Mike Barnicle wants to be as popular as Tweety among the gals:
On the January 23 edition of MSNBC's Morning Joe, during a discussion of the January 21 Democratic presidential candidates debate with an all-male panel that included co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Willie Geist, and guest co-host David Shuster, political and social commentator Mike Barnicle said of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY): "when she reacts the way she reacts to [Sen. Barack] Obama [D-IL] with just the look, the look toward him, looking like everyone's first wife standing outside a probate court, OK? Looking at him that way, all I could think of ... was this fall, if it's [Sen. John] McCain [R-AZ] that she's facing, McCain is likable. She's not." All three MSNBC co-hosts laughed at Barnicle's comparison of Clinton to "everyone's first wife standing outside a probate court," with Scarborough interrupting Barnicle by laughing loudly before saying, "I'm sorry. Go ahead."
The bolds are mine.
Note that Barnicle asked the other guys to hate on Hillary Clinton because she reminds him of one of the frightening myths attached to women in general: The ex-wife who takes you to the cleaners. Barnicle is not commenting on Clinton; he is commenting on Clinton's femaleness, and by that extension he is commenting on all women. And this was done in an all-male company on television.
Barnacle [sic] is pretty well known to me as a guy who really doesn't like chicks except perhaps in the same sense he likes a nice rib roast. That guys like him are viewed as mainstream and their ideas as quite ok to express tells us how common that low-level misogyny is in our culture. Similar levels of misandry would not be acceptable in what is called mainstream television.