The Sound of Silence
May 15th, 2008 at 6:52 pm by Susie
Via Lambert, Marie Cocco’s column today:
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.
I won’t miss episodes like the one in which liberal radio personality Randi Rhodes called Clinton a “big [expletive] whore”…
I won’t miss [nice use of anaphora!] Citizens United Not Timid (no acronym, please), an anti-Clinton group founded by Republican guru Roger Stone.
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.”
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).
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.
Yep. All those Democrats who are whining to the press (anonymously, of course) that they “can’t” support Obama because they’re “worried about the famous Clinton retribution.” We know they’re whores, let’s spell it out: They can’t raise that kind of money by themselves, and they’re not sure they can count on Obama to do it for them.
So they take the money from the Clintons with one hand, and stick in the shiv with the other. Nice!
Now that’s the cynicism I know and love.
I’d say she has been giving as good as she has been getting..No, actually NOT. She has given BETTER than she has been getting….Now, let’s see what kind of Democrat she really is.
Ken Rudin and Andrew Sullivan, Chris Matthews, Mike Barnicle, Jack Cafferty, and of course William Kristol no less! A confederacy of media dunces if ever there was one! They’re assholes and idiots … but then, they always have been.
And of course potty mouth Randi Rhodes, who got her ass fired behind her comments.
I don’t know why we’d expect Howard Dean to jump into that cesspool - I don’t recall him weighing in on racism issues either, for that matter, though maybe I just missed it.
it seems some find misogony and sexism everywhere…even where it really doesn’t exist or at the level claimed… or is it just the fact the candidate who beat hrc is a man - so the only excuse is sexism? is OB a sexist for the mere reason he won? I read and tried to accept hrc and OB tactics as politics - but then when I think I get it — “hey it’s just politics”, others start to blather on about racism or sexism. I realize some things were obv race-based and some were mildly sexist (i guess) - but to just swipe broadly and say sexism was so widespread and rampant… help me understand.
If Obama had ever answered a question about rumors that Hillary Clinton is a lesbian that have been propagated by the far right for years with a qualifier of “as far as I know” then I guess I would really have a problem with his silence on this issue too.
Sam, there’s no need to perpetuate that “as far as I know” meme. Clinton clearly said that Obama was not a Muslim several times on the 60 Minutes segment as Steve Kroft kept pressing her again and again on it. Of course, what gets extracted and bounced all around the blogosphere is the “as far as I know” phrase, totally out of context. This is just one example of the total ludicrousness that counts for discourse these days.
I’m also getting tired of defenses of sexism that basically amount to “well, yeah, but Hillary [or some surrogate] said something worse.” I thought all of us learned in kindergarten that two wrongs don’t make a right.
So Zon, if Obama answered no several times then said “as far as I know Hillary is not a lesbian” you’d be perfectly OK with that?
Yeah - right. The man can’t use normal words that are the best choice to fit the meaning of his sentences without folks jumping all over them and calling him sexist. What a crock.
This post is about Obama’s (and others) failure to ride to the defense of Hillary. It is quite reasonable to question why he should do this when she has not ridden to his defense over similarly offensive stuff and in fact has in some instances piled on herself. The premise that Hillary needs defending is itself sexist unless it is accompanied by an equal call for HER to come to his defense as well. Or do we only think women need to be defended by men?