Editor's Note: I just read Ashe Schow"s piece on the president's Grammy address (discussed below). I wasn't listening carefully enough to what the president said. It seems that the president actually broadened the false stat that one in five women on campus is the victim of rape. He is now saying that one in five American women is the victim of rape or attempted rape. So he is actually claiming more but apparently still based on the same highly questionable research. So it's worse than I thought. You gotta listen to what this man says very carefully. C.H.
President Obama sent a message to the Grammy Awards ceremony last night. In it, he urged that the entertainers use their platforms to help the White House promote its widely debunked statistic that one-in-five women is a victim of rape on campus.
“It’s not okay, and it has to stop,” the president said. He’s right on both counts, but it’s also not okay for the President of the United States to use false statistics to further his policies. It has to stop, though knowing the president’s propensity to live in a fantasy world, I doubt if it will.
The one-in-five figure is being used to promote the administration’s guidelines for handling campus sexual assault. These guidelines erode the rights of the accused and put more emphasis on college tribunals, whereas a rape accusation should be referred to law enforcement. The one-in-five figure has been debunked scholars and most recently by a study from the Department of Justice.
President Obama sent his message in a video, but a number of elected officials lawmakers made the scene. The list of congressional attendees was slanted towards Democrats, but there were a number of GOP members present too. I could care less as long as they paid their own way. Why do I think that a number of them might have billed us, calling it a "business trip"?
Congresswomen Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, DNC head, and Sheila Jackson Lee, another tribune of the people, have been getting some ribbing for their attendance at the Grammy Awards. Posting a video of partying pols, the Weekly Standard observed:
They were no doubt fighting for President Obama's so-called middle class economics plan.
A conservative site opined:
Feckless Democrats in Congress might find something else to do when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu comes to Washington, but they wouldn’t miss hanging with the glitterati at Sunday night’s Grammys.