On Jun 16, 2008, at 11:19 PM, Jim Devine wrote:
I don't know why PK views misogyny as a greater problem than racism
against Blacks or as persisting longer than racism. How can anyone
measure such things? <...>
If your reading of PK is right (and it seems to be) then I agree he is
wrong. Unlike you and your wife, however, my wife and I have followed
an opposite trajectory (and I write the below without intending
disrespect to those, like CB, Julio and Max, who are guardedly
optimistic w.r.t Obama): our irritation with Hillary took on an
inverse relationship with the way the media and the blogistan treated
her, even as Obama won rave reviews for vapid rhetoric that was beyond
irritating and truly insulting. And the thing that struck us was the
close parallel between the GOP playbook and that of the Obama
supporters -- the very tactics and terminology they had experienced in
the Gore debacle in 2000: "sore loser" is an example. And the smug
silliness about "you cannot change the rules in the middle of a
game" (its not a fucking game!!! and aren't "liberals" the ones who
cared about fairness over rules?), etc. We would still not have voted
for Hillary in the primaries, except perhaps out of anger and spite.
But I digress... where I do agree with PK is that misogyny,
unashamedly expressed (by general media figures and female Obama water-
carriers like Dowd, Ehrenreich, etc) set the tone of ridicule that
assisted in the forcing out of Hillary (arguably the winner of the
popular vote -- another eerie similarity with Gore). But in a sense it
was more elementary (to leftist attitudes) than misogyny: both women
and Blacks are subjected to the same ridicule, violence,
discrimination (and so on) that we (in the left) react against. In
this case however, while Obama faced his raft of controversies and the
usual Fox+GOP smear, we felt that what we saw happening to Hillary was
a gentler version of an individual lynching.
And even Karl Rove saw the disingenuousness of the Obama camp argument
(which saw elected delegates, but not the superdelegates or the people
themselves, as the votes to count) in its argument against
superdelegates: nobody, as he noted, expected Ted Kennedy or Deval
Patrick to "follow the will of their voters" and throw their
superdelegate vote to Hillary, who won their state.
With apologies for the uncollected nature of my rant,
--ravi
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