Government

Former U.S. Attorney General Says If You Don't Like 'Baby It's Cold Outside' You're An Islamic Terrorist And Oh My God I Wish I Were Exaggerating

A truly astounding display of 'missing the whole point.'

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The Wall Street Journal’s op-ed section is basically my “ever-spinning top” that tells me if I’m lost in an Inception-inspired dream world. Or tripping on some bad acid slipped into my drink. When I open up the paper and read tinfoil hat conspiracy theories eroding the goodwill of one of America’s “prestige” newspapers, I know that all is still right with the world.

Speaking of “hey what’s in this drink?” the Wall Street Journal has jumped on the “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” controversy that’s become this year’s “Happy Holidays Starbucks cup” fauxtroversy for the particular brand of wingnut who remains convinced that Hillary Clinton killed Vince Foster to throw us off of Pizzagate. To that end, the paper invited former federal judge and U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey to opine on the recent focus upon the song’s troubling fixation on dropping Roofies into the drinks of women who say, “the answer is ‘no, no, no'” and Mukasey did not disappoint one little bit.

While radio stations are playing the song on repeat for hours to “own the libs,” Mukasey isn’t satisfied with such a mundane justification for defending the song. Instead, Mukasey walks us through the history of a strand of Islamic fundamentalism and declares that anyone harboring contemporary issues with a ballad to date rape is really a terrorist and, yes, this article is that ridiculous.

The #MeToo movement has caught up with “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” The 1940s fugue between a woman, who has dropped by a man’s home but says she wants to leave, and the man, who persuades her to stay, has become a Christmas-season staple. But “to some modern ears, the lyrics sound like a prelude to date rape,” as one recent news story puts it. Some radio stations have yielded to the demand that they banish it from the airwaves.

That demand rings a bell. In the 1940s, an Egyptian writer and Education Ministry employee harshly criticized the government under King Farouk as insufficiently Islamic. That writer, Sayyid Qutb, was rewarded with a traveling fellowship, apparently to get him out of the country.

Well, that went from zero to batshit pretty quickly. Qutb, for those unfamiliar, was an Islamic political philosopher who espoused a deep cynicism about Western secularism, a standpoint driven in part by his experiences with corrupt secular Muslim governments and his not entirely inaccurate read of mid-20th-century Western nations as societies that preached a brand of “freedom” that mixed empty consumerism with virulent racial inequality. Qutb’s conclusions based on these observations careened into “so let’s be theocracies,” which probably went afield of the problem and this, combined with a hearty strain of antisemitism, is where his role as a posthumous inspiration to a number of terrorist movements comes in.

So, just to recap, having issues with date rape songs makes you like this guy. Go on…

But contempt curdled into revulsion when Qutb dropped in on a church dance that followed a service—a shocking juxtaposition in itself: “The dance hall convulsed to the tunes on the gramophone and was full of bounding feet and seductive legs. . . . Arms circled waists, lips met lips, chests met chests, and the atmosphere was full of passion.”

The song that was playing: “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” For Qutb, it epitomized the West’s moral degradation. He condemned the “animal-like mixing of the sexes,” concluded that Americans were “numb to faith in art, faith in religion, and faith in spiritual values altogether,” and determined that Islam would have to be perpetually at war with such a society.

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Remember that moment in the “feminism” part of some political science class when some bro confidently declared that, “you know, really Andrea Dworkin is no different than Jerry Falwell because they both hated porn” and you realized that was the dumbest person you’d ever encounter in college? That person was apparently Michael Mukasey.

To recap, a religious reactionary political theorist who believed that women should not work outside of having families is entirely equivalent to 21st century Americans who think it’s counterproductive to spend the holiday season listening to increasingly uninspired covers of a song about ignoring a woman who dares to challenge unwanted sexual advances. It would seem as though there’s a lot at work in the “show your math” part of this equation.

Why does everyone feel the need to cover this song? There’s a Willie Nelson and Norah Jones cover. It’s like there’s a contest in some record executives office, “Now we bring you ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’ featuring *spins wheel* Grimes and *spins wheel* 6ix9ine… enjoy!”

Ultimately, this op-ed may be insane but it’s not surprising. Mukasey’s troubling views on rape have gotten him in trouble before. During his confirmation hearings for the attorney general job, some time was spent on the time he was smacked down by the Second Circuit during his tenure as a district judge for ignoring a jury’s verdict and excusing the NYPD’s ignorance of “the physical trauma and resulting psychological manifestations commonly experienced by rape victims” where a woman was raped by an acquaintance (a fact that wasn’t even disputed). In the end, that’s the crux of this — Mukasey is committed to a world where rape can only happen when strangers jump innocent joggers and when events don’t fit his Platonic ideal, it’s psychological gibberish peddled by cucks. He can’t imagine a world where “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” is a field guide of time-tested rape tactics because the woman in the song clearly knows the guy.

That’s why it can’t be about rape but about some puritanical instinct that women have picked up from al Qaeda training camps:

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Fast forward to today, when our exquisitely sensitive thought leaders are cracking down on “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” Somewhere perhaps Sayyid Qutb is smiling as those who would make rules for the Western culture he so hated channel his moral sensibility.

No one is seriously this f**king stupid, are they? This is, at most, an awareness campaign that’s successfully persuaded people to privately move on from a glib homage to an era where date rape earned a wink and nod and that’s “channeling” a theocracy that seeks to confine women to work in the home?[1]

Methinks Mukasey’s real issue here is that “those who would make rules for Western culture” now includes “those with vaginas” and he’s really, really not cool with that. Somewhere a theocrat is probably smiling that Mukasey has channeled that moral sensibility.

The Jihad Against ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’ [Wall Street Journal]

[1] Actually, in fairness to Qutb, his argument was that women in the workplace was just a trick of the West to lower overall wages by bringing in women that they knew they could underpay without complaint from other men and that a traditional Islamic conception of family was therefore more equal. Again, his recommendations are suspect, but his diagnosis of the problem doesn’t sound nearly as bad as “women are too worked up over this whole ‘casual rape’ thing.”

HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.

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