Chelsea Handler Archives

Bookworm Beat 8/20/2018 — the Leftist double standards edition

August 20, 2018 by Bookworm Leave a Comment

Today’s tales of Lefty craziness have as a common denominator the double standards that infect every issue they touch, especially around Trump and Brennan.

It’s only sexual assault when Trump muses about it hypothetically. I know you remember the Access Hollywood tape in which Trump said, with complete accuracy, that if you’re a famous person, women will willingly let you grab their genitals. Maybe he was speaking from personal experience; maybe he was reflecting Bill Clinton’s experience. We don’t know and we can’t know. What we do know is that, for making this completely accurate, albeit hypothetical, statement in the context of locker room talk, Trump was labeled a rapist and sexual assaulter.

At the time, alleged comedian Chelsea Handler, a stalwart Hillary supporter, had this to say: “Any man who still supports DONALD trump has no respect for women. Hillary is training by having a drunk ape throw apples at her head.” She even made a little incest joke: “My father has always respected women’s pussies. I for one, should know.” -Ivanka Trump”

In turns out — and I know you’ll be surprised to hear this — that the same Chelsea Handler believes that the standard is quite different when you’re a Leftist, in which case grabbing people by the genitals is just another type of handshake:

In defending Mr. Franken against numerous allegations of sexual misconduct, Ms. Handler admitted during an interview with Buzzfeed News that she’s grabbed people’s genitals “many times” in photographs before and didn’t think that should be considered sexual assault.

“I don’t want to diminish anyone’s legitimate claim of feeling like they’ve been assaulted, because that’s your feeling,” she said. “But I think there is a very big difference of a man putting his arm around you — he’s a comedian, I’ve touched people’s breasts and genitals I can’t imagine how many times in photos. That doesn’t excuse it, but that’s something, that’s not rape. That’s not sexual assault, and it’s not repeated behavior over and over again.”

Leftist think: “It’s always innocent when we do it.”

And then there’s this pictorial reminder of another example of hypocrisy about a Leftist who engages in sexual and physical assault:

If Leftists didn’t have double standards, they wouldn’t have any standards at all. [Read more…]

Candace Owens: Wrongly shamed for saying children are good for women

May 17, 2018 by Bookworm Leave a Comment

Candace Owens was wrongly shamed for asking a question about childlessness and angry, bitter women like Sarah Silverman, Chelsea Handler, and Kathy Griffin.

I’m on the verge of being an empty-nester and I couldn’t be happier. I never wanted children and I really hated raising children. Being child-free will be lovely. That sounds pretty awful, doesn’t it? But that’s just the beginning; it’s not the end.

Here’s the really important thing: Despite being a Foghorn Leghorn kind of person about children, I don’t regret having children. Not one little bit. It’s not just that I love my children and am proud of the people they became. It’s also that having children was the best thing that could have happened to me.

At the most obvious level, children forced me to grow up. As long as I was childless, I could enjoy a perpetual adolescence, one in which I always came first. Sure, I was able to get through college and graduate school, and to hold a responsible job, but at the end of the day, I did it all for me. I got up in the morning for me, prepared food for me, went to work for me and, during my non-working hours, did things that made me happy.

Nothing much changed when I got married. My husband and I, although we worked very hard at demanding jobs, nevertheless tailored our lives to our wants, our needs, and our desires. Instead of being all about me, life now was all about us.

But when the kids came along . . . oh, my! Suddenly, it was all and entirely about them. As long as they were little, everything was about the absolute necessity of fulfilling their core physical needs: Feeding them, keeping them clean, getting them to sleep, keeping them physically safe, and imbuing them with emotional stability and love. Even when they weren’t babes in arms, my children’s needs continued for many years. As they got older, and their immediate physical needs lessened, there were new needs, not the least of which was the driving middle-class need to give them the best academic and extra-curricular opportunities possible.

The reality is that, with kids, self-indulgence ceased being a lifestyle and became a very rare privilege. I sorely missed being able to sleep through the night (a skill I never remastered, even after my kids ceased to be babies), I missed privacy, I missed having a minute to myself, I missed a quiet home. In other words, I missed the “me, me, me” lifestyle I had so enjoyed.

Also, unlike other mothers in the circles in which I now found myself, there was no offsetting compensation in the form of enjoying children. I don’t like children. I find them dull. Childish games, the ones for the ten and under set, are dull — something I felt when I was a child too (explaining my status as a social outcast). Kids and their games start getting interesting when they’re in their teens, so I at least had the blessing of enjoying my kids more with every passing year, rather than hating the teen years.

I also don’t find childishly lisping voices charming, and their innocent delight in the world does nothing for me. That is, I do not look on the world with fresh eyes because I have a child at my side. In this, I disagree with Jordan Peterson, who thinks that people should have children for the sheer pleasure of being around their sense of wonderment.

For me, when it came to children, they were sheer mental and physical drudgery. All those people who said to me, “Cherish these moments because you’ll miss them when they’re gone,” were wrong. I didn’t cherish them and I don’t miss them.

Still, as I said when I opened this essay, I love my children, I’m proud of who they’ve become, and I like them now and look forward to having them in my life for many decades to come. They were worth the effort and they forced me to be a mature person who moved beyond living only for herself and her selfish pleasures. Maturity is a much more enjoyable quality than adolescent selfishness. Interestingly, just today, Matt Walsh made the same point from the male perspective, although he saw marriage, not just having children, as part of that trajectory: [Read more…]

Two striking differences between the Islamic and the Judeo-Christian traditions, one of which is happiness

May 3, 2017 by Bookworm 17 Comments

Today, for the first time, I noticed striking differences between the Islamic and Judeo-Christian traditions involving both happiness and predestination.

Daniel Greenfield wrote about the interview Chelsea Handler did with Kumail Nanjiani, the Muslim star of HBO’s “Silicon Valley.” He complained that popular culture fails to focus on what fun Islam is and Muslims are. Handler, much struck by this observation, agreed.

The problem, Greenfield said, is that Islam is not about fun or even happiness. Nor are these missing attributes limited to the reverence associated with direct worship. For example, when we’re in a house of worship we don’t make fart jokes. Instead, the whole point of Islam, at least according to the Ayatollah Khomeni, is to vacuum any possibility of joy out of life:

Allah did not create man so that he could have fun. The aim of creation was for mankind to be put to the test through hardship and prayer. An Islamic regime must be serious in every field. There are no jokes in Islam. There is no humor in Islam. There is no fun in Islam. There can be no fun and joy in whatever is serious.

No wonder that the Islamic clerics and their mobs routinely deliver death to people who dare to dance or sing in a sharia-controlled world.

Contrast this Islamic world view with Dennis Prager’s take on happiness. When his radio show played in my area, I frequently heard him say that, because God gave us the capacity to be happy, we have a moral obligation to be so. He also wrote that true faith should in itself inspire happiness:

I once asked a deeply religious man if he considered himself a truly pious person. He responded that while he aspired to be one, he felt that he fell short in two areas. One of those areas, he said, was his not being a happy enough person to be considered truly pious.

His point was that unhappy religious people reflect poorly on their religion and on their Creator. He was right; in fact, unhappy religious people pose a real challenge to faith. If their faith is so impressive, why aren’t these devoted adherents happy? There are only two possible reasons: either they are not practicing their faith correctly, or they are practicing their faith correctly and the religion itself is not conducive to happiness. (Prager, Dennis, Happiness is a Serious Problem, paperback edition, p. 4.)

For me, Prager’s message has been eye-opening. I accept that he is correct that I have a moral obligation, both for myself and for those in my world, to be happy. To that end, I try to view things through a humor prism, I count my blessings daily (hourly, on a hard day), I’m open in expressing gratitude for all the good things in my life, and I look for true joy wherever I can. I can do this because I am human and, if I were religious, I would add because I am made in God’s image. [Read more…]