One hilarious aspect of this Turd Reich is the way all sorts of creepy-crawly critters eagerly come out of the woodwork to say all those things they couldn't say when they had their lips sewn together in that horrible liberal totalitarian era.
The responses to the silencing of a hussy in the US Senate are a good example of this. Senator Elizabeth Warren, D-Ma, was told to shut up by the Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell, because she was "impugning" the character of a Senator (Jeff Sessions) during the Senate hearings. (Sessions is now our attorney general, protecting our civil rights, which is a bit like approving of a wolf to care for the lives of sheep.)
McConnell's poetic utterances about Warren have now been etched into our collective memory:
“She was warned,” McConnell said later. “She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.”But others have written better about all that and also about the many and varied reasons for McConnell's behavior.
They may not have been rooted in just sexism, because Warren is a very effective speaker.
Neither is the fact that McConnell later allowed several male Senators to read the Coretta King letter for which Warren was censured necessarily just yet another indicator of the widespread conservative view that women are meant to be silent and obedient but men are not. Because once you step into pig shit by accident, you might not want to then do a step dance in it. Or in cleaner terms, McConnell stepped into that pig shit and then tried to wipe his expensive shoes clean.
It is the conservative reactions to all this that are of interest. Here's* Mike Huckabee, god's best buddy forever and a rigid interpreter of the Biblical code for women:
I love that! A politician is a scold. And that would be a female politician.
There are two obvious ways this post could go. The first one, to be saved for a later post**, is a dissection of the way we are now supposed to live in the post-PC era, where everyone, including Mike Huckabee (but excluding anyone on this side of the political aisle), can blurt all sorts of nasty stuff straight into someone's face and expect not to be punished for it at all.
The second one is to note that the Hillarization of Elizabeth Warren has begun. By "Hillarization" (my term, send royalties to Snakepit Inc.) I mean a process of smearing which is more rigorous, more extreme and more enduring for female politicians than it is for male politicians. Warren will be Hillarized in no time at all, especially if it looks like she might be running for president in 2020.
We can't have a scold in that august position, now can we?
Heh.
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* Read the Wonkette take, because it is delicious.
** I think that post will be quite nuanced. It's slowly simmering on the slow cooker part of my girl brain.