Women Aren't Very Bright --- Wash Post's Charlotte Allen

Oh, but I was forgetting driving, a crucial skill. Allen claims that the misogynist canard is true: thanks to their superior visuospatial abilities, men (although maybe not gay men?) are better drivers, with 5.1 accidents per million miles compared to women's 5.7. "The only good news," she adds, is that because they take fewer risks, women's accidents are only a third as likely to be fatal. That's a very interesting definition of ability behind the wheel: the better drivers are the ones who take more risks and are three times as likely to end up dead.

Women read more than men, too, especially fiction, which men tend to avoid. (A story about things that didn't happen? How does that work?) Women even read fiction by men and about men, further evidence of their imaginative powers -- while men, if they do pick up a novel, make sure it's estrogen-free. Who's really the dim bulb, the woman who doesn't see the beauty of "Grand Theft Auto," or the man who thinks Tom Clancy is a great writer?

aidan said

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Well, I still think her observations hold a kernel of truth. And I don't think truth is partisan or liberal or conservative.

It is the "kernal of truth" that catches us in so many of these arguments. The neoconservative notion that we ought to feel some moral obligation towards alleviating injustice or oppression in the world outside our borders (thus inside someone else's sovereign borders) tempts any of us with a moral conscience. The Bush administration notion that we'd be imprudent to avoid opening anyone's mail or electronic communications is equally compelling.

What we have to be alert to are the clods of bullshit that can surround that precious kernal.

Exhibit A is Al Gore. People eager to lie about him continue to portray him as a liar. First lie, that he claims to have "invented" the Internet. Second lie, that he claims to have "discovered" the pollution of Love Canal. Third lie, that he falsely claims to be the model for Oliver Barrett IV, hero of Love Story.

Gore never claimed that he "invented" the Internet, which implies that he engineered the technology. The invention occurred in the seventies and allowed scientists in the Defense Department to communicate with each other. In a March 1999 interview with Wolf Blitzer, Gore said, "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet."

Taken in context, the sentence, despite some initial ambiguity, means that as a congressman Gore promoted the system we enjoy today, not that he could patent the science, though that's how the quotation has been manipulated. Hence the disingenuous substitution of "inventing" for the actual language.

For a heady while we hoped that the Bush campaign would prove their man to be the champion of honesty and integrity that he pretends to be, especially for those looking for a squeaky clean new White House. A couple of weeks ago the campaign rejected a shoddy commercial showing Gore saying that Clinton never told a lie. Problem was that the clip showed an interview from 1994, long before Clinton ever heard of Monica Lewinsky.

To his credit, Bush scrapped the commercial before it aired. But as I write, his campaign is unloading a new commercial, featuring a sneer at the fragment from the Internet claim, again implying that Gore had nothing to do with the Internet's creation. At least they got the words right; it would be dangerous to doctor the tape.

But the real question is what, if anything, did Gore actually do to create the modern Internet? According to Vincent Cerf, a senior vice president with MCI Worldcom who's been called the Father of the Internet, "The Internet would not be where it is in the United States without the strong support given to it and related research areas by the Vice President in his current role and in his earlier role as Senator."

The inventor of the Mosaic Browser, Marc Andreesen, credits Gore with making his work possible. He received a federal grant through Gore's High Performance Computing Act. The University of Pennsylvania's Dave Ferber says that without Gore the Internet "would not be where it is today."

Joseph E. Traub, a computer science professor at Columbia University, claims that Gore "was perhaps the first political leader to grasp the importance of networking the country. Could we perhaps see an end to cheap shots from politicians and pundits about inventing the Internet?"

The Love Canal canard distorts a story Gore told to a high school class in Concord, New Hampshire. In answer to a question about how students could get involved in politics, Gore described a letter he'd received from a girl in West Tennessee while he was a congressman. Based on the girl's complaint about a poisoned well, he organized an investigation, which in turn led to other pollution sites, culminating in the expose of Love Canal. Referring to the well in Toone, Tennessee, Gore said, "That was the one you didn't hear of--but that was the one that started it all."

The media was quick to misquote the line as "I was the one that started it all." Seemingly dissatisfied with Gore's style, the Republican National Committee improved the line thus: "I was the one who started it all." When the Concord Monitor and the Boston Globe exposed what had really been said in that high school class, the New York Times, the Washington Post and U.S. News offered grudging corrections of their reportorial errors.

Some of the media's stars had rare fun with the idea that Al Gore was the kernel for Ryan O'Neal's most famous role; but no one seemed interested in finding out whether Gore was telling the truth or not. CNBC's Chris Matthews chortled. "It reminds me of Snoopy thinking he's the Red Baron." But in this case Snoopy really is the Red Baron. Erich Segal, author of Love Story, corroborated that Gore and his Harvard roommate, Tommy Lee Jones, were indeed the models for the story's main character.

Given that Gore was telling the truth, what's the issue? We have an odd bit of trivia of no relevance to the election--except to those liars who want to portray Gore as a liar.

All of these malicious whoppers have been exposed for over a year and have received pusillanimous apologies, often mean-spirited and grudging, from the so-called "liberal" press that promoted them. But like a corrupting disease the lies simply refuse to go away.

Here's Katha Pollitt on Allen's piece...

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Dumb and Dumber: An Essay and Its Editors
The question is not why Charlotte Allen wrote her silly piece -- it's why The Post published it.

By Katha Pollitt
Friday, March 7, 2008; 6:30 AM

I've never watched Oprah Winfrey's show, bought a Celine Dion CD, read "Eat, Pray, Love," or fainted at an Obama rally, although he is my preferred candidate.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/06/AR20080

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