The outcry has been predictable: The rich get no respect! Americans are prudes! Immigrant women lie about rape to stay in the country! She’s a hooker! Why, we should give poor ole DSK the French presidency just to make up for all his suffering.

Behind the hyperbole, commentators seem determined to hold this up as a grand vindication of the American legal system, where all accused parties, rich or poor, black or white, are treated as equals by blindfolded Lady Justice, and where the government stands ever ready to admit its own mistakes. Says William Saletin at Slate.com:

The unraveling of the Strauss-Kahn prosecution is a victory for justice, because investigators found ways to check the accuser’s credibility. Other accusers will pass such tests. This one didn’t. What the collapse of this case proves is that it’s possible to distinguish true rape accusations from false ones — and that the government, having staked its reputation on an accuser’s credibility, diligently investigated her and disclosed her lies. The system worked.”

Horsefeathers.

The collapse of this case does not prove we’re able to “distinguish true rape accusations from false ones.” Thus far, all that has been proven is that the maid was not as ivory-pure as she first appeared. Lying on an asylum application and scamming the system by claiming a fictitious second child does not mean she was not raped. Having five cell phones does not mean she was not raped. Having $100,000 in a bank account does not mean she was not raped. Frankly, even if the prostitution rumors are proven true, that does not mean she was not raped. It means the government no longer thinks it can prove that she was raped.

While the district attorney does deserve some props for investigating the maid’s background and releasing the findings, let’s not go about giving Cyrus Vance Jr. his Nobel Peace Prize quite yet. Justice is not income-blind. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, whose wife, Anne Sinclair, has an estimated net worth of $200 million, had his own investigators spread from the U.S. to Guinea digging up dirt on his accuser. These facts and allegations were bound to surface at some point. It was far better for the D.A. to rip the Band-Aid off, before it was ripped off for them. Strauss-Kahn is not the only one with a political future to ponder.

The story that is solidifying in the mind of the public is, if you’ll pardon the expression, DSK’s public-relations wet dream: that this grifter, this hooker, knew full well that he was rich and famous and in his room that afternoon, and that she got mad when he refused to pay her for the blow-job she delivered as part of her expanded turn-down service. So she cried rape in an attempt to blackmail him.

Perhaps. But it makes very little sense that a professional prostitute working the $3,000-a-night hotel circuit would risk that kind of exposure. Was she such a fabulous hooker that none of her wealthy tricks ever refused to pay her? With $100K in the bank, was she really so hard up for money that she wouldn’t just write it off and move on to the next suite? And if this was a premeditated blackmail attempt, why would she cry rape within moments of the event? Why not just spit some DSK seed into a hankie and then threaten to call the cops — or the media — if he didn’t pay up?

This is a woman who apparently spent most of her adult life flying below the radar, deftly playing the system and appearing to most of the world as a semi-impoverished, hard-working, devout Muslim widow and mother. Maybe this is giving her too much credit, but such a personal history suggests that she’s at least smart enough to realize that once the police and the lawyers and the press get involved, she would no longer control her story.

When and if the facts are sorted out from the innuendo, assuming that ever happens, it will probably turn out that the maid is a front for drug smugglers operating out of her native Guinea, laundering money through her accounts and acting as a source for secure cellphones. And it is entirely possible that, as a side business, she polished more than the hotel’s big brass-bed knobs. Her alleged statement to her incarcerated male friend, along the lines of, “Don’t worry, this guy has a lot of money… I know what I’m doing,” might be damning. Or it might be nothing more than an attempt to placate an unsavory character upset by her sudden involvement with the police.

An actual “victory for justice” would be establishing the truth of what happened in Suite 2806 of the Sofitel Hotel on the afternoon of May 14 and bringing any alleged crimes before a jury. Even if we take Strauss-Kahn at his word, he committed a crime that day: He solicited a prostitute.

We all know how this is likely to play out now: The indictment will be quietly dropped, Dominique Strauss-Kahn will pick up his life and perhaps even go on to run for the presidency of France, and the maid will be deported back in Guinea by the end of the year.

Maybe this is what justice looks like, but all in all, it seems like a very unsatisfying end to the story. Then again, it was never much of a fairy tale.

Even neutral-to-favorable stories about the events leading up to the U.S. joining in the establishment of the no-fly zone over the embattled North African nation betray a sense of discomfort over this display of female dominance.

“Boys against girls over Libya?” asks a representative headline in Politico.

“A ‘gender gap’ in Obama administration’s approach to war?” queries the Christian Science Monitor.

And maybe Jacob Heilbrunn at the National Interest didn’t realize that, in calling them “these Valkyries of foreign affairs,” he’s tying them to Scandinavian mythology of handmaidens (or witches) who decide which warriors are going to die in battle and who carried the slain off to Valhalla … but that’s a whole other load of symbolic baggage.

Those who hate Obama or who hate assertive women (admittedly, there’s often overlap between those two groups) have jumped on the story with glee. It allows them to call Obama effeminate and spineless, led around by the nose by mere women. And, oh, how they’ve missed Hillary the Nutcracker. Plus, three women means three times the opportunity to point out how these ladies fall short of God-ordained feminine norms.  

“We’d like to think that women in power would somehow be less prowar, but in the Obama administration at least it appears that the bellicosity is worst among Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice and Samantha Power,” writes Robert Dreyfuss at the Nation blog.

Of course, they’re doing it wrong, being women and all, thinking that military intervention should be all about “profound, moral” stuff like supporting democracy and preventing massive civilians casualties at the hands of a psychotic dictator, and so, Dreyfuss opines, “unless President Obama’s better instincts manage to reign in his warrior women — and happily, there’s a chance of that — the United States could find itself engaged in open war in Libya, and soon.”

Mark Krikorian at the National Review says: “Look, I’m a sensitive New Age guy — I cook, I do laundry, I choke up at movies (well, Gladiator anyway).” But since Islamic menfolk aren’t nearly as enlightened as he, he worries that all our enemies are learning from this military intervention is that “our commander-in-chief is an effete vacillator who is pushed around by his female subordinates.”

“Before you send me any burning bras, the problem is not with women leaders — the enemies of the Virgin Queen and the Iron Lady can attest to that. The problem is not even with the president having strong female subordinates. Rather, Obama’s pusillanimity has been hugely magnified by the contrast with the women directing his foreign policy and the fact that they nagged him to attack Libya until he gave in. Maybe it’s unfair and there shouldn’t be any difference from having a male secretary of state do the same thing, but there is.”

There it is, indeed.

As much fun as it can be to throw misogynistic, emasculating potshots at political opponents, there are a couple of points those of us with functioning brains need to keep in mind:  

First, it’s not like Clinton, Rice and Power walked into the Oval Office, batted their eyes, and asked the president to pretty-please attack that mean old Mr. Gadhafi. Nor did they march in and grab him by the scruff and order him to launch the damn Tomahawks already.

No, they did their jobs, publicly towing the administration line while working behind the scenes to sharpen their arguments and marshal their resources. In the end, Clinton swung key Arab players to their side and Rice got a 10-5 vote through the U.N. Security Council. Which means, says Brian Katulis of the liberal Center for American Progress, they “got the international support that makes this more like the 1991 gulf war than the 2003 Iraq war.”

Second, while this was an argument made primarily by women, it was in the end a decision made entirely by men: Barack Obama, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen. Men who, presumably, had their cojones firmly attached to their bodies at the time and only had to say “no” in a firm and (dare we say) manly voice to send the Valkyries on their way.

At least we’ve proven one thing: Wars may come and go, but sexism is eternal. 

“Several days,” of course, meaning the roughly 48 hours of media chatter following the suspension of MSNBC personality Keith Olbermann for his failure to clear $7,200 of political donations with NBC, in violation of corporate policy.

In those two days, more than 300,000 people signed a petition to get Keith back on the air. Pro-Keith Facebook groups were launched. Blog posts were written. Comments on said blog posts reached into the thousands. It was discussed and written about on other news networks and newspapers.

And all this was over a weekend. Unwilling to let the story drag on into the week, NBC clearly decided it was preferable to employ the supple spine needed to survive our modern spin cycle, and it declared “Mission Accomplished.”

Like many of these stories, the Olbermann Affair has a lot of layers — not the least being Keith’s tendency to butt heads with his superiors in dramatic, often career-derailing, ways. There was plenty of spewage this weekend about how Fox is still way more biased than MSNBC, and even if it isn’t MSNBC’s bias is better, because it’s more factual.

The most disturbing sub-argument, though, was succinctly stated by Howard Kurtz in his Friday post on the Daily Beast: “When you become a journalist, you give up certain rights.”

Kurtz and other journalists argue that the appearance of impartiality demands that people in the media cannot participate in civic affairs the way we civilians can. “You can’t write speeches on the side for politicians,” he continues. “You can’t march in political demonstrations. And you shouldn’t be able to donate money to politicians, unless you’re hosting a cooking show.”

Even Keith Olbermann subscribed to this theory. In November 2008, he told the ladies of “The View” that he doesn’t even vote. “It’s a symbolic gesture. It’s the only thing I can do that suggests even that I don’t have a horse in the race.”

Which sort of sums up the silliness of the whole exercise. Nobody who has spent more than 30 seconds listening to Keith doubts whom he would have voted for in 2008, if he allowed himself the right. Nobody can really be surprised he donated money to Arizona Democrats (and SB 1070 opponents) Gabrielle Giffords and Raul Grijalva and Kentucky Senate candidate (and Rand Paul opponent) Jack Conway.

Not only does he have a horse in the race, he’s ridden that horse into a multiyear, multimillion-dollar contract with MSNBC.   

That’s fine with me. Nor do I have much problem with Sean Hannity donating money to candidates, or Karl Rove raising money for the GOP by day while shilling for them on Fox by night.

We all know where these people stand, and we have the power to change the channel if we don’t care for those stands.

It’s absurd to think that policing journalists’ private behavior — from the checks they might write from their personal bank accounts to political campaigns or causes, to the ballot they cast in the privacy of a voting booth, to the rallies they attend on their time off — somehow makes them appear more “impartial” on air or in print.   

“When you become a _____, you give up certain rights.”

That’s about as anti-American a statement as you can make. Any profession benefits from a code of ethics, but nothing about being a soldier, or a cop, or a journalist, or an airline passenger should be incompatible with basic civil rights. We are, always, citizens first.   

Had they seen the text before it was shipped out to schools, historians would have asked her to take it out. 

The argument that many thousands of slaves willingly fought for the Confederacy during the American Civil War has zero support in mainstream academic circles — for the simple reason that it is not supported by the documentary record. There is evidence that a very few African-Americans joined the Confederate ranks by choice; the overwhelming majority were servants and laborers.



The Myth of the Black Confederate has found a home primarily in Lost Cause circles, particularly Southern heritage groups like the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), who use it to bolster the argument that the Civil War was not primarily about slavery. It’s been around for a while, but it has certainly found new life on the Internet in recent years. Not surprisingly, the links Masoff’s publisher provided to the Post as her sources for the passage in her book came almost exclusively from SCV-affiliate websites. 



This is not to say that Ms. Masoff is some sort of pro-slavery apologist. As far as I know, she’s a nice, middle-aged lady from New York — Westchester, to be exact — who has published way more books than I have and asks a speaker’s honorarium of $1,000 a day plus expenses. Clearly, though, she let what she perceived as an “interesting fact” from the Internet override a huge body of historical scholarship, and in doing so, helped propagate a dangerous storyline: that slavery was not the major issue of the Civil War.



Ultimately, the failure is not Ms. Masoff’s alone. 

The editors and the academic advisory board at Five Ponds Press let it go to print without properly evaluating the statement. The Virginia Department of Education, which just issued an advisory to teachers using the textbook to simply ignore the passage, says in a statement that “just because a book is approved doesn’t mean the Department of Education endorses every sentence,” … even though that’s sort of the point behind passing the book through their panel of teachers and content specialists, who rated the book “accurate and unbiased” during the evaluation phase.



In a publishing industry ravaged by the recession and the rise of the e-book, educational books still represent major money for publishing houses. Work is outsourced, sometimes to nonspecialists, and usually done on the kind of tight deadline that makes it difficult for editors and advisors to properly vet the text before it heads into the printing phase. The race to produce titles for schools inevitably leads to these kinds of factual and interpretational errors slipping through what looks like a strong safety net.



I speak from experience. As a contributor to more than a dozen reference and young-adult titles, I can tell you the voracious demand for text often forces writers to work at maximum speed, with minimal contact with editors and academic advisors to try to nip errors in the bud … or at least catch mistakes before the galleys are set. To my knowledge, I have committed no factual errors to print. But I know it could easily have happened, unnoticed, and I still would have gotten paid.  



The morals of the story are simple. 



Writers: Verify, verify, verify. Then verify some more. The Internet is not the ultimate source of human knowledge. 



Parents: Read through your kid’s textbooks and give them the old smell test. If something seems to stink, follow it like a bloodhound back to its source. And if it’s foul, raise hell.
 

Howe was spurred to action in 1870 with the start of the Franco-Prussian War in Europe a conflict that lasted less than a year, but managed to inflict tremendous casualties in both the military and civilian populations, create both the modern German state and the French Republic, and start Europe down the path to the First World War, more than four decades later.

From her vantage point in Boston, Howe was appalled. The conflict struck her as “cruel and unnecessary…a return to barbarism.” One day, she said, “[t]he question forced itself upon me, ‘Why do not the mothers of mankind interfere in these matters, to prevent the waste of human life which they alone bear and know the cost?’ I had never thought of this before.”

“The august dignity of motherhood and its terrible responsibilities now appeared to me in a new aspect, and I could think of no better way of expressing my sense of these than that of sending forth an appeal to womanhood throughout the world, which I then and there composed.”

Among other things, her proclamation proposed: “As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel…In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women, without limit of nationality, may be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient.”

Howe didn’t just toss out the idea of an international woman’s peace congress and let it be, nor did she put it aside when the war ended in the spring of 1871. Instead, she spent the next two years writing letters and organizing meetings to promote the formation of “a Woman’s Apostolate of Peace.” In the spring of 1872, she even traveled to London to give a series of public lectures on the subject.

Unfortunately, Howe found that female advocates of that time were so involved in the suffrage movement that they “were not much interested in my scheme of a world-wide protest of women against the cruelties of war,” so the Peace Congress never materialized. But she did organize a series of Mother’s Day Peace Festivals beginning in 1873; these would be held in cities as diverse as Boston, London, Geneva, and Constantinople over the course of the next decade, and more sporadically thereafter.

 The last was held in 1912, two years after Howe’s death at the age of 91. Around that time, several states began celebrating a different kind of Mother’s Day, following a model proposed by a West Virginian named Anna Jarvis — a day marked by flowers and frills, made into a national holiday by Woodrow Wilson in 1914. Howe’s vision, sadly, drowned in a sea of sentimentality.