Once the votes are counted in Ohio and Texas tomorrow night, we’ll be looking back to probably the most sexist primaries in US election history. It’s been amazing to watch how Senator Hillary Clinton’s gender ended up being the defying factor. It’s been even more amazing how liberals turned out to be the sexists du jour.
From the onset of the campaign Clinton’s experience was reduced to being a former president’s wife. Repeatedly, lefty commentator Robert Scheer belittled her as “a First Lady”.
I remember going to the 2000 Republican convention in Philadelphia. A right-winger was selling doormats, sporting the face of then First Lady Hillary Clinton, “so you can rub it right into her”, he told me. I asked him why he hates her that much. “Ah, she’s a cunt”, he answered. That was his only argument.
Well, it seems that many liberals are copying the ugly bias against Clinton without making an argument. The C-word has been typed by Obama supporters all over liberal blogs. Salon.com even had a competition to find “more ways to call Hillary Clinton the C-word”.
Bill Maher, one of my favorite comedians, lashed out at Hillary with a nasty montage of her “different personalities”:
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFp5y944tP4]
He introduced the piece in an all male panel as “I’m not sexist”, knowing how sexist it is. He also talks about “Hillary Clinton’s cunt”:
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gyg31Wf18yc]
Slate published a video that looked for “Hillary’s Inner Tracy Flick”. Flick was the ambitious and therefore horrible girl in the 1999 movie “Election”.
On Alternet, she’s been called a “woman who has tied herself to the semen-stained coattails of her husband”, and she is “no more a feminist than the man in the moon”.
On the comment boards of the Huffington Post Hillary was called the “most selfish witch in politics”, or “headless chicken”.
MSNBC, long called the liberal’s news network, called Chelsea Clinton’s campaigning for her mother “pimping”:
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPACErdBaUg]
Chris Matthews, also on MSNBC and a long time liberal, said she’ be nothing without her husband: “The reason she’s a U.S. Senator, the reason she’s a candidate for president, the reason she may be a front-runner is her husband messed around. That’s how she got to be senator from New York. We keep forgetting it. She didn’t win there on her merit.”
Matthews apologized for his “sexist (though correct) comments”, as the Huffington Post put it. So it’s true that Hillary Clinton only has a shot at the presidency because of Monica Lewinsky. Liberals sometimes have a rather twisted mind.
Liberals on the New York Times editorial pages have been particularly sexist. Frank Rich, normally a great thinker, uses one argument against John McCain in his latest column: He is like Hillary Clinton. And what is Hillary Clinton, in Rich’s thinking? “Tone-Deaf” for Obama’s cultural appeal. He called her campaign “whiners”.
It’s pretty pathetic how New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd seems to get a kick out of kicking another woman in the stomach in almost every column she’s published latley. A recent letter to the editor summed it up by quoting Dowd’s words to describe Clinton – “desperate,” “primal scream,” “clanging,” “churlish,” “discombobulated,” “gloomy,” “flipping,” “begrudging,” “whining,” “experience,” “pea green with envy,” “Sybil,” “cascading,” “dizzying,” “unsettling,” “struggling,” “tartly,” “peevishly,” “pointlessly,” “sarcasm” – versus words she uses for Obama – “golden child,” “sunny,” “consistency,” “bedazzling,” “confidence,” “excitement,” “exceptionally easy in his skin”. Enough already.
As the New York Times points out, US Magazine treated Hillary Clinton as a fashion victim while Barack Obama is shown as “a good dancer, a cool dad, a regular guy”. US, edited by a newsroom full of trendy liberals, gives Hillary the classy girl treatment while Obama is oh so great.
When Hillary stood up against sexism, she was accused of double playing. At a speech in Salem, N.H., a guy was holding up a yellow sign that read “Iron My Shirt”. One Clinton was on the podium he kept yelling at her. “Oh, the remnants of sexism, alive and well!” Clinton said, to roaring cheers and applause from the stunned crowd. When MSNBC reported on it on a blog, the first comment accused Clinton of dishonesty. “If this turns out to be a slick Hilly plant, then, shame on slick Hilly.” Or: “Completely staged. First the crying thing to appeal to women. Not this, to piss them off into voting for Hillary!”
Walter Shorenstein from Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, asks the right question: “Is it in the country’s best interest that voters received far more information about Hillary’s laugh than Obama’s legislative record?”
Well, what’s the come after this? Probably the most racist general election in U.S. history. And don’t forget ageism. John McCain, as we already know, would be the oldest president to enter the White House.
What started out as an exciting US election – the first time in some five decades without an incumbent president or vice president running, the prospect of a first woman president or the first African American president – is turning into a nasty, and mostly meaning less affair. Issues anyone? Rather not.