JONATHAN CHAIT OCTOBER 18, 2010
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[Guest post by Isaac Chotiner]
Over the weekend, C-Span2 aired a panel discussion about the new book Proud to be Right: Voices of the Next Conservative Generation, edited by Jonah Goldberg. Goldberg led a panel with a few of the contributors, and, as luck would have it, I caught some of the program. My interest began fading when Goldberg started discoursing on John Rawls, but apparently that was far from the most outrageous moment of the event. It turns out that two of the other panel members, Todd Seavey and Helen Rittelmeyer, once dated. Naturally, things got ugly. Here is part of the transcript, from The Daily Caller's summary:
Seavey: “I think you’ll find a lot of Helen’s positions are guided by the desire to increase suffering.”
Rittelmeyer: “I’m Catholic.”
Seavey: “That might explain it. Although, you start connecting the dots and you realize that, though she sounds like an old-timey, old-fashioned Catholic moralist, she’s almost always defending something that most of us you find horrific, whether it’s corrupt politicians over reformers, bar brawlers. She’ll defend Catholic moralists one moment, but defend prostitutes and bad girls the next. She says she’s sort of like a libertarian, but the first thing she wants to repeal, she once said, was the law against assault, so that men get into more fistfights or at least live under the threat of constant fistfights…I probably should confess that Helen and I dated for two years, so we’ve sparred about many things. It might come as a surprise to some of you that we dated for two years, not just because we have ideological differences, but because there are probably some people in this room who also dated Helen during those two years, given how tumultuous it got. It was sort of on again, off again.
Rittelmeyer: “I’m in favor of combativeness."
Seavey: “And, at at times her gamesmanship would include even coldly saying that she was gonna play matchmaker and set up a couple and then seduce the man away to play with his mind and hurt the woman, which when you think about it is pretty creepy. Kinda disturbing.
Rittelmeyer: “Is all this going on CSPAN?”
13 comments
Given the quality of conservative "thought" today, this exchange does not surprise me one bit.
- zardoz67
October 18, 2010 at 5:49pm
Sounds like Helen might be second coming of Ayn Rand.
- kraut
October 18, 2010 at 5:55pm
C'mon. This is just fun! I give conservatives credit for doing stuff like this. Imagine, say, the Bloomsbury crowd on television. It would be fascinating.
- timteeter
October 18, 2010 at 6:10pm
The description of her fits what we used to call Razor Blades in Her Panties.
- Nusholtz
October 18, 2010 at 6:19pm
Nah kraut, she's fine. She's actually a good friend of mine, and certainly can be a tad peculiar on political issues some times, but Ayn Rand she ain't.
- Crock1701
October 18, 2010 at 6:36pm
Indeed, she really did not like the Objectivists on campus. So she does have that going for her, too.
- Crock1701
October 18, 2010 at 6:58pm
At this rate, soon we won't even be able to claim that the left has the best parties!
- ironyroad
October 18, 2010 at 10:14pm
Everyone here is on Rittelmeyer's case. My reaction to reading this item is that Seavey is a major asshole.
- mnkoplow
October 19, 2010 at 8:01am
Trust me, mnkoplow, that was mine as well.
- Crock1701
October 19, 2010 at 12:37pm
Your comment is excellent, tim. And mnk, if Helen Rittelmeyer plays with peoples' minds the way Todd Seavey alleges, maybe it isn't him who is the part of the anatomy that you suggested he is.
- liberal reformer
October 19, 2010 at 1:38pm
Yeah, Lib Ref, except trust me, she totally doesn't. I know her rather well. Seavey's just an asshole.
- Crock1701
October 19, 2010 at 2:10pm
LR, maybe Seavey was telling the truth, in which case she is also an asshole. I don't assume Seavey (being an asshole) was telling the truth. The fact that Rittelmeyer didn't deny it doesn't mean anything to me--why argue with this asshole on TV? It can only make you look bad. And Seavey is an asshole, even if everything he said was true. That was my point. The criticisms in these comments were assymetric, esp. given that we **know** Seavey is an asshole, and we only have Seavey's word for it that Rittelmeyer is an asshole. Crock, I take it as a given that you know Rittelmeyer well and want to assure me that she isn't an asshole. I have no opinion on whether she is. But you really don't need to reassure me that she isn't.
- mnkoplow
October 19, 2010 at 3:05pm
Clarification: My first sentence above would have been clearer as "LR, maybe Seavey was telling the truth, in which case Rittelmeyer is also an asshole."
- mnkoplow
October 19, 2010 at 4:29pm