feminist blogs

Angry sentiments like Caryl Rivers' may be understandable, in a sense....

Does anyone wonder why women who support Hillary Clinton for president get (excuse the vernacular) PO'd at some of our fellow Democrats?

It's because very time we turn around, someone is dissing our candidate in ways that infuriate us. He (or she) is using sexist, insulting language about the first woman to mount a viable run for the presidency, in ways that, to say the least, we do not appreciate.

While many of us see Barack Obama as an exciting, able and worthy candidate, and will gladly vote for him if he is the nominee, we do not see the same respect given to Hillary Clinton.

But Hillary Clinton's problem is Hillary Clinton -- or, I should say, the absence of a sense of who Hillary Clinton really is.

When I didn't know much about her, back in 1996, I was something of a Hillary fan. I was looking for a button or bumper sticker that said, "12 more years! Bill in '96, Hillary in '00".

When Hillary ran for Senate, I was a supporter. I would have voted for her, had I still been living in New York.

But then something changed. I saw her numerous times on CSPAN, speaking here and there, and at least 90% of the time I was left cold, feeling like I wasn't getting a real sense of what she really believed. She started to project that focus-group-tested persona that hid all but the carefully constructed image.

And then there was the war, and how she claimed to "take responsibility for her vote" for the war -- without really taking responsibility at all, beyond just claiming she took responsibility. No apology. No remorse. Just self-righteousness.

And then all the strange votes and political positions she took, such as banning flag "desecration" and giving $10k to forced-pregnancy advocate Casey's campaign and on and on.

Even so, when she finally announced her run, I was hopeful. Her online announcement was, well, okay. At least she seemed like she was trying to be authentic. But she obviously did not "get" the netroots. Her top-down campaign of a few big donors and cultivating of lobbyist money was disconcerting.

Then she failed to clinch it all by Super Tuesday. Then we started to see many different Hillary Clintons. There was the A-student-who-has-all-the-answers Hillary Clinton. Then there was the teary-cares-so-much Hillary Clinton. Then there was the scolding Barack-has-to-answer-for-his-behavior Hillary Clinton. Then there was the I'm-honored-to-be-here-with-you-Barack Hillary Clinton. Then there was the Barack-cannot-be-trusted-to-be-ready Hillary Clinton. And then there's the Karl Rove-like rhetoric.

And now we get the "Stay the Course" Hillary Clinton.

And all this points up how Hillary Clinton is the DLC representative, and the way she's campaigning seems to be more about her control over the Party rather than gaining the nomination.

Is Hillary the victim of mean media coverage? Certainly in some ways. But even more, Hillary is the victim of Hillary. She has been her own undoing.

More than a year ago, in response to Joe Biden’s racial miscue at the start of the Democratic primary campaign, I discussed how most white Americans have no idea how to talk about race. Little did I know, though, that ignorance and naivete about race wouldn’t prevent a lot of white people in the media from [...]

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She keeps going and going and going.... But at this point, does she's sounding like Bush does when he talks about Iraq.

She's lost her grasp. Either that, or she's actually fighting a bloody fight for control of the Democratic Party, election be damned. I can't see her continuous attacks on Barack Obama any other way.

I don't like Hillary Clinton for many reasons, mainly: her slippery non-positions on some issues, her demagoguery on other issues (even when I might agree), her "taking responsibility" for her support of the war on Iraq while not taking any responsibility, and the smarmy tone of her campaign more worthy of a Rove than a progressive.

Yet this kind of misogynistic crap:

“Nixon in a pant suit” is an anti-Hillary meme that Andrew Sullivan, longtime stalwart of Tricky Dick’s party, has successfully propagated. And James Wolcott, with presumably better intentions, has followed, um, suit.

Google this:

hillary pantsuit OR “pant suit” OR “pantsuits” OR “pant suits”

By last count, there are over 300,000 web pages referencing this candidate and garment choice.

What does this fixation with “pant suits” mean?

Indeed. A loaded phrase. Because women aren't supposed to wear pants. Or, maybe, do other things men do?

William Mayer brings us the latest in political news from Htrae’s election season:

If you think Chicago 1968 was bad then the prospect of what could happen in Denver is truly frightening. Picture a million people in the street with bombs going off and the central downtown business area burned to the ground.

Denver is a very liberal city, ala San Francisco and Seattle there is nowhere near the political will, nor is there sufficient police power to stop committed rioters.

You think I’m kidding?

Get real, the potential is there because Obama’s natural shock troops, something that has not been discussed anywhere in the MSM that we can find, consist of the same crazies that have caused so much trouble at various anti-globalization demonstrations around the world.

It’s therefore an international force.

Hell, when taken as a whole the nutcase hard lefties are the least dangerous people in that universe. The anarchists, and trust me, thousands of them could be mobilized from the Western United States, will constitute the SS divisions in this pro-Obama army. These folks live to cause trouble and are totally unpredictable and uncontrollable.

—William Mayer, PipelineNews.org (2008-04-26): Is Denver Burning? - Hillary Must Stay In Race To Ensure Destruction Of Obama

If those of us who are anarchists on Earth were half as numerous, well-organized, and uncontrollable in our efforts to undermine and ultimately destroy State authority as the Bizarro Anarchists are in their efforts to get a smooth politician invested with the authority of the President of the Bizarro Divided States of Acirema—well, then I’d be a lot more sanguine about the near future than I am.

(Via Dan Clore on the LeftLibertarian2 listserv.)

Hillary Clinton was grinning from ear to ear while North Carolina Governor Mike Easley endorsed her by saying she's no "pansy."

It's the kind of veiled homophobic slur wingnuts use. We remind you that both Easley and Clinton are Democrats.

Never mind the innuendo directed at Barack Obama. What about voters who happen to be homosexual, or happen to think homosexuality is in fact not a mortal sin?

Ryan J. Davis on HuffPo:

Now, I know from spending many recesses in middle school being called a pansy that it's just a subtle way of saying "faggot." Clinton stood by while Easley made that comment, smiling away. Speaking to a prominent gay journalist friend of mine this morning, he expressed his frustration with her campaign. "Hillary doesn't care about the gays. It's that simple. We're a political tool, like everything else in that family's orbit."

Clinton owes the gay community, which she has shamefully used as an ATM during her campaign, an apology for gay-baiting. We're waiting, Hillary.

Joe Aravosis on Americablog:

Oh, so Hillary has launched a "culture war" against Obama. And what are the three elements of the culture wars? God, guns, and gays. Hillary already pulled the God and gun card on Obama in Pennsylvania, where she couldn't even say when she last went to church, and then claimed she was a hunter after a lifetime as one of America's top gun control advocates. And now she's gay-bashing.

So will she denounce Governor Easley? Will the media press her on it, after hounding Obama about Reverend Wright?

Oh, but let's not pick on Hillary. She's had such a hard life.

Joe Sudbay on Americablog:

Think about your daily existence and compare it to Hillary's "tough" life.

When was the last time Hillary Clinton:

Went to the grocery store?

Pumped gas?

Had to argue with her health insurance company about a bill?

Had to wait for the cable guy?

Had a spontaneous, unscripted moment?

The woman has lived in a protective bubble for over 16 years. She and her husband have hauled in over $100 million over the past seven years. Everyone around her is either paid to be around her -- or pays to be around her. And, she has paid Mark Penn a lot of money to tell her about the lives of real people, gleaned from focus groups and polls. That's her reality and she's not exactly roughing it.

"Theft"? When it will require a Superdelegate coup to win -- mathematically it's her only chance -- that amounts to a theft, in my book.

I wouldn't be so antagonistic towards Hillary, but she has been the chameleon this entire campaign. In fact, at least since 2004. The only thing clear about Hillary is her ambition.

The Democratic destruction continues. Congratulations to the DLC.

As some of you know, I recently deleted my entire blog. I had several reasons (of which this episode was less an immediate trigger than it was the icing on the hyper-rhetorical cake), but the bottom line was that my life had been overtaken by (overt) political blogging, such that most other subjects and activities had become subordinate.

There was also a growing disgust with the state of political discourse within the feminist blogosphere. Many of the feminist blogs to which I had once looked for nuanced explorations of crucial issues of politics and culture were now doing little besides spewing constant streams of grossly distorting invective against Barack Obama (or what they would oh-so-innocently refer to as “vetting the candidate”).

When I took a deeply felt, authentically diplomatic approach, my would-be sisters advocating for Hillary Clinton generally ignored me (with precious few exceptions - you know who you are). And when I took more of a fighting approach, I began to deplore the sound of my own voice.

Finally, I did a post specifically on the dangers of the Obama/Clinton divide among progressives (using a one-shot opportunity to guest blog at Huffington Post), and while responses were generally favorable (I was thanked, for instance, for “inserting a little sanity into the divisive discourse”), it was also clear that my words could not begin to counteract what was, after all, a tsunami-sized wave of grossly cynical, and sometimes openly hateful discourse.

So, does my about-face with regard to overt political blogging mean I no longer care - passionately - about these issues? Hardly. (Indeed, what woke me up in the middle of the night, provoking me to write this, was a dream containing the audaciously brassy and insistent chorus line from Skunk Anansie’s Yes It’s Fucking Political.) Well then, does it mean my support for Barack Obama’s candidacy is in any way lessened? Most certainly not.

But if months engaging in what had been a labor of love - writing about the issues in this election - have gotten me absolutely nowhere in terms of fostering open, substantive dialogue with progressives’ common interests in mind, why on earth would I continue with that labor now? (For while it is my candidate’s prerogative - and, indeed, mandate - to respond as needed¹ to constant attacks coming from the Clinton camp, I don’t see that my doing so adds to the current discourse.)

Today, as Pennsylvania voters go to the polls, I’m going to impose a total news blackout in this household (from TV to newspapers to blogs to Twitter) until I know most of the returns are in, and my kids are in bed. Because, in the event Clinton’s last-ditch effort to save her campaign, by deploying that most Rovian of all despicably Rovian tactics - using the image of Osama bin Laden in campaign ads, in an effort to scare voters (remember when Democrats were in universal opposition to this practice?) - is successful (where ’success’ would mean more than a marginal victory in this particular state, with significant net gain in pledged delegates), I am going to be incredibly angry. And I’d rather my kids didn’t see me like that.

Whatever the outcome, this time tomorrow, I’ll compose myself again, and deal with whatever comes next. If, somehow, Clinton becomes the Democratic party’s nominee, I will certainly vote for her, because McCain is by far the more dangerous candidate.

In the Huffington Post guest blog entry referenced above, I included in a footnote this somewhat out-of-place comment: Each post I write on the election, I die a little. Extricating myself from these debates, then - despite a constant stream of outrages to which I might otherwise have been compelled to react - has been in the interests of self-preservation, and I don’t regret it.

Going back to something I jokingly said on Twitter, awhile back:

Feminist blogosphere, I wish I knew how to quit you.

I’m happy to say that with this last post, I finally have.

Good luck, Pennsylvania. I hope you’ll vote your conscience.

__

¹ As Obama said, in an interview to be aired in full on the Today Show later this morning:

This is an old trick, right? Somebody attacks you and attacks you and attacks you, and when you finally call them on it, suddenly you’re ‘engaging in the same tactics.’ We have been extraordinarily restrained during the course of this campaign and have generally responded only to attacks that have already been leveled at us by Senator Clinton.

What seems apparent to me -- and correct me if I'm wrong -- is that the Hillary Clinton campaign is waging a battle to retain (or restore) the DLC control of the Democratic Party. Why else this suicide run ostensibly aimed at the White House. She has no mathematical chance of winning, save for a Superdelegate trump play. And her scorched-Earth campaign tactics seem designed to prevent Barack Obama from ever succeeding.

It's like the #1 priority is to prevent Obama's campaign from waging a successful insurgency against the old-politics power center of the Democratic Party. The DLC.

What is the election tomorrow about? Why is the mainstream media even playing along? What's going on here?

Watching the news online, it was clear what the debate story was today:

Washington Post television critic Tom Shales, in an April 17 article headlined "In Pa. Debate, The Clear Loser Is ABC," described the debate as "another step downward for network news -- in particular ABC News, which hosted the debate from Philadelphia and whose usually dependable anchors, Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos, turned in shoddy, despicable performances." Shales added that the debate "dwelled entirely on specious and gossipy trivia" and "seemed slanted against Obama."

Time magazine's Michael Grunwald, in an April 17 article headlined "The Democrats Play Trivial Pursuit," wrote, "Obama's memoir dripped with contempt for modern gotcha politics, for a campaign culture obsessed with substantively irrelevant but supposedly symbolic gaffes," and added, "Last night at the National Constitution Center, at a Democratic debate that was hyped by ABC as a discussion of serious constitutional issues, America got to see exactly what Obama was complaining about."

In an April 16 article on Editor & Publisher's website, Greg Mitchell wrote, "In perhaps the most embarrassing performance by the media in a major presidential debate in years, ABC News hosts Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos focused mainly on trivial issues as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama faced off in Philadelphia. They, and their network, should hang their collective heads in shame."

You don't need to go to Daily Kos to find cries of assent to these assessments.

Greg Mitchell writes on HuffPo:

In perhaps the most embarrassing performance by the media in a major presidential debate in years, ABC News hosts Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos focused mainly on trivial issues as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama faced off in Philadelphia. They, and their network, should hang their collective heads in shame.

Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the health care and mortgage crises, the overall state of the economy and dozens of other pressing issues had to wait for their few moments in the sun as Obama was pressed to explain his recent "bitter" gaffe and relationship with Rev. Wright (seemingly a dead issue) and not wearing a flag pin -- while Clinton had to answer again for her Bosnia trip exaggerations.

Then it was back to Obama to defend his slim association with a former '60s radical -- a question that came out of right-wing talk radio and Sean Hannity on TV, but was delivered by former Bill Clinton aide Stephanopoulos. This approach led to a claim that Clinton's husband pardoned two other '60s radicals. And so on. The travesty continued.

More time was spent on all of this than segments on getting out of Iraq and keeping people from losing their homes and -- you name it. Gibson only got excited complaining that someone might raise his capital gains tax.

The Philly Enquirer's poll has, at the time of this writing, about half of all views rating the questions as "terrible, a waste of time."

Even ABC admitted that the heat was on. As MSNBC noted:

By midafternoon Thursday, more than 15,600 comments were posted on ABC News' Web site, the tone overwhelmingly negative....

..."Why not have Paris Hilton moderate next time?" one poster wrote. One man repeated the word "bad" 48 times. A sampling found opinion was running against the network about 8-to-1.

Did the message sink into the skulls of Gibson and Stephanopoulos?

"The questions were tough and fair and appropriate and relevant," Stephanopoulos told The Associated Press. "We wanted to focus at first on the issues that were not focused on during the last debates."

The criticism comes with the territory, he said. "It's one more sign of how engaged people are over this election," he said.

Engaged on a higher level than ABC was willing to present, apparently.

It didn't help to learn that presumably George Stephanopoulos was throwing questions seeded by right-wing commentators.

But watch the NewsHour, and the story is all about the petty issues.

LINDA DOUGLASS: Well, certainly they expected the questions on Reverend Wright. Certainly they expected the questions on the statements that he made about small-town America being economically depressed and turning to guns and religion. They expected all of that.

But it was the relentlessness of it, the fact that they didn't get into health care, or gas prices, or college tuition, or whatever in the beginning that I think took them aback. They were prepared for many other kinds of questions.

And you could see that Obama himself was becoming irritated. But the one thing you can't do in a situation like this, if you are the candidate who feels aggrieved by how the moderators handled you, the one thing you cannot do is blame the press for the questions they ask. That never works as a tactic.

Enough about armchair quarterbacking. What about the facts?

MARGARET WARNER: So, Brooks, in defending himself, based on your analysis, did Obama stretch the truth in any way?

BROOKS JACKSON, FactCheck.org: Well, yes. One of the things for which we're criticizing him is that he said that, in regard to that lapel pin, the American flag lapel pin, he said, "I never said that I had refused to wear it."

Well, in fact, less than a year ago in Iowa, he told a TV interviewer that after 9/11 he had decided not to wear the pin because it had become, in his view, a substitute for true patriotism, which is upsetting a lot of people and being talked about.

So he's engaging in a little bit of rewriting his own history.

You really have to see the video where Brooks Jackson and Linda Douglass smirk with self-satisfied pride over their easy proclaimations as "the facts."

And then:

MARGARET WARNER: And, Dan, do the Obama people feel that some of these issues that were brought up last night, these personal issues or things he said or associations he's had, do they think they're really invalid or do they actually think these are potential vulnerabilities?

DAN BALZ: Well, I think they certainly recognize that the controversy over Reverend Wright is likely to be a problem in the general election. I think at this point they think they have weathered most of these in the nomination battle.

All of the polling that came out over the last few days shows no particular damage from the comments he made at the San Francisco fundraiser about how small-town Americans are bitter about their situation and cling to guns and religion and things like that.

I think they believe that -- I mean, I know they were quite worried when that erupted. I think they think that that has not been a serious problem.

Again, the Old Media are stuck in their Old Story. Even when they are the story. Even in the face of criticism, they insist upon focusing on trivia rather than on things that matter.

Lapel pins? Who "loves America more"? Puhleez! I'd have expected more from the NewsHour, but they were as lazy as ABC. Something to remember during the next pledge break.