Why Can’t Politicians be Honest about the real State of the USA?
Posted: October 21, 2012 Filed under: 2012 elections, 2012 presidential campaign | Tags: exceptionalism, falling behind 14 Comments
IMAGINE a presidential candidate who spoke with blunt honesty about American problems, dwelling on measures by which the United States lags its economic peers.What might this mythical candidate talk about on the stump? He might vow to turn around the dismal statistics on child poverty, declaring it an outrage that of the 35 most economically advanced countries, the United States ranks 34th, edging out only Romania. He might take on educational achievement, noting that this country comes in only 28th in the percentage of 4-year-olds enrolled in preschool, and at the other end of the scale, 14th in the percentage of 25-to-34-year-olds with a higher education. He might hammer on infant mortality, where the United States ranks worse than 48 other countries and territories, or point out that, contrary to fervent popular belief, the United States trails most of Europe, Australia and Canada in social mobility.
The candidate might try to stir up his audience by flipping a familiar campaign trope: America is indeed No. 1, he might declare — in locking its citizens up, with an incarceration rate far higher than that of the likes of Russia, Cuba, Iran or China; in obesity, easily outweighing second-place Mexico and with nearly 10 times the rate of Japan; in energy use per person, with double the consumption of prosperous Germany.
How far would this truth-telling candidate get?
We’ve been enriching the wealthy and draining the rest of the nation since the 1980s and it’s really beginning to show.
Indeed, in the current fiscal environment, promising an ambitious effort to reduce poverty or counter global warming might imply big new spending, which is practically and politically anathema. And given the increasing professionalization of politics, any candidate troubled by how the United States lags its peers in health or education has plenty of advisers and consultants to warn him never to mention it on the stump.
“Nobody wants to be the one who proposed taking the position that got the candidate in trouble,” says Martha Joynt Kumar, a political scientist at Towson University who studies presidential communications.
Of course, the reason talking directly about serious American problems is risky is that most voters don’t like it. Mark Rice, who teaches American studies at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, N.Y., said students often arrived at his classes steeped in the notion that the United States excelled at everything. He started a blog, Ranking America, to challenge their assumptions with a wild assortment of country comparisons, some sober (the United States is No. 1 in small arms ownership) and others less so (the United States is tied for 24th with Nigeria in frequency of sex).
“Sure, we’re No. 1 in gross domestic product and military expenditures,” Mr. Rice says. “But on a lot of measures of quality of life, the U.S. ranking is far lower. I try to be as accurate as I can and I avoid editorializing. I try to complicate their thinking.”
Why can’t we get our priorities straight?
Speak like a Throwback
Posted: October 20, 2012 Filed under: 2012 elections, open thread, VAGINA MItt Romney | Tags: Romney, Throw Back language 21 Comments
So, I’m uploading my Mozy backup files–estimated time hours and hours and hours–because my computer suffered a case of blue screen of death. Windows 7 totally choked and I had to return it to the factory image. So, I’m throwing up a retro speak open thread since I have an alien computer until Mozy does its thing. This thread is actually related to this NYT’s article: “Gosh, Who Talks Like That Now? Romney Does”. RomneySpeak is a throwback to the good ol’ days when blacks had to pay poll taxes, count marbles in jars, and take long tests to vote. It’s a time when it was hard to get birth control and abortion was one of those back alley things. Yes, folks with Mittens, it’s like a throw back to that good old time when White Men were White Men and the rest of us were under their thumb. Probably why they appear to be his main supporters.
At a campaign stop in Rockford, Ill., not long ago, Mitt Romney sought to convey his feelings for his wife, Ann. “Smitten,” he said.
Not merely in love.
“Yeah, smitten,” he said. “Mitt was smitten.”
It was a classic Mittism, as friends and advisers call the verbal quirks of the Republican presidential candidate. In Romneyspeak, passengers do not get off airplanes, they “disembark.” People do not laugh, they “guffaw.” Criminals do not go to jail, they land in the “big house.” Insults are not hurled, “brickbats” are.
As he seeks the office of commander in chief, Mr. Romney can sometimes seem like an editor in chief, employing a language all his own. It is polite, formal and at times anachronistic, linguistically setting apart a man who frequently struggles to sell himself to the American electorate.
Romney evidently hides out a lot in his little corners of the world where modernity alludes him.
Mr. Romney, 65, has spent four decades inside the corridors of high finance and state politics, where indecorous diction and vulgarisms abound. But he has emerged as if in a rhetorical time capsule from a well-mannered era of soda fountains and AMC Ramblers, someone whose idea of swearing is to let loose with the phrase “H-E-double hockey sticks.”
“He actually said that,” recalled Thomas Finneran, the speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives when Mr. Romney was governor. “As in, go to ‘H-E-double hockey sticks.’ I would think to myself, ‘Who talks like that?’ ”
Mr. Romney, quite proudly. In fact, he seems puzzled by the fascination with something as instinctive (and immutable) as how he talks, as if somebody were asking how he breathes
You can tell he’s stuck there by the way he thinks the Soviet Union is still our biggest threat? Kruscheve any one?
Those around him are so accustomed to his verbal tics that they describe them in shorthand. “Old-timey,” said one aide. “His 1950s language,” explained another. “The Gomer Pyle routine,” said a third.
Asked about his boss’s word preferences, Eric Fehrnstrom, a veteran Romney adviser, responded knowingly: “You mean like ‘gosh, golly, darn’?”
For Democratic strategists, Mr. Romney’s throwback vocabulary feeds into their portrayal of a man ill-equipped for the mores and challenges of the modern age. David Axelrod, a top adviser for an Obama campaign that has adopted “Forward” as its slogan, once quipped that Mr. Romney “must watch ‘Mad Men,’ ” the hit television show set in Manhattan in the 1960s, “and think it’s the evening news.”
His exclamations can sound jarring to the contemporary ear — or charming, depending on whom you ask. Midway into a critique of Mr. Obama’s economic policies a few months ago in Charlotte, N.C., Mr. Romney declared: “They’ve scared the dickens out of banks,” he said. “They’ve scared the dickens out of insurance companies.”
Frankly, the idea of a President Romney and a Vice President Ryan scares the dickens out of me! Talk about revenge of the zombies!
I have to admit to being in Nursery School in 1960 so you’ll have to excuse me if most of what I remember has to do with Captain Kangaroo. I do know that when I was growing up as the 60s rolled on that I saw the Vietnam War on TV and heard nightly body count and black people in the south being hosed down with fire hoses just for trying to vote. I remember that I couldn’t even wear pants to school in the middle of a midwestern winter. I sure as hell don’t want to go back to that.
The Politics of Grave Dancing: Issa and Romney
Posted: October 20, 2012 Filed under: Foreign Affairs, Libya | Tags: Benghazi, Cheney Bush Foreign Policy Blunders, Issa, Libya 64 Comments
The more the Republicans push for some kind of October Surprise on the Benghazi attacks, the more mortified we should all be about the politics of grave dancing. More information is coming out on the damage to US intelligence in Benghazi and the Middle East by Issa’s public hearings. Issa’s document dump has exposed safe houses and Libyans working for the US. He’s actually exposed US intelligence assets and put their lives in danger. This is yet another –ala Cheney–of the ways Republicans will actually kill US interests and people in an effort to put their political power and aims above everything else.
“The American people deserve nothing less than a full explanation from this administration about these events, including why the repeated warnings about a worsening security situation appear to have been ignored by this administration. Americans also deserve a complete explanation about your administration’s decision to accelerate a normalized presence in Libya at what now appears to be at the cost of endangering American lives,” Issa and Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) wrote today in a letter to President Barack Obama.
But Issa didn’t bother to redact the names of Libyan civilians and local leaders mentioned in the cables, and just as with the WikiLeaks dump of State Department cables last year, the administration says that Issa has done damage to U.S. efforts to work with those Libyans and exposed them to physical danger from the very groups that had an interest in attacking the U.S. consulate.
“Much like WikiLeaks, when you dump a bunch of documents into the ether, there are a lot of unintended consequences,” an administration official told The Cable Friday afternoon. “This does damage to the individuals because they are named, danger to security cooperation because these are militias and groups that we work with and that is now well known, and danger to the investigation, because these people could help us down the road.”
One of the cables released by Issa names a woman human rights activist who was leading a campaign against violence and was detained in Benghazi. She expressed fear for her safety to U.S. officials and criticized the Libyan government.
“This woman is trying to raise an anti-violence campaign on her own and came to the United States for help. She isn’t publicly associated with the U.S. in any other way but she’s now named in this cable. It’s a danger to her life,” the administration official said.
Another cable names a Benghazi port manager who is working with the United States on an infrastructure project.
“When you’re in a situation where Ansar al-Sharia is a risk to Americans, an individual like this guy, who is an innocent civilian who’s trying to reopen the port and is doing so in conjunction with Americans, could be at risk now because he’s publicly affiliated with America,” the official said, referring to the group thought to have led the Benghazi attack.
Emptywheel lays it out even more clearly: ‘Darrell Issa Exposes the CIA as a Foreign Policy Debate Stunt”. Here’s a sample. (H/T to RalphB).
Darrell Issa just released a bunch of documents so as to seed the Sunday shows in time for Monday’s foreign policy debate. [Update: See Josh Rogin’s reported description of some of the sensitivities Issa exposed.]
Here’s a running explication of what he released, all in the name of “national security.”
PDF 1: In December, Jeffrey Feltman asked Patrick Kennedy to approve “a combined footprint of 35 U.S. government personnel in Benghazi.” That would include 10 people identified as State: 8 State Department and USAID, and 2 temporary duty personnel.
Which leaves 25 people unaccounted for.
As it happens, the Libyans say there were 29 people they hadn’t expected when they came to evacuate the Americans. They complained afterwards that the Americans hadn’t told them about all the spooks they’d have onsite.
Well, now, Issa just confirmed they were not State or even USAID personnel. He has confirmed the Libyans’ claims–that they were spooks.
And then there’s this:
Because of budget considerations and the reduced footprint, Diplomatic Security’s current presence consists of two Special Agents…
As far back as December 2011, budget considerations were driving the small security footprint in Benghazi.
The budget considerations put into place by the GOP cuts to State’s budget.
.
The Romney campaign may have misfired with its suggestion that statements by President Obama and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice about the Benghazi attack last month weren’t supported by intelligence, according to documents provided by a senior U.S. intelligence official.
“Talking points” prepared by the CIA on Sept. 15, the same day that Rice taped three television appearances, support her description of the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. Consulate as a reaction to Arab anger about an anti-Muslim video prepared in the United States. According to the CIA account, “The currently available information suggests that the demonstrations in Benghazi were spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and evolved into a direct assault against the U.S. Consulate and subsequently its annex. There are indications that extremists participated in the violent demonstrations.”
The CIA document went on: “This assessment may change as additional information is collected and analyzed and as currently available information continues to be evaluated.” This may sound like self-protective boilerplate, but it reflects the analysts’ genuine problem interpreting fragments of intercepted conversation, video surveillance and source reports.
The senior intelligence official said the analysts’ judgment was based in part on monitoring of some of the Benghazi attackers, which showed they had been watching the Cairo protests live on television and talking about them before they assaulted the consulate.
“We believe the timing of the attack was influenced by events in Cairo,” the senior official said, reaffirming the Cairo-Benghazi link. He said that judgment is repeated in a new report prepared this week for the House intelligence committee.
The latest information is that there is now no evidence of an Al Qaeda role in the attack on the Benghazi consulate. This is also something falsely bandied around by Republicans like Sununu who insists the Libyan attack showed the President is lying about the strength of Al-Qaeda in the region. Another shameless attempt to portray on foreign policy in the area as misguided and most likely another attempt to justify more military intervention and the Romney platform of $2 trillion increases in military spending. It should also be emphasized that the attack did not occur on the US embassy in Libya because there’s also been this Republican inference that embassy security was weak and so allowed the attack. Consulates are not embassies.
The assault on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi last month appears to have been an opportunistic attack rather than a long-planned operation, and intelligence agencies have found no evidence that it was ordered by Al Qaeda, according to U.S. officials and witnesses interviewed in Libya.
The circumstances of the Sept. 11 attack have become a matter of heated political debate, with President Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney clashing in their debate Tuesday about when Obama termed the assault an act of terrorism. But the emerging picture painted by intelligence officials and witnesses differs from the assertions of both sides.
Republicans have zeroed in on possible Al Qaeda ties to the Sept. 11 attack that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans, and have criticized the Obama administration for not saying early on that it was an act of terrorism. But after five weeks of investigation, U.S. intelligence agencies say they have found no evidence of Al Qaeda participation.
The attack was “carried out following a minimum amount of planning,” said a U.S. intelligence official, who, like others, spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a matter still under investigation. “The attackers exhibited a high degree of disorganization. Some joined the attack in progress, some did not have weapons and others just seemed interested in looting.”
A second U.S. official added, “There isn’t any intelligence that the attackers pre-planned their assault days or weeks in advance.” Most of the evidence so far suggests that “the attackers launched their assault opportunistically after they learned about the violence at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo” earlier that day, the official said.
The lack of a firm Al Qaeda link could constrain U.S. military options. The administration believes it has the right under international law to use lethal force against Al Qaeda operatives who kill Americans, but that case would be harder to make against members of a Libyan militia.
You may recall the Sununu meltdown on Soledad O’Brien’s CNN interview the other day. He should really look stupid and hyperpolitical now.
Republicans are continuing the Cheney-Bush policy of misleading people to further their own political and NeoCon agendas. It is more important than ever that the press continue to ignore their grave dancing and follow the actual process of getting to the facts. We’re basically seeing the same sort of crap that lead us into Iraq repeating. It’s nothing but basic Republican propaganda in support of NeoCon Lies. Let’s hope that more of this comes to the surface during the Monday night presidential debates on foreign policy. We don’t need any more unnecessary wars.
Friday Reads
Posted: October 19, 2012 Filed under: 2012 elections, Feminists, fetus fetishists, morning reads, Women's Healthcare, Women's Rights 99 Comments
Good Morning!
Every time I see anything having to do with Mitt Romney, it feels like we’ve time tripped back to some awful period in the past where women don’t have access to the pill unless they live in certain states and are married, where black people are no where to be seen on TV and they can’t vote without facing extreme tests and poll taxes, and where GLBT have been shoved back in the closet.
We’re getting voter suppression by the GOP that’s horrifying. I expect to see people being hosed in the streets again for trying to eat in public places. This election just has been really bringing out the worst in a lot of people and by that I basically mean white Republican people. Here’s a story from Virginia that’s shocking. A 31 year old white male of GOP persuasion was caught throwing away voter registrations for democrats.
The Rockingham County Sheriff’s office has arrested a Pennsylvania man and charged him with attempting to throw away filled out voter registration forms.
Colin Small, 31 year old male from Phoenixville, PA has been charged with 8 felonies and 5 misdemeanors in connection with the controversy. He is employed by Pinpoint, a company that was hired by the Republican Party of Virginia to help with voter registration.
UPDATE: The Republican Party of Virginia Chairman Pat Mullins released the following statement in reaction to the arrest of Small:
“We were alarmed by allegations recently made regarding an individual in Harrisonburg. The actions taken by this individual are a direct contradiction of both his training and explicit instructions given to him. The Republican Party of Virginia will not tolerate any action by any person that could threaten the integrity of our electoral process.
The individual in question was fired immediately after we learned of his alleged actions. We are grateful to the local sheriff’s office and Registrar for acting so quickly to protect our democratic process and will fully cooperate with any requests made by them. However, since there is currently an investigation underway, we will refrain from any further comments until they have concluded their inquiry. “
Not surprisingly, democratic bloggers are on fire with this news tonight. The initial scuttle came from Ben Tribbet at Not Larry Sabato, who with help discovered Small’s LinkedIn pagewhich says he is a current employee of the Republican National Committee.
Arizona has been handing out voter cards to Hispanic voters with the wrong date on it.
Arizona’s Maricopa county listed the wrong date in the Spanish version of voter registration cards, a development likely to further complicate tense relations between local authorities and Latino residents.
The county’s elections office says it mailed out nearly 2 million new voter registration cards. Only about 50 of the cards — handed out over-the-counter at its offices — had the error, it said.
Instead of November 6, the Spanish translation said the election would take place on November 8.
“The program has been updated so it reflects the correct dates in both English and Spanish,” the county said in a statement.
A local rights group said the damage has already been done.
“It’s a mistake that should not have happened,” Petra Falcon, the executive director of Promise Arizona in Action, told CNN affiliate KNXV-TV. “To know that there’s information out there that’s wrong, it’s going to take a lot of work to make sure that people know the correct date.”
Promise Arizona describes itself as “a nonprofit organization dedicated to expanding civic participation in Arizona, particularly among Latinos and youth.”
County officials and local Hispanics have long had an adversarial relationship, particularly over the subject of illegal immigration.
Those disputes have landed in court.
“I can remember the good old days, when there were all men in my department, and we didn’t have these problems!” a male manager complains to his boss. “You didn’t have the production output you’ve got now either!” the boss counters. Through this anecdote, the McGraw-Hill instructional film below sets out to teach male managers how to “cope” with female employees.
Long before anyone was slinging binders full of women, men were forced to accept female coworkers out of sheer need. Women joining the workforce during World War II seems to have spawned a cottage industry in educational material about gender and work. Don’t miss this 1944 gem, Supervising Women Workers, or this manual of management tips.
“Look Brad, you’ve got a new bearings inspector who happens to be a woman. You need someone, and there isn’t a man available. It seems to me that whether the gal ads up to trouble or not is pretty much up to you,” the boss explains at the end of the film. Brad is in for an attitude adjustment. He arches an eyebrow but says nothing.
Go look at the film and see if you don’t see a few Romney men wandering around.
The one thing you won’t find is any Romney men wandering around the military. They have their own special form of “service”. Here’s Queen Ann talking about the princes and their public service (i.e. harassing people to become mormon) on the view.
The wife of Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney on Thursday said that her husband and sons had not joined the U.S. military but had found “different ways of serving” by going onreligious missions in France, England, Australia and Chile as part of their obligation to the Mormon church.
During an interview on ABC’s The View, co-host Whoopi Goldberg asked Ann Romney how she would explain to the families of fallen soldiers why her husband and sons had not served their country.
“When I read about your husband, what I had read — and maybe you can correct this — is that the reason he didn’t serve in Vietnam was because it was against the religion,” Goldberg said.
“That’s not correct,” Ann Romney insisted. “He was serving his mission, and my five sons have also served missions. None served in the military, but I do have one son that feels that he’s giving back to his country in a significant way where he is now a doctor and he is taking care of veterans.”
“So, you know, we find different ways of serving,” she added. “And my husband and my five boys did serve missions, did not serve in the military.”
The candidate’s wife explained that Mormon missions were like military service in that “you’re going outside of yourself, you’re working and you’re helping others. And it changes you. And are we so grateful in this country for those people — men and women — that are volunteering, they’re sacrificing their life for us, and we cannot forget that or we have to acknowledge that always.”
Yup, irritating people with religious spiels is akin to fighting wars abroad. At least it is the weird world of the Romneys. Joe Walsh inhabits that world too.
Republican Rep. Joe Walsh, running against Democratic challenger Tammy Duckworth in Illinois, told reporters Thursday night that there should be no abortion exception for the “life of the mother” because “with modern technology and science, you can’t find one instance” in which a woman would actually die, according to a radio station. Walsh, of course, is flat wrong.
“There is no such exception as life of the mother, and as far as health of the mother, same thing,” Walsh continued. The comments were first reported by the Illinois radio station WGN.
“There is no such exception as life of the mother, and as far as health of the mother, same thing, with advances in science and technology,” Walsh said, according to the video above. CREDO superPAC, which is opposing Walsh, tipped HuffPost to the comments.
You should hear Dr. Daughter go off on this. She delivers babies every day and is seeing an increasing number of high risk pregnancies due to obesity and mothers than come in that are already diabetic and have blood pressure issues from obesity. Of course, most of the women are also on medicare or are unable to get medicare because of their status so their babies tend to be born compromised. But hey, Joe says no one dies any more because science won’t let them.
Yes, there’s some weird Stepford wife reality going on there in Republican land.
It’s really hard to know these guys come up with this crap, isn’t it?
I still can’t believe that Dr. Jill Stein and her running mate were subject to arrest and detention for basically showing up at the debates the other night. Amy Goodman has interviewed the two. Nothing like shutting out alternatives to the two party political duopoly.
I interviewed Stein the day after the debate, after their imprisonment (which ended, not surprisingly, not long after the debate ended). She told me: “We are on the ballot for 85 percent of voters. Americans deserve to know what their choices are. The police said they were only doing job. I said, ‘This is about everyone’s jobs, whether we can afford health care, whether students will be indentured.’ There are critical issues left out of the debate. Ninety million voters are predicted to stay home and vote with their feet that neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney represent them. That’s twice as many voters than expected for either of them.”
Even if Stein and Honkala hadn’t been hauled off a public street and handcuffed to those chairs for eight hours, Stein’s exclusion from the debate was certain. The debates are very closely controlled by the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD), which excludes third-party candidates, among other things. George Farah is the founder and executive director of Open Debates, and author of “No Debate: How the Republican and Democratic Parties Secretly Control the Presidential Debates.” Farah told me on the morning of the Hofstra debate about how the CPD gained control over the debates from the nonpartisan League of Women Voters: “We have a private corporation that was created by the Republican and Democratic parties called the Commission on Presidential Debates. It seized control of the presidential debates precisely because the League was independent, precisely because this women’s organization had the guts to stand up to the candidates that the major parties had nominated.”
Okay, so I’ve had it with all things Republican this election. What about you? And, what’s on your reading and blogging list this today?
So, who is really Scapegoating Hillary??
Posted: October 17, 2012 Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, Foreign Affairs, Libya | Tags: Benghazi attacks, Buck Stops here, Hillary Clinton, Pantomime October Surprises 82 Comments
I’ve been pretty chagrined at blog and media responses to some Daily Mail Gossip article suggesting that there was some kind of finger-pointing binge between SOS Clinton and POTUS on the Benghazi tragedy. It features the side show of a cat fight between UN ambassador Rice and Secretary Clinton just for that added dash of NeoCon porn fantasies. It also smacks of right wing tropes and sexism. Already, we discovered the WSJ sat on an interview–later to be ‘scooped’ by CNN–where Hillary clearly stated she was taking full responsibility for any lax in security and for any mistakes in conveying information made by the State Department. So much for that right wing vision of Clinton as victimized and disgruntled! Ever the team player, Clinton had already fallen on the sword when the WSJ let the tropes be flung. Last night, the President took responsibility saying that as Commander in Chief he was ultimately responsible. Does this sound like the behavior of two people trying to shift blame to each other or bristling at the other’s attempts to shrug responsibility?
We didn’t write about the Daily Mail article here because it smacked of speculation and right wing wishful thinking. Today, Salon‘s Joan Walsh writes “How Hillary Clinton Is Sending the GOP to New Heights of Psycho-Sexual Rage“. Her thesis is this that “right wingers can’t appraise our first black president and his female former rival in anything other than the most degrading gender stereotypes”. I agree. Just as the right wingers were gleefully shouting that Obama and Rice were throwing Hillary under the bus and that Hillary was not going to stand for it, Clinton had given that WSJ that interview that they sat on that would’ve basically put that entire canard to rest. So much for the complete Foxification of the WSJ. It’s no longer just the editorial page that can’t be trusted. I’m also glad to see Walsh take on Jennifer Rubin who should be swiftly fired from WAPO for perverse tweets that are essentially slut slamming.
It turns out Clinton had already told the Wall Street Journal that she took responsibility for the security problems exposed in the attack almost a week ago – but the paper declined to share that information with the world, saving it instead for a forthcoming profile. Proving that was terrible news judgment, if not a deliberate effort to withhold information that might undermine the right-wing story line that Obama and Joe Biden were scapegoating Clinton, the WSJ published the remarks last night, after CNN’s interview ran.
“I take responsibility,” Clinton told the Journal’s Monica Langley. “I’m the Secretary of State with 60,000-plus employees around the world. This is like a big family … It’s painful, absolutely painful.”
As clear as Clinton’s statements were, the right immediately used them to bash Obama . Fox’s Steve Doocy claimed Clinton was “falling on her sword for the administration,” while Laura Ingraham insisted she jumped “on the grenade the day before the debate.” CNN contributor Erick Erickson wrote on his RedState blog: “Doesn’t the buck stop with Barack Obama?”
But the award for most unhinged reaction goes to the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin , who took to Twitter to unleash a psycho-sexual tirade against Clinton, Obama and even the former President Clinton. “First Bill humiliates her and now Obama does.. Hillary no feminist, more like doormat,” Rubin wrote. She went on: “yeah once you take your Yale law degree and go to Arkansas you basically are putting your career in the hands of others.” When Obama adviser David Axelrod tweeted in reply: “Sick. Mitt mouthpiece jumps shark,” Rubin shot back: “so is Obama going to hide behind her skirt Tuesday night? Why would the president let Hillary end her career in disgrace?”
It’s been clear for a while that the Clintons and the Obamas drive the right to surreal heights of psycho-sexual anxiety. They can’t decide whether, with her Benghazi statement, Clinton is somehow emasculating Obama by taking responsibility that should be his, or being abused by him.
I would like to add that some of the worst offenders of these tropes are also supposed Hillary supporters who are featured in this Buzz Feed article today on Dead-Enders. You’ll recognize a lot names–many that I’ve been purging from my tweeter and face book stream for some time–because the hatred of Obama and nearly rabid dog hatred of anything related to Islam. It has spilled into some pretty revealing sexist slurs of Hillary and racist slurs of Obama. Thankfully, our past associations with people that I full admit to personally, severely misjudging is no where to be seen in the article.
But, back to how banging this drum on Hillary and Benghazi is really, really sexist. Jennifer Rubin is an angry hack who has no place in mainstream journalism.
Let’s unpack the assumptions here.
- If your husband cheats on you it makes you less of a feminist.
- Hillary Clinton obviously doesn’t bear responsibility for ensuring that ambassadors have sufficient security despite being secretary of state — it’s safe to assume that she didn’t mess up somehow.
- She was just covering for Obama, who actually bears responsibility.
- Covering for him makes her less of a feminist, and akin to a doormat (even though she’d have obvious selfish and ideological motives for doing so).
- Bill Clinton’s actions toward his wife and Obama’s behavior toward his subordinate are analogous.
Rubin managed to pack a lot of inane assumptions into that one tweet! In doing so, she demonstrated the very double standard that ought to call her feminist credentials into question. In every presidential administration, appointees “fall on their swords” in ways large and small. Male appointees are described as good soldiers when they do this for the president they serve.
But a female appointee? For Rubin, a woman doing the same thing is a weak doormat who forfeits the title of feminist. It’s a charge Rubin breezily makes while dredging up the fact that, years ago, Clinton got cheated on, itself a cheap shot that is irrelevant to the controversy at hand. Rubin’s been defending her tweet. She ought to accept censure for her mistake and move on.
So, again, let’s look at what was said last night at the political debate.
President Barack Obama assumed responsibility Tuesday for the deadly terror attack in Libya last month that killed four Americans just hours after Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton sought to shoulder the blame for any mistakes the administration made.
“She works for me,” the president said in New York in his second presidential debate with Republican challenger Mitt Romney. “I’m the president and I’m always responsible, and that’s why nobody’s more interested in finding out exactly what happened than I do.”
So, again, what do you believe? The latest right wing conspiracy theory featuring harridans Rice and Clinton?
The Mail piece features the delicious but extremely dubious claim that Clinton is still gunning for U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, who backed Obama over Clinton in 2008, and is thus making clear to reporters that the White House, not the State Department, was the source of Rice’s early claim that the attack was inspired by the same anti-Islam movie that was driving protests elsewhere in the region.
“State Department sources have said that Clinton has never forgotten that Rice, who served in her husband Bill’s administration, was an early supporter of Obama,” Harnden reports breathlessly. “Rice has ambitions to take over from Clinton if Obama is re-elected but the Benghazi debacle could scupper her chances.” In fact, the two women became allies on the decision to intervene in Libya, and the idea that Hillary Clinton would talk directly to Toby Hernden to settle an old score with Susan Rice is straight out of the fervid fantasies of Clinton-haters everywhere. Harnden claims that Clinton’s supposed “announcement of State Department dissent” from Rice and the rest of the Obama administration “could help protect Clinton during 2016 presidential run.” In the end, for the right wing, it all comes back to the Clintons and their ambition.
Is any one besides me getting tired of the never-ending CDS and hyped-up ODS now being turned into kind of supposed pantomime “October Surprise”? It’s like some kind of hyper-sick form of disco dancing on the graves of four American public servants. The Romney campaign is so freaking desperate they’ve got surrogates out spouting some of the worst stuff I’ve ever heard. But, remember, it’s all the fault of those grudge-holding, ambitious Clintons and the impossibly incompetent,lazy, and “foreign” Obama. Who can be so stupid not to see this stuff for what it is? It’s fricking right wing jerk-off porn for Neo Con Tools. Any supposed Clinton fan that falls for this is pretty stupid, imho.
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
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