Copyright 2012 by John T. Reed
Third-year law student Sandra Fluke “testified” before a faux Congressional hearing in support of Obama’s royal edict that henceforth health insurance companies must offer free birth control pills—both preventive and morning after.
It was a faux hearing because the Republicans control the House and they refused to call Fluke on the grounds that she is unqualified. Nancy Pelosi held a fake hearing in response.
Ms. Fluke’s only qualifications to testify on the subject are that she likes to have sex but does not want to have a baby as a result at the present. Since at least half the U.S. population has those same qualifications, her testimony is superfluous.
She whined that others must pay for her birth control pills because they cost $3,000 over the course of the three years of law school and that is the amount one earns during one summer as an intern.
Three years of sex for three months of summer job work does not sound like famine in Africa, but Fluke seemed to suggest it was a similarly impossible hardship to bear.
On his radio program, Rush Limbaugh did a multi-day “are you kidding me” shtick about it, working himself up to such hyperbole as calling her a “slut” and “prostitute.” If you listened to the show and know Rush’s persona, you knew he was exaggerating for effect. He was referring to her need as a single woman for sex every single month of her law school days—which, as a result of Paper Chase, we thought were rather full of studying—and her refusal to pay for the tools required to do that baby-free.
After the usual out-of-context and hoping-readers-would-not-know-he-was-kidding righteous outrage and attacks on Rush’s advertiser for sponsoring such—and loss of some advertisers, Rush posted an apology for his language on his web site and verbally repeated the apology on his radio show. He should not have done that.
Here is what he should have done.
Posted a statement on his web site to non-listeners that reports that he called Fluke a slut and prostitute were accurate, but that as his regular listeners know, he was simply using hyperbole to make a point. For non-listeners, he should say:
I have no reason to believe that Ms. Fluke is a slut or a prostitute. My listeners know that. They also know that I was not trying to convince anyone else that she is a slut or a prostitute. I was exaggerating for humorous effect.
I post this here because my enemies on the left have tried to convince non-listeners that I was actually believed Ms. Fluke was a slut and a prostitute and trying to persuade others of that. I do not and did not.
As a result of my saying those things, and in spite of my protests that I was just kidding, the following advertisers of mine have stopped advertising on my show: X, Y, Z
They will be replaced by advertisers with a sense of humor who are less wimpy. I apologize to listeners for having had such advertisers to begin with.
The broadcast company that sells Rush’s program to AM radio stations called what he said about Fluke “absurdist humor” and expressed continued support for his role in the many opinions they broadcast across their stable of broadcasters. I am not sure what absurdist means, but it sounds like what I am saying. Wikipedia says this:
Surrealist humour is used effectively in Cinema where the suspension of disbelief can be stretched to absurd lengths by logically following the consequences of unlikely, reversed or exaggerated premises.
Okay. That sounds like what Rush did and what I am doing in this article.
The generation gap was evident in this incident. Rush is 61. An unmarried third-year law student—probably 24 years old—revealing on national TV that she has, or may have, sex every single month, and cannot afford the medicine to prevent unwanted pregnancies, violates Rush’s generation’s sense of propriety. (I am 65.)
As does her profound feeling of entitlement that someone else should pay for this hobby as a medical necessity akin to insulin or AIDs drugs.
Ms. Fluke suffers from a worse generation gap. Infants care only about themselves and not one whit about the needs of others. Adults care about others. 24-year old Ms. Fluke appears to be about 65% adult and 35% infant. And I am NOT exaggerating when I say that.
When she appeared on national TV, he knew she was speaking to an audience that ranged in age from about 9 to 105. She also knows that the economy has been stagnant since 2008, millions have seen their homes become underwater, millions are unemployed, thousands have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan and many more maimed by that war. Millions of the audience who had no birth-control pills when they were young because they had not been invented, cost too much, or they would be embarrassed as single women to ask a doctor to prescribe them or to go to a pharmacy to buy them. The audience also included millions of survivors of the Great Depression, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam—people who define hardship in ways that are about a million miles away from having to use some summer job pay to buy pills that let you have unmarried, unprotected sex without getting pregnant.
Yet, while attending an expensive, private law school (Georgetown) on scholarship, she is so oblivious to the needs and challenges of millions that she whines about having to spent one-month’s summer job pay per year buying contraceptives. (Hannity did some research on the cost. She was exaggerating and using a worst-case scenario. The cheapest approach would be morning-after pills which would require a frequency of sex that could be said to approach, well, slut levels, to cost $1,000 a year.)
Identifying yourself as a slut is apparently in part a feminist reaction to a Canadian police constable saying women should stop inviting rape by dressing like sluts. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SlutWalk. When I coached high school football in the 2000s, I was astonished by the female students at the school each Halloween. The costume on about 90% of them seemed to be slut. One of my assistant coaches said one girl’s boob popped out of her dress in front of him as he was coming to pracice that day. What happened to witches and Wonder Woman?
Fluke is young and, as is characteristic of the young, utterly self-absorbed and inconsiderate of others. In case you’re wondering, what I was doing at age 24 was being a platoon leader in Vietnam.
But what is Nancy Pelosi’s excuse? She is old—72 in March 2012—and a woman. She knows about all the people in the audience I just described. She was one of them. Yet she organized, encouraged, and presided over this stunt and used this young woman knowing exactly what testimony she was going to give.
The cost of Ms. Fluke’s unbroken string of 36 months of unprotected sexual intercourse should be borne—Dutch treat—by Ms. Fluke and her “bareback” male partner(s). In that case, each will be paying about half of one month’s summer job pay—to use Ms. Fluke’s worst-case, brand-name, full-sticker-price birth control pills scenario—for each year of unprotected sex.
Indeed, considering incremental free drinks, transportation to entertainment events, and meals and movies and such paid for by the guy(s) over what she would receive as a virgin or abstainer, (fewer fourth dates per relationship) I wonder what Ms. Fluke’s true net cost is. Hell, she may even be operating at a profit. Would that mean she has lost her amateur status?
If so, her pills would be deductible on Schedule C as business expenses. (See my book Aggressive Tax Avoidance for Real Estate Investors, 19th edition, which explains the definition of deductible expenses. The fact that the business in question need not be legal where the taxpayers works is well established to be irrelevant to whether it is deductible. Of course, non-cash compensation like drinks and meals and entertainment must be reported as gross income, too. I kid you not.)
Ms Fluke is a third-year law student. She would know all these legal details.
Gerogetown also has a business school—McDonough. I wonder if any MBA students there have expressed sympathy to Ms. Fluke for her plight and offered to assist by giving her additional happy endings over which to amortize her contraception costs.
The Contraceptive Pills Manufacturers and Health Care Providers Association should make an announcement that, contrary to King Obama’s edict, they will not be providing free contraceptives to anyone. If anyone objects to that, sue us.
Their argument in court will simply be to ask the court to take judicial notice of the economic principle:
There is no free lunch.
And they should also point out to the court that they have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to make as much profit and return on equity as legally and ethically possible and that and other pertinent laws prohibit them from giving away free products to aid a presidential candidate’s vote-buying campaign.
Rush’s apology was unnecessary, unwarranted, and un-Rush-like.
The Democrats’ efforts to use this to distract voters from the economy and debt continue to work like a charm.
After I wrote this, O’Reilly said Fluke was 30, not 24. At age 30, I was a grad student myself getting an MBA.
John T. Reed