Saturday Night Fixation Read

This is going to be a rather short post.  Last Saturday, BostonBoomer wrote about the New York Times and its seemingly endless need to write completely unhinged things about Hillary Clinton.  We’ve also written about MoDo before and her strange fixation on the former Secretary of State and presidential candidate.   Peter Daou and Tom Watson have completely dissected MoDo’s screeds in a must-read blog post.   I want to make sure y’all read it.  Daou traces the memes and name calling back to Karl Rove and has a rather complete list of misogynist adjectives frequently assigned to Hillary.

• POLARIZING
• CALCULATING
• SECRETIVE
• OVER AMBITIOUS
• WILL DO ANYTHING TO WIN
• DISINGENUOUS/INSINCERE
• MACHINE-LIKE/INHUMAN
• INEVITABLE/OVER-CONFIDENT
• OLD/OUT OF TOUCH
• DEFIANT/UNCARING

Just about any woman with grit, ambition, and a talent for assertiveness has worn those labels at one time or another.  Why on earth is Maureen Dowd and the NYT allowing Karl Rove to control their narratives on the former Secretary of State?  I’m always first in line to attribute the nonsense to the Dudebro culture where all white men with coveted college educations believe that only they can be the masters of the universe. See what you think.

In The Great American Brainwash: Half a Billion Dollars to Turn the Public against Hillary, Peter explains how these memes work and where they originate:

From a revealing report on Karl Rove’s Crossroads:

“An expensive and sophisticated effort is underway to test and refine the most potent lines of attack against Mrs. Clinton, and, ultimately, to persuade Americans that she does not deserve their votes. Republican groups are eager to begin building a powerful case against the woman they believe will be the Democratic nominee, and to infuse the public consciousness with those messages. The effort to vilify Mrs. Clinton could ultimately cost several hundred million dollars, given the variety and volume of political organizations involved.”

Crossroads’ goal is to indoctrinate the public with anti-Hillary narratives, to insert carefully tested negative memes into the public debate.

Voters need to understand that what they think they know about Hillary is often the result of sophisticated propaganda techniques, where tightly-crafted talking points are focus-grouped and deployed by shadowy GOP groups then magnified by the mainstream media and pundits.

This is the subtext to Maureen Dowd’s new, vicious attack against Hillary. Dowd’s words are chosen meticulously: they fit perfectly into the narratives and frames that have been developed for over two decades to smear Hillary. Each of these terms is taken from Dowd’s new op-ed – many are verbatim matches with our compendium of anti-Hillary memes:

“Acting all innocent, disingenuous, egregious transgressions, militant fans, craving a championship, surreptitious, wanting to win at all costs, calculating, history of subterfuge, crafty, sketchy value system, seamy, Faustian bargain, sheen of inevitability, robotic, queenly attitude, suspicious mind-set, unsavory.”

Delivering such excessive negativity in one piece is not opinion writing. It is not journalism. It is a personal vendetta aided and abetted by the New York Times, with the intention of spreading potent sexist frames crafted by conservative opposition researchers.

Dowd’s history of Hillary-bashing is notable:

Dowd has written more than 200 columns on Hillary, most of them negative. A detailed analysis by Oliver Willis and Hannah Groch-Begley published last summer found that “Dowd has repeatedly accused Clinton of being an enemy to or betraying feminism (35 columns, 18 percent of those studied), power-hungry (51 columns, 26 percent), unlikable (9 columns, 5 percent), or phony (34 columns, 17 percent). She’s also attacked the Clintons as a couple in 43 columns (22 percent), many of which included Dowd’s ham-handed attempts at psychoanalysis.”

The abuse continues. Just this past April, Dowd wrote that Hillary is a “granny” who “can’t figure out how to campaign as a woman” after she “scrubbed out the femininity, vulnerability, and heart” required to do so during her 2008 presidential run. Claiming Hillary is now trying to shift her image after she “saw the foolishness of acting like a masculine woman,” Dowd asserted that the candidate “always overcorrects,” and is now “basking in estrogen.” Dowd concluded, saying hopefully Hillary will “teach her Republican rivals…that bitch is still the new black” instead.

At #HillaryMen, we’ve dubbed this endless invective directed at Hillary in the media the “wall of words” and we’ve argued that it is the single biggest obstacle on her path to becoming America’s first woman president. Although Dowd is the master of anti-Hillary memes, she is hardly alone.

With that in mind, I have a lot of respect for the role Senator Bernie Sanders has played in the U.S. Senate even though he’s never been very influential or effective in getting anything passed. He at least is one notable voice from a point of view we rarely get to hear in this country.  I also admire that–unlike Donald Trump or Ralph Nader–Sanders has said he would never run as an independent to try to unrail any other Democratic nominee. However, the same group of dudebros from 2008 have been popping up trolling women supporters of Hillary.   There still seems to be an incredible discomfort among white male elites with the idea of a woman in charge.

On my side of the aisle, it’s all about Bernie. Well, Bernie vs. Hillary. And that’s where the rub is getting… rubbier.

I like Bernie; I’ve always liked Bernie. I’ve shared his memes and quotes over the years, I’ve appreciated his unvarnished views on issues of the economy and fiscal equity, and I believe he’s a passionate, powerful idealist who has a lot to say that bears hearing. I’m thrilled he’s running; I think he’s energized many on the left who’ve felt Hillary wasn’t left enough but didn’t have another candidate to support. He makes the Democratic ticket a true race, one that’s vibrant and competitive, and that’s a good thing.

The rub is in the way too many of his supporters are comporting themselves in their effort to promote the cause. I don’t mind the enthusiastic postings about big crowds, electrifying speeches, or hope-inducing polls. The ideas he’s touting, the kind of government he’s visualizing, the core principals of his platform are all admirable, and it’s easy to see why people are excited. That’s how it should go in campaigns, certainly at this point in the process. I don’t even mind the countless invitations I’ve received to join this “Bernie group” on Facebook, or come to that Bernie event in Hollywood. Invite away; I’m a big girl and I have no problem being gracious in my responses.

But lately I’m seeing too many threads on the topic turn into sadly-typical spitting contests, with those supporting Bernie flinging epithets at Hillary supporters, breathlessly listing all her purported transgressions and foibles, denigrating her accomplishments, insulting her personal decisions, and acting as though anyone who supports her is an idiot who doesn’t grasp the folly of their ways. I’ve had Bernie supporters get snarly with me, bait me to answer questions about why I might support Hillary, push me to defend her record, explain her business decisions, even parse her choice to stay with her husband. As a woman I find it appalling, but frankly, many of those most zealous on this topic are women… Hillary has always had the capacity to trip the wire with some on that side of the gender aisle!

My moment came when I posted this and said wtf was he thinking on Facebook.  In 1972, I was a kid in high school working as a volunteer in the origination of what’s now one of the most successful rape crisis lines and centers in the country. I was like all of 16 and I can tell you that rape is a woman’s nightmare and one likely to happen.  It’s not a damned fantasy. Well, this was evidently a satire piece but hell, the immodest proposal of eating Irish Children was good satire because it was such an over the top unlikely scenario.  Being raped or held down against your will by men is something most of us will experience and by that time I’d been held down by upperclassmen and yelled at for not being humble like Jesus.  I just considered myself fortunate to not get the rape part of it but I have many many friends that have.  So, my question is what was he thinking then and what has he said now.   (RAPE TRIGGER FOR THAT LINK)

So, one of the responses I got was from a friend of a friend “Looks like the Hillary supporters are dredging for straws to grasp.”.  Uh,  we’ve got no straws to grasp. Being a self-proclaimed socialist in today’s USA is about all it takes to sink a candidate outside of a few states. I’m fine with him being in the race. It’ll make for interesting debates.

I also “like” being mansplained about a piece being a critique of entrenched gender roles.  My response was as follows.

No one thinks it’s his own sexual preferences nor was the critique of gender roles lost on me. It’s the idea of using a rape fantasy for a woman that’s appalling period. But the dudebros back then were as misogynist as they are today. I just want to read something explaining what on earth he was thinking back then. When you write satire you assign outrageous scenarios but you don’t make ever woman’s nightmare–and a likely one at that–a fantasy. I don’t think this will impact any election. It’s just appalling no matter when it was written and no matter by who

You can read more on the Bernie Swoon and the way the press is encouraging him to Hillary bash by reading this example at The Atlantic. They should debate and establish contrasts but there’s no need for anyone to be combative.

I just absolutely hate to think that we’re going to have to go through another one of these political seasons where we get dick-thwapped just because a woman wants to be president.  I especially don’t want to hear a rehash of all that Rove crap coming from the New York Times.  We’re going to be treated to the Republican Primary Debates shortly.  I hope they just stuck to trashing each other.  Otherwise, it’s going to be a long, stressful, misogynistic political season.

The original MoDO screed is here at today’s NYT where she compare’s Clinton to Tom Brady and says they have an attitude of “win at all costs” with a history of “subterfuge.” She even quotes a Wall Street Journal article. Wow, the NYT really needs to reassess their relationship with her if that’s the stuff she reads and cites.

Anyway,  you can consider this an open thread.  I slept late today and took a huge long nap this afternoon. I’m exhausted.