From Slate, via Gucci Little Piggy:
Marc Ambinder: How Washington's Gay Mafia Helped My Career
By Robert Wright | Posted Monday, June 4, 2012, at 7:34 PM ET
Veteran journalist Marc Ambinder has left Washington after years of political reporting and is ready to share some of the city's secrets. Here he explains why DC is a place where being gay can bring significant career advantages:
Ambinder describes the advantages of being a gay media figure in Washington D.C. as "tribal."
I don't have time to transcribe what the gay reporter says about the advantages he enjoyed in his career as part of the D.C. gay mafia, but it would be nice to have it in text as part of the searchable permanent record.
As a long time fan of what Artie told Phil on The Larry Sanders Show, I particularly like how Wright responds to Ambinder's confessions: "It's kind of like being a Mormon or something!"
By the way, the generally accepted storyline is that the war over gay marriage is between a powerless, marginalized, oppressed minority and the well-organized, oppressive majority. An alternative conception is that converts to the cause of gay marriage tend to be the folks who know which way the wind is blowing and sense it is prudent to pay tribute to the rise of gay power by aligning themselves with the better organized side, while the opponents of gay marriage tend to be yokels who don't have a clue about how things really work.
I don't have time to transcribe what the gay reporter says about the advantages he enjoyed in his career as part of the D.C. gay mafia, but it would be nice to have it in text as part of the searchable permanent record.
As a long time fan of what Artie told Phil on The Larry Sanders Show, I particularly like how Wright responds to Ambinder's confessions: "It's kind of like being a Mormon or something!"
By the way, the generally accepted storyline is that the war over gay marriage is between a powerless, marginalized, oppressed minority and the well-organized, oppressive majority. An alternative conception is that converts to the cause of gay marriage tend to be the folks who know which way the wind is blowing and sense it is prudent to pay tribute to the rise of gay power by aligning themselves with the better organized side, while the opponents of gay marriage tend to be yokels who don't have a clue about how things really work.
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55 comments:
yeah... mormon.. not scot-irish or anything...
Ambinder is gay? And a "veteran" political journalist? I thought he was about Yglesias's age, and was mainly an Atlantic blogger.
Mike Ovitz said the same
Does it help more nowadays, vs. the Joseph Alsop era?
Remember Ken Mehlman? He had zero skill for ideological combat. When he came out it only made sense
The gay jews ran the town...
Homonism.
Feminism too became tribal. It went from 'let us girls in' to 'this is OUR world, and YOU stay out.'
gaypac
Looks like this he's been on this lame idea for months:
"How Mormons Are Kind of Like Jews"
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_wright_show/2012/02/02/joanna_brooks_author_of_the_book_of_mormon_girl_on_mormonism_and_judaism.html
But then that's what you get when the East Coast establishment tries to think about any group of people west of Scarsdale. Mormons, Mexicans...
According to Wikipedia, Andrew Huxley was the son of Leonard Huxley's second wife, not Julia Arnold. Point taken though.
That Sanders show moment was all about ingroup outgroup strategy concentric circles.
The question is now: does there exist an ingroup within the Jewish gay group that can leverage power for themselves?
I don't really understand the Mormon comment.
"It's kind of like being a Mormon or something!"
Examiner Editorial: Romney's transition pick a red flag for conservatives - "Over the weekend, Politico reported Romney had tapped former Utah governor and Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt to lead his transition effort should he win the presidency. At best, Leavitt is a puzzling choice. Although most Republicans, including Romney, have warned about the dangers of President Obama's national health care law, Leavitt is a leading Republican advocate for implementing Obamacare's burdensome health insurance exchanges in all 50 states. Conveniently, his consultancy group won a contract last month to set up the new exchange in New Mexico..."
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"How Mormons Are Kind of Like Jews"
The Asia Times Spengler got quite pissy about this very point back in 2008.
Rightly or wrongly, I assume that all young male political journalists are gay, or at the very least gay-for-pay. At the New Republic, Marty Peretz used to keep an entire stable of them, and they all tended to do well after they left his employ. That suggests to me that they were trading on flesh.
I make the same assumption about actors, although that's a little more ambiguous, since acting, unlike repeating word-for-word what powerful people tell you, actually takes a bit of skill. Meaning that meritocracy is at least theoretically possible.
Meritocracy is bamboozle for da dopey masses.
Meanwhile ruthless ingroup strategy succeeds wonderfully--like it has since the beginning of time.
"to pay tribute to the rise of gay power"
"Gay power". With a posher word that would be -- wait for it --
Sodomight
When one thinks of a tribal groups with tons of power in Washington DC, of course the Mormons come to mind. One would never "think" of the Scottish-Irish.
Even if one did think of the Scots-Irish, one would never dare say it out loud. Now that is real power, so much power that nobody dare speak of it out of fear.
The gay lobby would be FUDGEPAC, surely?
Anyway, this gay man would like to point out gays are not well represented in political, business or banking elite circles, and contra rumors, gay men earn less on average, despite being better educated. http://www.american.edu/cas/economics/pdf/upload/Paper-Martell.pdf
Tell you what, when we annex San Francisco, put heterosexuals into prison camps a la Gaza and get the US Gov to start wars with homophobic countries on our behalf, I'll accept the Jewish comparison...
They are modern day court eunuchs.
"The question is now: does there exist an ingroup within the Jewish gay group that can leverage power for themselves?"
Neoconservatives?
Gay power has power cuz it's favored by all-powerful Jewish power. Same with the illegal lobby.
One can get ornate on this or listen to Occam. Homosexuals are a minority only in a particular kind of inclination. In terms of law, they favor the libertine, consenting-adults policies on sex that have become the legal preference of a majority of Americans, including those whose own moral standards are much stricter.
On marriage, homosexuals favor the fake equality or sameness that has become the default reflex of most Americans, for which lawyers have erected a contrived but elaborate body of constitutional theory and which the media is bound to support for both commercial and personal reasons.
Whether all this sexual libertinism and fake equivalence will sustain a society over the long run is another question. At some point we may have to face the Big Paradox. Sexual conduct is at once one of the most private of human acts but one with huge public consequences.
"Sodomight"
Grrrrroooooooaaaaaaaaannnnnnnnnnn.
On a somewhat similar note: What do David Gregory (MSM), David Brooks (conservative pundit), Jeffrey Goldberg (reporter for liberal mags) and Martin Indyk (former ambassador to Israel) have in common? No, besides that. They're all in the same Torah study group in Washington. See Jason Zengerle piece in NY Mag
http://nymag.com/news/features/peter-beinart-2012-6/index3.html
Gay males are about 3% of the population. Maybe a little more.
I remember once getting a job interview because the hiring manager in rifling through all the resumes noticed that I had attended the same university as he had.
Another time for another job my heart leapt when I saw on the wall behind the hiring manager's head a poster of - Placido Domingo. Yet another tine I was happy to see that the hiring manager was my height.
What are the chances of that? Answer:about 1%. Knowing opera:about .1%. Being a GWU alumnus <.01%.
It doesn't surprise me that me that gays in Washington DC preferentially hire one another. It doesn't seem very sinister. It seems normal. I suspect that if gays didn't show prejudices toward each other there would be penetrating analyses about "self hate".
Albertosaurus
Academic dishonesty by one of the liberal elites?
Where else might we find such academic dishonesty? Some elite law schools?
Surely Ambinder is part of a group evolutionary strategy!
Yours,
K-Mac
http://youtu.be/poyPjx5mTi4
Episode 005 - The Race Report with Craig Bodeker
Wow. I've never felt I had much in the way of "gaydar," but when I clicked on the Slate link and Ambinder's picture came up in the video window his gayness registered in well under 50ms!
"It's kind of like being a Mormon or something!"
Saying "It's kind of like being a Jew or something" would have been more apt, but less politically correct.
"while the opponents of gay marriage tend to be yokels who don't have a clue about how things really work."
Ironically, the most stalwart opponents of the gay marriage proposition in California were... the Mormons.
"[It was] estimated that Mormons made up 80 percent to 90 percent of the early volunteers who walked door-to-door in election precincts.... In the end, Protect Marriage estimates, as much as half of the nearly $40 million raised on behalf of the measure was contributed by Mormons."
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/15/us/politics/15marriage.html
FUDGEPAC for the win!
And a gay dad can be useful also (Elliott Sr. was an aviation/rocketry manager in west L.A.)
"Where you been, Homer? The entire steel industry's gay--aerospace and the railroads too"
"Examiner Editorial: Romney's transition pick a red flag for conservatives..."
Well, duhh, Mitt Romney is the least conservative GOP nominee since Gerald Ford, of course he's going to pick a moderate Republican as transition chief.
Curious that gay marriage aside, there seems to be an awful lot of Mormon GOP pols who are fairly moderate; Romney (father and son) Gordon Smith in Oregon, Utah has Leavitt, Jon Huntsman, Bob Bennett (he lost his Senate to a Tea Party primary challenger) and in years past, Orrin Hatch (who faces his own primary challenge later this month).
Hell, Leavitt's former aide Jason Chaffetz voted AGAINST funding the war in Afghanistan and sponsored a bill requiring a search warrant for police GPS tracking (the Supreme Court went ahead and mandated it). In Tea Party Republican terms, they're a bunch of Unitarian peace activists. :o)
Blowjobs: No longer just for advancing the careers of women!
Jewish morality in a nutshell.
To blacks: 'Because we supported you against South African apartheid, you should support our apartheid against Palestinians.'
To whites: 'Because you saved us from racial destruction from the Nazis, we must support your racial destruction.'
I think opportunistic homosexuality only benefits the male operators, because it doesn't offend the dominant voter-consumer bloc (housewives) while it simultaneously secures an in among a cozy group of shrewd fixers. With the exception of the professional feminist organizations (all-female groups have a drift towards leadership vacuum) lesbianism is no use for leveraging the D.C. power structure, and may even be a liability if taken beyond that environment. Otherwise Prof. Warren would come out now & thereby clinch it (with a "32/32nds Gay-American" ad presumably)
So much talk about racial wage gay and sexual wage gap.
What about ethnic wage gap? How much are Jewish-Americans and Polish-
Americans earning?
And what about sexual orientation gap? How much are gays earning and non-gays earning?
Being a White straight male is handicap today...
"Ironically, the most stalwart opponents of the gay marriage proposition in California were... the Mormons."
No, we're told Mormon church money was heavily used for the ads, but as a Californian, I doubt very seriously that ad campaigns had much of anything to do with a voter's vote on Prop 8.
The demographic most heavily opposed to gay marriage in CA if one is to believe the exit polls is blacks.
Since Prop 8, I think people are so pissed at the courts and the gay lobby that were it put to a vote again, gay marriage would lose again. I actually don't believe it when the media says that gay marriage now is favored by a majority of Americans.
In fact, I believe very little of what the media says at all, and I believe polls commissioned by activist groups even less. I do believe the voting results.
Last time I looked, Garth Ancier, the former head of WB, and an openly Gay Black man, was not Jewish.
Power does not come from a small group of "devious" people wielding influence behind the scenes, "market dominant minorities" in SE Asia only survive as long as they have a protector: Western Imperialists, or China. Otherwise they are DEAD MEAT when it comes time to divy up the spoils from the real power players, the local majority elites who run most everything. Hence periodic pogroms in SE Asia against the Chinese diaspora.
"Gay power" is really an expression of female orientation. Who loves the gays? Why women! Just look at say, broadcast TV, which in the 1950's ran stuff like "the Rifleman" with Chuck Connors, and today runs ... "Fattest Loser" with open lesbians adopting African babies right out of "Bruno" as the star. Women love gays (the model for all non-Alpha men) and the more society tilts toward a female-driven consumer model, the more "power" as a function of female-orientation gays have.
But Gays don't run the military. Or Wall Street. Or major industrial companies. They are absent mostly from Silicon Valley. ONLY in Hollywood, which is under serious pressure (basically a power struggle between making China happy and growing US Nationalism and protectionism see Wanda Corp buying AMC; and catastrophic revenue declines from movies themselves) are Gays a big presence.
There is no equivalent to say, Ellen, in Aerospace. Gay Power is just another way of saying female power. That's all.
Who has more power and wealth?
Gay men, lesbians, or transsexuals?
I'll bet it's gay men. OH THE INJUSTICE! Gay 'sexism' must end!
"No, we're told Mormon church money was heavily used for the ads, but as a Californian, I doubt very seriously that ad campaigns had much of anything to do with a voter's vote on Prop 8."
The aftermath of that vote was surreal. Nice gay couples were weeping copiously on camera, complaining that those rich, media savvy city slickers in Provo had hoodwinked the poor country bumpkins in San Francisco and West Hollywood who only wanted to be left alone to live their quaint folkways.
I was deeply offended by all of that anti-Mormon animus. We Catholics should have been the target of their ire. That was a real failing on our part.
I still don't get the Mormon remark. I've not noticed they are particularly significant as a group in the power alleys of the United. But maybe that is the point--that they operate in clandestine fashion?
It's possible he's being self-deprecating, but more likely that Wright doesn't know any actual Mormons and it's a legitimately clueless analogy.
Gay elected officials can be blackmailed unless they have come out of the closet. But if they come out of the closet they can't get elected. I've long suspected George W. Bush and his sidekick were gay and may have been blackmailed by rich Texans in the aftermath of the S&L scandal (Texas was ground zero) and later by Saudis in the aftermath of 9/11. "Don't come after us, go after Sadam instead."
About George W.'s gayness, remember these creepy pictures:
http://tinyurl.com/85qbk62
And wasn't their a male prostitute who got regular admittance to the White House in the middle of the night? That story got swept under the rug.
When a president is blackmailed the whole nation pays.
http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/06/05/bath-salts-drug-behind-miami-face-eating-attack-could-be-banned-in-canada/
This is like banning fried chicken to reduce black crime.
"Whiskey said...
Last time I looked, Garth Ancier, the former head of WB, and an openly Gay Black man, was not Jewish."
David Geffen is. It's probably easier to come up with a lot more examples like him, than like yours.
By the way, are you still pushing the meme that Harvard is dominated by hip-flask snorting, Stutz-Bearcat-driving WASPs in Oxford Bags and Racoon coats?
I bought and have since barely used http://NotTheAtlantic.com in part to show Ambinder wrong. Then, Sully left. Then, he left. Now, McArdle left. I wasted $20 ($10 x 2 years). At least TNC is still there.
While showing how Ambinder is wrong elsewhere, leaving many comments showing him wrong, and laughing heartily at The Table (a brief video series with Yglesias), I had no idea he's gay. Didn't care then, don't care now.
Regarding the part about yokels, I have yet to hear a reasonable, mainstream, not-exclusively-religion-based argument against gay marriage. If those opposed to gay marriage were CAP/ACLU/NCLR/MSM/etc., things would be a lot different. DunningKruger applies to that as it does to the TPers and to OWS.
"Tell you what, when we ... get the US Gov to start wars with homophobic countries on our behalf, I'll accept the Jewish comparison..."
I don't know about this one. The, ahem, 'strange fruit' images from Iran seem to be front and center in the pre-invasion agit-prop.
I keep forgetting that most people as yet have not accepted the notion that homosexuality is a disease. The gay-germ theory is not a particularly new idea. My own modest contribution that homosexuality is caused by T. Gondii is rather newer. I started blogging about T. Gondii only about six months ago.
Most of the alarm and/or entusiasm for homosexuality simply evaporates if you understand what it is. A lot of the hyteria around the gay Catholic priests and Joe Paterno's coach assumes that if you molest a young boy you will convert him into a homosexual himself. This doesn't seem to be true. It is true that there are young boys who don't realize yet that they are gay. Gays are about 3% of the population. Gayness is present from before birth but often is unrecognized until puberty. So if the molester stumbles across such a boy it can look as if he has "converted" the lad from hetro to homo.
I believe that normal men have an inherent revulsion for gay sex but there is no reason to believe such a sexual orientatiion is "catching". Gay sex may be revolting but it isn't particularly harmful unless the young abuse victim is exposed to venereal diseases. Buggery is bad for you.
Normal men also have an inherent revulsion for the sight of human blood. Doctors have to be de-sensitized to the sight of blood. Similarly normal heterosexual men can learn to accept the idea of gay sex. This seems to be a major goal of the gay activists. These agitators also want to expose gay men who are still "in the closet". They do not generally expect to persuade staright men to be gay. Millions of gay men have tried over the centuries to be straight and they have failed. Why would anyone expect the opposite conversion (straight to gay) would be anymore successful?
Gayness is indeed contagious but it is caused by your mother catching it from a cat not you catching it as an adult from another human.
Albertosaurus
"David Geffen is."
Boy, is he ever.
"Nice gay couples were weeping copiously on camera,...."
Yes, and this is what sickens people or just makes them laugh...the notion of males weeping and whining. Women don't even do that. Being gay is so often about being hyperbolic.
Ever heard about something called hystrionic personality disorder? I'd say many gays gave it. Whatever goes on in the brain to have caused same-sex attraction likely has also caused the proclivity to hystrionic behavior in many of them.
"Gayness is indeed contagious but it is caused by your mother catching it from a cat not you catching it as an adult from another human."
If your idea is correct, one would expect cultures where the cat population is high to have homosexual populations much higher than in cultures where cats aren't that common.
Further, one would expect the French, who as a population have a much higher prevalence of toxo. from their propensity to eat raw or semi-raw meat (another common mode of toxo transmission), to have a statistically noticeable higher percentage of gay men than is found in other Western countries. Do they?
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