The XX Factor: What women really think.

What We're Talking About: Talking to Nannies and More

Despite their portrayal in pop culture as overentitled, micromanaging shrews, mothers who employ nannies often struggle to communicate with them and vent to friends instead. Recognizing this communication gap, some schools have begun training nannies to draw out their employers' needs. [New York Times] ... (Read the rest of this article here).

That Must Have Been Some Kiss

I am of two minds about the story from the Newark Star-Ledger that says that the recent Newark airport security breach was caused by a couple kissing goodbye. On the one hand, it’s outrageous (though not entirely surprising, alas) that people could be so absolutely selfish that they would violate security protocols and inconvenience thousands of people for hours to sneak a few last moments together before a flight. I only hope they had the decency to be ashamed of themselves when they realized what a mess they had created.

On the other hand, we probably owe this as-yet-to-be identified couple a huge thank you. Because they have exposed that, mere days after an attempted flight-based terror attack and at an airport from which one of the 9/11 flights departed, that all you have to do to get past TSA is lift a rope. Kinda makes all the debate about the full-body scanners seem pointless and proves Anne Applebaum right for saying that all our spending on Homeland Security and TSA has been misdirected.

According to Napolitano, the System Worked

Clarity, Climate, and the Fort Hood Massacre

Bill Bennett has a post up at National Review demanding that Major Nidal Malik Hasan’s murder of 13 people be deemed “terrorism.” Forty-nine percent of Americans apparently prefer the phrase “killing spree.” This, we are to understand, is the terminology of the morally unserious, the purveyors of “psycho-babble,” the “politically correct” masses who prefer the “language of mush.” Avoidance of the word “terrorism” is taken to be an avoidance of clarity.

Whether you want to use the word terrorism probably depends on whether you see Hasan’s actions as the isolated ravings of a madman or as part of some larger ongoing struggle ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)

Ft. Hood Shooting is Less Jihad Than Part of a Pattern of American School and Workplace Shootings

A post from DoubleX writer KJ Dell'Antonia:

Emily and Marjorie, don't you think we ask ourselves different questions about Major Nidal Hasan because he wasn't just a Muslim or jihadist, he was also a U.S. citizen and a member of the armed forces? It's easy to reduce the 9/11 terrorists to pure villains. Because Hasan was truly one of us—born here of an immigrant family, like 20 percent of the population—this feels different.

Both Dorothy Rabinowitz and David Brooks fault the media coverage of the Fort Hood shooting as a willful avoidance of the obvious. Emily agreed with Rabinowitz, saying that we as a nation find it "more comfortable to look away from his religious beliefs for an alternate theory." Brooks claimed that looking beyond Islamic extremism to the other factors affecting Hasan "sought to reduce a heinous act to social maladjustment" ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)

Maybe the Military Is Inept, Not Politically Correct

Emily,

When you say: “Surely the general doesn't mean that in our quest for diversity in the military, we embrace fanatics in our midst,” you're surely not suggesting, are you, that military generals would purposely sacrifice the lives of dozens of soldiers, simply for the sake of political correctness? I mean, there is a middle ground between withholding judgment and “embracing fanatics in our midst,” isn’t there?

I don’t believe for a minute that these generals would risk the lives of 1.3 million U.S. military personnel on active duty (another 1.1 million serve in the National Guard and Reserve forces.) if they thought Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, or any of the 10,000 to 20,000 Muslims who serve in the U.S. armed forces, posed a terrorist risk ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)

Terror, Right and Left

On May 30 several men and a woman broke into an Arizona trailer, killing 9-year-old Brisenia Flores and her father. This weekend three people were arrested for the murder, two of whom are leaders of the Minutemen American Defense, an anti-illegal immigrant group not connected with the Minuteman Project. Here’s one of the accused on his web site:

"I take a very hard line with drugs and illegal immigration. Make no bones about it, I have a zero tolerance for terrorists, and that is what they are.”

It would not have occurred to your average anti-immigration activist, before 9/11, to describe Mexican families seeking honest work as “terrorists.” Nor would it have occurred to liberals to call the Minutemen themselves “precursors of domestic terrorism.” Yet George Bush used this rhetorical device so successfully, and so pervasively, that it has now become ... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

Dr. George Tiller's Killer Was a Domestic Terrorist