Townhall Columnist Solves Everything: Secret Service Is Addicted To Porn

"What do you suppose are the chances," wonders Townhall columnist Mona Charen, that the Cartagena Dozen or whatever, like and watch porn? It's very important that we talk about this, says Ms. Charen, because if we can just know this one thing, maybe it explains everything, and if we can stop porn, maybe we can stop men from going down south and "damag[ing] their marriages and the lives of their children by engaging prostitutes." Engaging prostitutes! What a turn of phrase. Charen then answers her own question:  the chances are "100 percent," and so now we know what we must do, with this hard science in our grasp. Turn off the Internet. Take a woman's hand (as long as she is not a prostitute) and talk to her.

After saying that the Cartagena guys are "pornified" (based upon the 2005 book Pornified), Charen goes on some long tangent about a straw 1950s housewife named Betty and her modern straw counterpart, Betty, and how in the '50s Betty would be scandalized by porn but would smoke to her little heart's desire, and now the modern Betty thinks cigarettes are disgusting butwill enjoy porn of all varieties to her heart's desirethinks porn is OK, and her husband watches it, which she is fine with, because she is sometimes tired at night, and so is he, because he watches porn all day.

And all this is to say...those men in Cartagena and future visitors to this buzzed-about resort spot could be stopped if Future Betty would swoop down and teach us that both smoking and porn ought to make us gag, not one or the other.

Like smoking, porn is not an innocent pleasure. At a 2003 meeting of the Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, 62 percent of attendees said that Internet porn had contributed to divorces in the previous year.

Yes. Porn is a gateway drug, the gateway to which is people enjoying weddings too much and hating each other and never doing it. But let us propose for a moment that the Secret Service is a gateway to an inflated sense of power and control? And that owing to the belief that women are fair and weak and are better as secretaries and porn stars, there are usually no women around the Secret Service to prevent it from turning into a gross boys' club? Oh, but your Wonkette is an "ette" and so can't pretend to know anything, that is probably just an ignorant and sexist thing to say about men.

Charen does quote from Pornified, give her credit, written by current New (LIBERAL) York Times Book Review editor Pamela Paul, in making her argument that the men down in Cartagena probably can't "relate to or be close to" women (except prostitutes) due to all the porn that they are watching but which most other people aren't, except sex offenders and people who have "risky sex." This is a conclusion drawn in Paul's book, despite the fact that it is, in Charen's words "hard to prove with statistics." Despite this, Charen says it is in fact the "heart of the matter" in the Cartagena case. A totally theoretical concept based on a random sampling of men interviewed for a book that was published in 2005. Yes, this is The Way We News Now! Bye. [Townhall, regrettably]