Get over it. She deserves it. If not for the half of the party she reps, then for being a tough ass woman almost winning candidate. Here's an article by Marie Cocco about the insane sexism. I can attest to it since I have been sucked into the vortex of watching cable during the election season:
Misogyny I Won't Miss
As the Democratic nomination contest slouches toward a close, it's time to take stock of what I will not miss.
I will not miss seeing advertisements for T-shirts that bear the slogan "Bros before Hos." The shirts depict Barack Obama (the Bro) and Hillary Clinton (the Ho) and are widely sold on the Internet.
I will not miss walking past airport concessions selling the Hillary Nutcracker, a device in which a pantsuit-clad Clinton doll opens her legs to reveal stainless-steel thighs that, well, bust nuts. I won't miss television and newspaper stories that make light of the novelty item.
I won't miss episodes like the one in which liberal radio personality Randi Rhodes called Clinton a "big [expletive] whore" and said the same about former vice presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro. Rhodes was appearing at an event sponsored by a San Francisco radio station, before an audience of appreciative Obama supporters -- one of whom had promoted the evening on the presumptive Democratic nominee's official campaign Web site.
I won't miss Citizens United Not Timid (no acronym, please), an anti-Clinton group founded by Republican guru Roger Stone.
Political discourse will at last be free of jokes like this one, told last week by magician Penn Jillette on MSNBC: "Obama did great in February, and that's because that was Black History Month. And now Hillary's doing much better 'cause it's White Bitch Month, right?" Co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski rebuked Jillette.
I won't miss political commentators (including National Public Radio political editor Ken Rudin and Andrew Sullivan, the columnist and blogger) who compare Clinton to the Glenn Close character in the movie "Fatal Attraction." In the iconic 1987 film, Close played an independent New York woman who has an affair with a married man played by Michael Douglas. When the liaison ends, the jilted woman becomes a deranged, knife-wielding stalker who terrorizes the man's blissful suburban family. Message: Psychopathic home-wrecker, begone.
The airwaves will at last be free of comments that liken Clinton to a "she-devil" (Chris Matthews on MSNBC, who helpfully supplied an on-screen mock-up of Clinton sprouting horns). Or those who offer that she's "looking like everyone's first wife standing outside a probate court" (Mike Barnicle, also on MSNBC).
But perhaps it is not wives who are so very problematic. Maybe it's mothers. Because, after all, Clinton is more like "a scolding mother, talking down to a child" (Jack Cafferty on CNN).
When all other images fail, there is one other I will not miss. That is, the down-to-the-basics, simplest one: "White women are a problem, that's -- you know, we all live with that" (William Kristol of Fox News).
I won't miss reading another treatise by a man or woman, of the left or right, who says that sexism has had not even a teeny-weeny bit of influence on the course of the Democratic campaign. To hint that sexism might possibly have had a minimal role is to play that risible "gender card."
Most of all, I will not miss the silence.
I will not miss the deafening, depressing silence of Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean or other leading Democrats, who to my knowledge (with the exception of Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland) haven't publicly uttered a word of outrage at the unrelenting, sex-based hate that has been hurled at a former first lady and two-term senator from New York. Among those holding their tongues are hundreds of Democrats for whom Clinton has campaigned and raised millions of dollars. Don Imus endured more public ire from the political class when he insulted the Rutgers University women's basketball team.
Would the silence prevail if Obama's likeness were put on a tap-dancing doll that was sold at airports? Would the media figures who dole out precious face time to these politicians be such pals if they'd compared Obama with a character in a blaxploitation film? And how would crude references to Obama's sex organs play?
There are many reasons Clinton is losing the nomination contest, some having to do with her strategic mistakes, others with the groundswell for "change." But for all Clinton's political blemishes, the darker stain that has been exposed is the hatred of women that is accepted as a part of our culture.
Thursday, May 22, 2008
siegelman again
Dan Abrams on the MSNBC show "The Verdict" keeps hammering the Siegelman case. I'm so grateful that he won't let it go. This story is dirty, dirty, dirty.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
daniel berrigan, still at it
From an article in The Nation...The distractions of the world are for him just that--distractions. The current election campaign does not preoccupy him, and he quotes his brother, Philip, who said that "if voting made any difference it would be illegal." He is critical off the Catholic Church, saying that Pope John Paul II, who marginalized and silenced radical priests and nuns like the Berrigans, "introduced Soviet methods into the Catholic Church," including "anonymous delations, removals, scrutiny and secrecy and the placing of company men into positions of great power." He estimates that "it is going to take at least a generation to undo appointments of John Paul II." He despairs of universities, especially Boston College's decision last year to give an honorary degree to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and this year to invite the new Attorney General, Michael Mukasey, to address the law school. "It is a portrayal of shabby lives as exemplary and to be honored," he says.
...Berrigan argues that those who seek a just society, who seek to defy war and violence, who decry the assault of globalization and degradation of the environment, who care about the plight of the poor, should stop worrying about the practical, short-term effects of their resistance.
"The good is to be done because it is good, not because it goes somewhere," he says. "I believe if it is done in that spirit it will go somewhere, but I don't know where."
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
softsack
Hillary Clinton's campaign advisor was just delusional on Chris Matthews' Hardball show. She was talking about what if's with campaigns and used as an example the 2000 election saying "what if it didn't have to go to the Supreme Court." It didn't have to go to the Supreme Court, they stuck their noses in and stole that election. Then Matthews pontificates saying well if Gore had gone for a complete recount instead of just the narrow recount, things could have been different. If we were a normal country, we could just look at that election as a travesty and a coup and work to make sure it does not happen again. But then we would have to admit that our democracy is as fragile as anyone else's. And that would dent the press's role as the great superego of the nation. They are not given to self-criticism.
Monday, May 12, 2008
feng ming
This is a still from Feng Ming: A Chinese Memoir. I'm sure a nearly still shot camera of a woman speaking Chinese for three hours does not sound like an engaging movie, but how about the opportunity to sit in the house of a former committed communist journalist whose life took a horrifying turn after her husband was accused in an anti-rightist deviation purge of the late 1950s. She was later rehabilitated but had to go through it all again during the Cultural Revolution. Once a rightist, i guess... It's an extraordinary film. Because she's a writer, she tells her story in a really simple but totally gripping way. At one point she gets up to go to the bathroom and I couldn't wait for her to get back. Here is a review from Robert Koehler who saw it at Cannes last year. This was my favorite movie at the Buenos Aires festival. Amazing. I love this woman.
Friday, May 9, 2008
susan faludi's op-ed on hillary
The Fight Stuff
NOTABLE in the Indiana and North Carolina primary results and in many recent polls are signs of a change in the gender weather: white men are warming to Hillary Clinton — at least enough to vote for her. It’s no small shift. These men have historically been her fiercest antagonists. Their conversion may point less to a new kind of male voter than to a new kind of female vote-getter.
Pundits have been quick to attribute the erosion in Barack Obama’s white male support to a newfound racism. What they have failed to consider is the degree to which white male voters witnessing Senator Clinton’s metamorphosis are being forced to rethink precepts they’ve long held about women in American politics.
For years, the prevailing theory has been that white men are often uneasy with female politicians because they can’t abide strong women. But if that’s so, why haven’t they deserted Senator Clinton? More particularly, why haven’t they deserted her as she has become ever more pugnacious in her campaign?
Maybe the white male electorate just can’t abide strong women whom they suspect of being of a certain sort. To adopt a particularly lamentable white male construct, the sports metaphor, political strength comes in two varieties: the power of the umpire, who controls the game by application of the rules but who never gets hit; and the power of the participant, who has no rules except to hit hard, not complain, bounce back and endeavor to prevail in the end.
For virtually all of American political history, the strong female contestant has been cast not as the player but the rules keeper, the purse-lipped killjoy who passes strait-laced judgment on feral boy fun. The animosity toward the rules keeper is fueled by the suspicion that she (and in American life, the regulator is inevitably coded feminine, whatever his or her sex) is the agent of people so privileged that they don’t need to fight, people who can dominate more decisively when the rules are decorous. American political misogyny is inflamed by anger at this clucking overclass: who are they to do battle by imposing rectitude instead of by actually doing battle?
The specter of the prissy hall monitor is, in part, the legacy of the great female reformers of Victorian America. In fact, these women were the opposite of fainting flowers. Susan B. Anthony barely flinched in the face of epithets, hurled eggs and death threats. Carry A. Nation swung an ax. Yet they were regarded by men as the regulators outside the game. Indeed, many 19th-century female reformers defined themselves that way — as reluctant trespassers in the public sphere who had left the domestic circle only to fulfill their duty as the morally superior sex, housekeepers scouring away a nation’s vice.
While the populace might concede the merits of the female reformers’ cause, it found them repellent on a more glandular level. In that visceral subbasement of the national imagination — the one that underlies all the blood-and-guts sports imagery our culture holds so dear — the laurels go to the slugger who ignores the censors, the outrider who navigates the frontier without a chaperone.
Certainly through the many early primaries, Hillary Clinton was often defined by these old standards, and judged harshly. She was forever the entitled chaperone. But that was then. As Thelma, the housewife turned renegade, says to her friend in “Thelma & Louise” as the two women flee the law through the American West, “Something’s crossed over in me.”
Senator Clinton might well say the same. In the final stretch of the primary season, she seems to have stepped across an unstated gender divide, transforming herself from referee to contender.
What’s more, she seems to have taken to her new role with a Thelma-like relish. We are witnessing a female competitor delighting in the undomesticated fray. Her new no-holds-barred pugnacity and gleeful perseverance have revamped her image in the eyes of begrudging white male voters, who previously saw her as the sanctioning “sivilizer,” a political Aunt Polly whose goody-goody directives made them want to head for the hills.
It’s the unforeseen precedent of an unprecedented candidacy: our first major female presidential candidate isn’t doing what men always accuse women of doing. She’s not summoning the rules committee over every infraction. (Her attempt to rewrite the rules for Michigan and Florida are less a timeout than rough play.) Not once has she demanded that the umpire stop the fight. Indeed, she’s asking for more unregulated action, proposing a debate with no press-corps intermediaries.
If anyone has been guarding the rules this election, it’s been the press, which has been primly thumbing the pages of Queensberry and scolding her for being “ruthless” and “nasty,” a “brawler” who fights “dirty.”
But while the commentators have been tut-tutting, Senator Clinton has been converting white males, assuring them that she’s come into their tavern not to smash the bottles, but to join the brawl.
Deep in the American grain, particularly in the grain of white male working-class voters, that is the more trusted archetype. Whether Senator Clinton’s pugilism has elevated the current race for the nomination is debatable. But the strategy has certainly remade the political world for future female politicians, who may now cast off the assumption that when the going gets tough, the tough girl will resort to unilateral rectitude. When a woman does ascend through the glass ceiling into the White House, it will be, in part, because of the race of 2008, when Hillary Clinton broke through the glass floor and got down with the boys.
NOTABLE in the Indiana and North Carolina primary results and in many recent polls are signs of a change in the gender weather: white men are warming to Hillary Clinton — at least enough to vote for her. It’s no small shift. These men have historically been her fiercest antagonists. Their conversion may point less to a new kind of male voter than to a new kind of female vote-getter.
Pundits have been quick to attribute the erosion in Barack Obama’s white male support to a newfound racism. What they have failed to consider is the degree to which white male voters witnessing Senator Clinton’s metamorphosis are being forced to rethink precepts they’ve long held about women in American politics.
For years, the prevailing theory has been that white men are often uneasy with female politicians because they can’t abide strong women. But if that’s so, why haven’t they deserted Senator Clinton? More particularly, why haven’t they deserted her as she has become ever more pugnacious in her campaign?
Maybe the white male electorate just can’t abide strong women whom they suspect of being of a certain sort. To adopt a particularly lamentable white male construct, the sports metaphor, political strength comes in two varieties: the power of the umpire, who controls the game by application of the rules but who never gets hit; and the power of the participant, who has no rules except to hit hard, not complain, bounce back and endeavor to prevail in the end.
For virtually all of American political history, the strong female contestant has been cast not as the player but the rules keeper, the purse-lipped killjoy who passes strait-laced judgment on feral boy fun. The animosity toward the rules keeper is fueled by the suspicion that she (and in American life, the regulator is inevitably coded feminine, whatever his or her sex) is the agent of people so privileged that they don’t need to fight, people who can dominate more decisively when the rules are decorous. American political misogyny is inflamed by anger at this clucking overclass: who are they to do battle by imposing rectitude instead of by actually doing battle?
The specter of the prissy hall monitor is, in part, the legacy of the great female reformers of Victorian America. In fact, these women were the opposite of fainting flowers. Susan B. Anthony barely flinched in the face of epithets, hurled eggs and death threats. Carry A. Nation swung an ax. Yet they were regarded by men as the regulators outside the game. Indeed, many 19th-century female reformers defined themselves that way — as reluctant trespassers in the public sphere who had left the domestic circle only to fulfill their duty as the morally superior sex, housekeepers scouring away a nation’s vice.
While the populace might concede the merits of the female reformers’ cause, it found them repellent on a more glandular level. In that visceral subbasement of the national imagination — the one that underlies all the blood-and-guts sports imagery our culture holds so dear — the laurels go to the slugger who ignores the censors, the outrider who navigates the frontier without a chaperone.
Certainly through the many early primaries, Hillary Clinton was often defined by these old standards, and judged harshly. She was forever the entitled chaperone. But that was then. As Thelma, the housewife turned renegade, says to her friend in “Thelma & Louise” as the two women flee the law through the American West, “Something’s crossed over in me.”
Senator Clinton might well say the same. In the final stretch of the primary season, she seems to have stepped across an unstated gender divide, transforming herself from referee to contender.
What’s more, she seems to have taken to her new role with a Thelma-like relish. We are witnessing a female competitor delighting in the undomesticated fray. Her new no-holds-barred pugnacity and gleeful perseverance have revamped her image in the eyes of begrudging white male voters, who previously saw her as the sanctioning “sivilizer,” a political Aunt Polly whose goody-goody directives made them want to head for the hills.
It’s the unforeseen precedent of an unprecedented candidacy: our first major female presidential candidate isn’t doing what men always accuse women of doing. She’s not summoning the rules committee over every infraction. (Her attempt to rewrite the rules for Michigan and Florida are less a timeout than rough play.) Not once has she demanded that the umpire stop the fight. Indeed, she’s asking for more unregulated action, proposing a debate with no press-corps intermediaries.
If anyone has been guarding the rules this election, it’s been the press, which has been primly thumbing the pages of Queensberry and scolding her for being “ruthless” and “nasty,” a “brawler” who fights “dirty.”
But while the commentators have been tut-tutting, Senator Clinton has been converting white males, assuring them that she’s come into their tavern not to smash the bottles, but to join the brawl.
Deep in the American grain, particularly in the grain of white male working-class voters, that is the more trusted archetype. Whether Senator Clinton’s pugilism has elevated the current race for the nomination is debatable. But the strategy has certainly remade the political world for future female politicians, who may now cast off the assumption that when the going gets tough, the tough girl will resort to unilateral rectitude. When a woman does ascend through the glass ceiling into the White House, it will be, in part, because of the race of 2008, when Hillary Clinton broke through the glass floor and got down with the boys.
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