DICKISH POWER LINE POST OF THE DAY

Here's a story from The Washington Post:

Dartmouth College's president lamented Wednesday that the Ivy League school's promising future "is being hijacked by extreme behavior," including sex assaults, parties with "racist and sexist undertones," and a campus culture in which "dangerous drinking has become the rule and not the exception."

Philip J. Hanlon, a Dartmouth alumnus who took office in June, said such problems were taking a toll on the image of the 245-year-old college in Hanover, N.H....

The reaction to this from Power Line's Steven Hayward is that the problem is all a figment of lying liberals' imagination -- or is it that the problem is real, but is all liberals' fault? Hey, it's his blog -- why does he have to choose? Both answers are true!

First: it's all a myth spread by lying liberals.

Hanlon is implicitly siding with the current rage about "rape culture" on campus. Some conservatives have questioned the general statistic that even President Obama has cited that one out of five women experiences rape in their college years.

And if Obama says it, you know it's a lie!

Then comes the 180: What Hanlon says isn't a lie after all, but everything he's citing is liberals' fault:

Leaving aside this quarrel, allow me to suggest that Hanlon and the feminists are actually right about a larger point: college campuses currently tolerate -- indeed actually encourage -- a predatory climate toward women in which there is enormous social pressure to have sex, and are permissive about massive alcohol use by undergraduates whose chief purpose is to undermine inhibitions.

I love the notion that colleges currently "are permissive about massive alcohol use by undergraduates." You mean currently as in for about a century?

But there's more. Did you know that rape only happens in climates of liberalism?

Step back and note something obviously out of whack with this whole controversy. It is said that college campuses are the prime venue of "rape culture." But most college campuses are run by liberals, and liberalism and its correlates -- maximum individual liberation in all things sexual -- is the dominant orthodoxy.

Um, you know where else there's a rape crisis? In the military. Is the military "run by liberals"? Is it a culture that encourages "maximum individual liberation"?

More:

Why is this problem ostensibly most severe where liberalism reigns? Perhaps for the same reason that poverty and social dysfunction are worst where liberalism reigns supreme (Detroit). Hanlon notes a rising number of reported rapes at Dartmouth. He should be embarrassed by this. But he ought to ponder this question: is sexual assault a problem at conservative colleges like Hillsdale, Patrick Henry, Liberty University, or Regent University?

Actually, it is a problem at Patrick Henry, as this recent New Republic story makes abundantly clear. Would we know if it were a problem at the other schools? I'm sure we wouldn't. I'm sure the culture at those schools is a culture that covers up the truth about sexual assault and encourages the women who are attacked to blame themselves -- after all, that's the pattern seen at Patrick Henry. (That may also be true to a disturbing extent at secular schools, but those who are assaulted are much more likely to be exposed to the notion that blaming victims of sexual violence is an outrage.)

So there you have it, according to Power Line. Liberals invented drinking to excess on campus. Rape culture is liberal -- and the belief that rape culture exists (which it doesn't) is also liberal. Got it?