Monday, November 12, 2007

Today's Odd Screed



It's a few days old. Still a mighty screed, and by Andrew Sullivan, one of the conservative bloggers at the Atlantic Monthly. It is about the horrors that await us all if Hillary Clinton gets elected. Instead of the last eight years, the fat and peaceful Bush ones, we get the lean and mean Clinton eight years again. The horrors! Wars and economic collapses are much, much better than cocksucking in the Oval Office, or the ensuing wingnut mental collapse:

Barack Obama put it gently, with respect to Bill Clinton's increasing role in trying to ensure that he gets his wife (and himself) back into the White House:

"My understanding is President Clinton's not on the ballot."

The problem is: he is and he isn't. His wife wants to use him as a weapon in the campaign, but still insist that it is she who is running, and not him. She wants to appeal to a return to his policies, but still insists that she does not represent a third term for the 42d president. She wants him on her resume until it's not convenient. Then she pretends to be a feminist. She wants to include in her "experience" her attempt to get everybody's healthcare under her beatifically benign control in the early 1990s. But in turn he insists that her failure to achieve anything - because of her reflexive secrecy, paranoia and over-reach - was actually his fault, not hers. She wants credit for being a feminist, while still running in part on her husband's record - both claiming credit for the good parts and disowning the bad parts. They will keep playing this game - arguing every which way, passing the buck from one to the other, never accepting responsibility, for as long as it gets them past the latest news cycle.

Ok. Let's just elect a Republican who will start a few more wars, who will get rid of the Social Security and Medicare, who will get rid of all Civil Rights legislation and who will turn those pesky 5-4 decisions in the Supreme Court into resounding 9-0 ones for Vaterland and against the little people. At least we don't have to fret over the Clintons, and if we are really lucky we will die in those wars and will have to fret over nothing.

That was my mini-screed back.

Later in the same post Sullivan notes that:

I am told by my Clinton-friendly readers that I am obsessed with this matter, seized with hatred, a mouthpiece for Republican talking points, a woman-hater, etc etc. Fine. Whatever. Have your say.

Hmm. Wasn't Sullivan the guy who in the 1990s wrote a long piece about how women are biologically constrained never to be able to rise to the level of men? I somehow happen to remember that piece. Odd how certain things stick to my goddessy mind.

And wasn't Sullivan the guy who argued for something called "gender patriotism"? Meaning that men should sort of side with men and against women? Now, these statements don't necessarily make him into a woman-hater. But they make his use of feminism a little wobbly as a weapon.