on that link? You just dropped like five IQ points.
-- A. Serwer
