I don’t want to talk about it.

1. Is it ethical to point out that the candidate my desperate progressive friends are trying to justify supporting in the arid Democratic field is really a jerk? Sure it is! In a deft call that I missed, Rolling Stone writer Tim Dickinson found yet another striking example of Pete Buttigieg’s hypocrisy. He writes,

For much of the presidential campaign, Pete Buttigieg has championed the importance of the popular vote. In a town hall nearly a year ago, Buttigieg proclaimed: “One thing I believe is that in an American presidential election, the person who gets the most votes ought to be the person who wins.”

Yet after the Iowa caucuses, where Bernie Sanders clearly got thousands  more votes, Buttigieg has been trumpeting victory — on the basis of a metric that can subvert the popular vote, the state delegate haul from Iowa’s equivalent of the electoral college.

To be plain, the actual tally in Iowa seems to matter less to the Buttigieg campaign than building a perception of victory. On the night of the caucuses, long before any of the official tally had been reported, Buttigieg dubiously declared he had won..the Iowa Democratic Party has now released 100 percent of the state results. The current tally shows Buttigieg trailing Sanders by 2,631 votes, yet leading by 2 “state delegate equivalents” — a margin of 0.1 percent on that metric. Yet the official tally includes many documented and uncorrected errors and what the state party deems “inconsistencies in data.” The Associated Press has refused to call the election, and Democratic party chair Tom Perez has demanded a “recanvass” or recount. Despite the tenuousness of these results, the Buttigieg website now proclaims: “It’s official: Pete won the Iowa Caucuses!”.

President Trump’s election, however, was illegitimate.

2. Bias makes you stupid, and Twitter makes it obvious.  An assistant solicitor for South Carolina’s 7th Judicial Circuit was somehow  driven to tweet obsessively  using the Twitter handle @TheLillyLawyer.  A white woman, she  used Ebonics to describe conversations with black defendants, witnesses and victims. She mocked gays. She insulted defense attorneys. @TheLillyLawyer described going to work drunk: one tweet  read, “I woke up still drunk. Today should be fun.” The prosecutor admitted that some of her cases were less than compelling. “Literally all of my witnesses are perjuring themselves, she tweeted once. She mocked victims.

Guess what happened? Yup: a defense attorney was tipped  off to her feed, and because this idiot mentioned enough specifics of cases and locales that he was able to determine who she was. She’s apparently been fired, and there’s enough evidence in the tweets to support an investigation by the South Carolina Bar.

She’s not merely unprofessional and unethical. Her careless tweeting proves she’s too stupid to be a competent lawyer.

3. I’m not sure the plaintiffs thought this one through...U.S. District Judge Victor Bolden rejected  the claims in a lawsuit that sought to force all-male fraternities at Yale University to admit women, ruling that both fraternities and sororities are specifically excluded from a federal law that bans discrimination based on gender in education.

The ruling came in response to motions to dismiss filed by Yale and the fraternities. “The gender exclusive nature of the Fraternity Defendants is at the root of the Plaintiffs’ alleged hostile educational environment claim,” Bolden wrote in his ruling. “But … Congress has expressly limited Title IX and made the membership practices of the Fraternity Defendants beyond Title IX’s scope.”

Lawyers for the women have said they believe this was the first lawsuit by students against a university seeking to “gender integrate” fraternities. There’s a reason for that: what’s sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose. A victory in such a case would kill both fraternities and sororities, and probably female sports organizations as well.

The lawsuit called for a court order banning fraternities from considering gender in admission decisions; Great! Just watch what happens when gender is illegalized as  a factor in determining jobs, promotions, and memberships. The three students  said women are being shut out of the social and economic benefits offered by all-male fraternities, including access to vast alumni networks that can help land coveted jobs. Maybe, but destroying the source of the networks won’t help their position any.

[Notice of correction: In the above paragraph, the word “illegalized” was originally published as “legalized.” This was understandably confusing to readers, especially those not used to me lifelong tendency to say or write the exact opposite of what I intend to convey. In this case, however, that wasn’t what happened. “Illegalized” was flagged by WordPress as misspelled, and I allowed it to auto-correct without checking on the result.]

4. Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias! Here’s CBS’s commentary on the disastrous Iowa caucus:

As has been noted many times, especially by Prof.Glenn Reynolds and his co-blogger Ed Driscoll, when Republicans screw up, that’s the mainstream media’s story. When Democrats screw up, the Republican reaction is the story. It’s a sinister reflex, hard to detect until someone points it out.

Then it will make you furious.

It should.