Flake told me he started thinking seriously about bowing out of his reelection bid a few weeks ago. He was facing a well-funded primary challenger and a wrathful revolt from the Republican base over his public criticism of President Trump. The polls looked bad; the fundraising was daunting. And the more he grappled with what it would take to win, the more he realized he didn’t have it in him.
As he weighed the decision with his wife, Cheryl, he made a point of soliciting advice from each of his five children. One of his sons was serving in a Mormon mission overseas, and unreachable by phone, so they corresponded via email. Another, his youngest, had spent the summer interning at the Capitol. He was just a year old when his dad was first elected to Congress. “In some sense, it’s about all they know,” Flake said of his kids. “They’ve followed politics enough to know what works and what doesn’t in a campaign.” When it came time to finalize his decision over the weekend, the family was unanimous: “To a person, everybody realized … that to win the primary I would have to run a campaign that I would not be comfortable with, and that I wouldn’t be proud of. And they didn’t want me to do that.”
You KNOW it's bad when a Mormon politician isn't welcome in his own party.
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It looks as if Bill Cosby has some competition.
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Too bad it takes a man to state the obvious about women and feminism. Remove the Marxist lingo from the article, and it is still dead on:
Being born female is a life sentence to, at “best”, second class citizenship, and, at worst, a life full of the worst kind of slavery and exploitation. Women make up not a class, but a caste; it is possible to move out of the class one belongs to, but caste is something one is born into and can never escape. Feminism aims at the emancipation of the female caste; it is not some kind of abstract identitarian movement. We must ask, would those who denounce feminism as identity politics also say the same thing about black liberation, or national liberation movements? Certainly some will, but one has to suspect these would be a minority. If anything, the cult of the ideal “worker” worshipped by the class reductionist left is an example of actual identity politics, the way it fetishizes and elevates a kind of archetypal industrial worker as being the symbol of the working class. This kind of crude class reductionism poses a far greater danger to the left than feminism ever can, even if feminism were an example of “identity politics”. Again, these denunciations serve more to conceal the discomfort of leftist men than anything else. Working class men, and leftist men are still men, and unless they actively combat patriarchal-capitalist socialization, they are going to be doing more to support the status quo than the revolution. If solidarity with working class women cannot persuade them to support the feminist movement, then perhaps they ought to support it as it is ultimately in their interest to do so. Like the racist white worker who thinks himself superior to his black comrade, capitalism will not hesitate to sacrifice the chauvinist male worker on the pyre of profit and accumulation._____
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