The Wrongologist

The Silver
Spoon Team’s Prayer:

Joint
Chiefs Try Explaining Themselves:

Wrongologist’s
Sunday Sermon:

There
are 26 members of the Senate
Armed Services Committee, only seven of them are women. When you consider
that women chair 3 of the 6 Armed Services subcommittees, you can better
appreciate their newfound power. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) chairs the
Subcommittee on Personnel, and she’s been a bulldog on the issue of sexual
assault in the military. In a full committee hearing on sexual assault this
week, the women on the committee pounded away on the witnesses, insisting that
more be done to protect service members and punish wrongdoing.

The military leaders
of the free world were in Senate Hearing Room 216, hunkered down and taking
fire from a 59-year-old woman who had them pinned to a
ridiculous piece of ground to defend and knew it. Sen. Clare
McCaskill,
(D-MO):

When she asked
whether the men wearing the stars had consulted with their colleagues from our
allies, Germany, Australia, and UK, about how it had worked when those military
forces transferred responsibility for prosecuting sexual assault cases from
unit commanders to military prosecutors, all they could say was, “Hey,
thanks, good idea, why didn’t we think of that?”

That struck even
McCaskill’s conservative Republican Missouri colleague, Roy
Blunt,
as a bridge too far. That’s “a terrible answer,” he scolded them.

Republicans
across the spectrum revealed their discomfort with even discussing sexual
assault in the military. But no one did it better than the venerable Sen. Saxby
Chambliss, (R-GA), who basically said “boys will be boys” as he
urged a go-slow approach to reforms:

Yeah,
let’s be careful not to interfere with hormones, because boys will be boys, you
see, so why are we even having this hearing?

And we wonder why it
has taken until now for this issue to get the attention it deserves in the
Senate?

As for the collection
of brass behind the parapets in the hearing room, their argument that changing
the command structure to more effectively prosecute sexual assault would
destroy “unit cohesion” and the military way of doing things seems
ridiculous on its face: How can you
have “good order and discipline” in your unit when soldiers who have
been assaulted are being pressured not to come forward?

It’s time for the
generals and admirals to stand up and own
the unconscionable abuses the current system has produced, take the
necessary steps to change the culture, and end military sexual abuse.

It’s also time for
the vestigial old men of Congress to stop dithering about hormones and the
sanctity of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and get on with this
necessary change.

Obama’s New
Hire:

Congress Gets Ready To Show Off Their
Expertise: