OPINION:
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
Just in case you thought slutgate had reached its apogee of absurdity, the entrance into the story of sluts and hos attorney Gloria Allred should inform you otherwise.
Now, Ms. Allred really knows her hos and sluts. (We can still say that, right? Of course, only in the sense of Merriam-Webster’s definition, which says, “Slut: A promiscuous woman; especially: prostitute.”)
“In December 2009, Allred was retained by Rachel Uchitel after media sources alleged Uchitel had been having an affair with married golfer Tiger Woods,” her Wikipedia profile says. “Allred is also representing Joslyn James, a pornographic actress and Woods’s alleged mistress.”
Hmm — two women having affairs with a married man, one who gets paid to have sex on camera. Sluts? Hmm. Not sayin’ they are or anything, just sayin’.
More Wiki: “In February 2010, Allred was retained by Amanda J. Eneman, a massage therapist and ex-girlfriend of Illinois lieutenant gubernatorial candidate Scott Lee Cohen who once had Cohen arrested, and who had herself been arrested for prostitution.” And convicted, making her — a ho. Just sayin’.
The barrister-cum-TV-talker Ms. Allred has already reared her ugly head once in the Republican presidential nomination race. “On November 7, 2011, Allred appeared at a press conference with Sharon Bialek, a Chicago woman who alleged that Herman Cain grabbed her in a sexually aggressive way when she sought his help after losing her position at an education foundation affiliated with the National Restaurant Association in the late 1990s,” Wiki says.
And now she’s back, right on cue, to keep the Obama administration’s ginned-up controversy alive.
Now, in case you’ve been under a rock the last fortnight, conservative shock-jock Rush Limbaugh started a brush fire after a fake congressional hearing in which law school “student” Sandra Fluke said her horrible Jesuit university, Georgetown, wouldn’t pay for her $1,000-a-year contraception (the horror).
On Feb. 29, Mr. Limbaugh said on his show that the “student” was asking the government to subsidize her sex life. “What does that make her?” he asked. “It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She’s having so much sex she can’t afford contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex.”
Then, the S hit the fan (or the rubber hit the road, whatever). Democrats got their undies in a wad over the talk-show host’s temerity. How dare he not want to pay for this desperate, young “student’s” contraception? War on women! War on women!
Mr. Limbaugh apologized — profusely and humbly. The end.
But no. On it went. The mainstream media demanded that Republican presidential candidates weigh in on the crucial matter, Democrats on Capitol Hill sought to whip the hype into a lather and celebrities tweeted their disdain for the Neanderthal Republicans — how dare Republicans prevent a woman from getting birth control!?
And then, on Friday, Ms. Allred stoked the fire by demanding that Florida prosecute Mr. Limbaugh. “On behalf of the Women’s Equal Rights Legal Defense and Education Fund, we request that you open an investigation into whether or not Mr. Limbaugh is in violation of Section 836.04 of Florida Statutes,” which, she wrote, “provides: ’Defamation — Whoever speaks of and concerning any woman, married or unmarried, falsely and maliciously imputing to her a want of chastity, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor of the first degree.’ “
Just so the irony isn’t lost, let’s point out that the law under which Ms. Allred wants to prosecute Mr. Limbaugh was written in 1883. 1883. And back to Merriam-Webster for a definition of chastity: “Abstention from all sexual intercourse.” Perhaps the 30-year-old Ms. Fluke falls under that definition and is just trying to be prepared with her $1,000 worth of birth control. Who knows?
And yes, that’s right, 30 years old. She’s not some young-20s innocent law student. Want to know more about her? Don’t look to Wikipedia for a biography: It’s gone. Disappeared. Her entry now redirects to a page titled “Rush Limbaugh — Sandra Fluke controversy.”
But others checked her out. “As many have already uncovered, Sandra Fluke is, in reality, a 30-year-old, long-time liberal activist who enrolled at Georgetown with the express purpose of fighting for the school to pay for students’ birth control,” the Media Research Center wrote.
Shocker.
The hapless Republican candidates don’t know it yet, but President Obama, with his demand that the federal government pay for birth control, has handed the party’s nominee a spectacular issue for the fall campaign. And it’s simple: The United States is $16 trillion in debt — $6 trillion from the pen of Mr. Obama — and now the guy wants to buy everyone rubbers and IUDs?
The Obama administration, in a nutshell.
• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times. He can be reached at jcurl@washingtontimes.com.
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