“Seeing Albright, the first female secretary of state, give cover to President Clinton was a low point in women’s rights. As was the New York Times op-ed by Steinem, arguing that Lewinsky’s will was not violated, so no feminist principles were violated. What about Clinton humiliating his wife and daughter and female cabinet members? What about a president taking advantage of a gargantuan power imbalance with a 22-year-old intern? What about imperiling his party with reckless behavior that put their feminist agenda at risk?
It rang hollow after the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings. When it was politically beneficial, the feminists went after Thomas for bad behavior and painted Hill as a victim. And later, when it was politically beneficial, they defended Bill’s bad behavior and stayed mute as Clinton allies mauled his dalliances as trailer trash and stalkers.
The same feminists who were outraged at the portrayal of Hill by David Brock — then a Clinton foe but now bizarrely head of one of her “super PACs” — as “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty,” hypocritically went along when Hillary and other defenders of Bill used that same aspersion against Lewinsky.
Hillary knew that she could count on the complicity of feminist leaders and Democratic women in Congress who liked Bill’s progressive policies on women. And that’s always the ugly Faustian bargain with the Clintons, not only on the sex cover-ups but the money grabs: You can have our bright public service side as long as you accept our dark sketchy side.
Young women today, though, are playing by a different set of rules. And they don’t like the Clintons setting themselves above the rules.”
NYT: When Hillary Clinton Killed Feminism
First, let me say I’m stunned I read this call-out of the Clinton’s hypocrisy in the NYT of all places from none other than Maureen Dowd. This is tectonic and tells us the ground has just shifted on the left. That says a few things:
- The NYT in general and Maureen Dowd in particular no longer fear the Clinton’s power nor feel they will be punished for disloyalty by a Hillary Clinton administration. Because…
- The NYT in general and Maureen Dowd in particular no longer see a Hillary Clinton administration as a probability. They know the Hillary campaign is in flames and will only get worse.
- Maureen is aware that something fundamental has changed regarding the siren song of feminism. Once upon a time, Hillary could press the button that lit the overhead sign saying, “I deserve your vote because I’m a woman and it’s time we had a woman president!” and get applause and support across the board. It’s not working anymore. Hillary keeps pressing the button, women see the sign, but it’s having no effect. Young women in particular are flocking to, of all people, Bernie Sanders, who offers free college and more free stuff where that came from. Which brings me to the next stunning thing…
- Maureen writes, “Bernie has a clear, concise “we” message, even if it’s pie-in-the-sky.” She knows this is a fairy tale. She’s worked and paid bills and seen the NYT teeter on the edge of bankruptcy and knows things need to paid for, and a plan for taxing ‘speculators’ is economically ignorant at best. If you’re realistically going to discuss providing free college tuition, you also need to discuss what you’re going to give up to get that, especially when you’re $19 trillion in debt already.
That young women are rejecting a pavlovian response to ‘I have a vagina, vote for me!’ is a positive development. That they aren’t asking rational economic questions about Bernie’s promises and appear to know nothing of the long failed history of socialism or even think to ask questions as basic as how much does this cost and how does it get paid for is not a positive reflection on our unionized, increasingly radicalized, government bureaucrat staffed educational system*. But it does show self serving design on their part, coincidentally enough.
(*) I haven’t got the slightest doubt that there are people in that system who genuinely want to provide a good education. However, those desires are overwhelmed by the social-political-bureaucratic tidal wave that imposes the conditions and the curriculum.
So Maureen knows things are looking grim for the Democrats. The vile Clinton syndicate is collapsing as we watch and she knows that while children and the government dependent might vote for Bernie, it’s going to be a hard sell to everyone else. Reading this op-ed in the NYT is like reading a critique of Brezhnev in Pravda. When one of the primary party organs has turned on you, change is afoot.
Darn – who knew that I was ahead of the game, eight years ago when my daughter and I were both completely turned off by the assumption that because we were women, OF COURSE we would be voting for Hillary. I was mildly annoyed by this assumption back then – the millennials of my daughters age and younger must be incandescent with fury now, if it is something which the Dowd can perceive.
MoDo has always hated Bill & Hillary. I am not surprised to see that she still hates them.
As for Brock on Anita Hill, I have actually meet her. In fact I had dinner with her. (It was a table of 8 people.) She may have been the stiffest, most humorless, and uncommunicative person I have ever meet. If she was nutty, it was major depression. As for slutty, she had zero sex appeal.
Mom: MoDo is 64. She is a boomer, I doubt that she communicates with any millennials.
She let the Clintons off lightly by not referring to Slick Willie’s time as Governor, when he was a serial sexual molester, including (according to the victim) one case of rape.
P.S. I still assume that she’ll somehow contrive to buy the election. And that Ms Dowd will be fired.
She might yet, Dearie – but looking at it all, it will have to be in job-lots. They’ll likely have to pack in the stuffed ballot boxes in 18-wheeler convoys to strategic polling places to make it so.
The woman just has so much baggage. And makes such a personally unappealing candidate when she deigns to go out among her people.
My Tiny Publishing Bidness did a book by a local educator, who once met Bill Clinton when Bill was hustling for votes for his campaign for governor of Arkansas – and this author was just blown over by how intensely charismatic he was in his prime. Hillary is a walking, waddling anti-charismatic field. All her events are tightly pre-arranged, pre-organized, nothing spontaneous, nothing really human about them, to judge by what I have read here and there. There is an aura about some of those so-called spontaneous meetings with the common folk (who usually turn out to be local Dem Party activists) that absolutely smacks of the lordly demand to ‘Have them washed and perfumed and delivered to my tent!’
It’s not required of our pols that they be instantly likable, personable, charismatic people when going out and about on the campaign trail, or even in performing the duties that we have hired them for. What is required, I believe, is that they at least make a convincing pretense of it. Hillary can’t even summon up that.
Another blogger (can’t remember who at this point) remarked months ago, after the Scooby-van stealth road trip, that she seems to be just impatiently marking time and going through the minimum required effort, while she waits for the inevitable coronation.
Yes, I despise Hillary. And I am a mere two years younger than MoDo.
For Afghan women feminism makes sense. For American women, who have it better than almost anyone else ever, yet who still get preferential treatment from govt, from private institutions, and from older men who don’t realize that the game has changed, feminism is a joke. Call yourself a feminist now, you might as well label yourself an aging leftist boomer or some other kind of misfit.
Hillary rode the feminist wave despite having herself succeeded in life mostly on her husband’s talents, and notably by helping to cover up his predatory behavior against other women. Now the wave is dissipating and the women who surfed it are old and tired. I think it gives Hillary too much credit to suggest that she killed the wave.
Is there anything stopping O from resigning so that President Biden can try to claim the Democratic nomination? The job obviously bores O, so why doesn’t he just clear off to Hawaii?
He would no longer be the center of attention. The job doesn’t interest him, it’s the power, privilege and adoring acolytes.
Megalomania, lust for power, desire to destroy the country and its people, probable religious warfare against the Judeo-Christian tradition, the wealth involved, and the prospect and risk of actually being held accountable once he is out of office.
Mind you, I am a cynic about the 22nd Amendment being followed and also the normal procedures in the first week of November this year. I am finding that I have more and more company.
My oldest daughter (in the mid 90’s) worked for Clinton’s election and went to NOW meetings. It soon became clear to her (she has remained on the left, I guess, though it is a bit hard to tell) and me that the one criteria for the feminist vote and appreciation was abortion. You don’t have to be an avid pro-lifer to consider that to be a pretty lousy sole marker of women’s rights – and to be suspicious of those who consider one of the great markers of gender differences to be negative in terms of women (and life). this obsession implies a lack of respect for one of our essential abilities. That bothered me – and bothers me.
“…the one criteria for the feminist vote and appreciation was abortion.”
Indeed. How terribly sick that is, too. Children are a gift, a promise, a hope … and the doctrinaire upper-case Feminists would throw all of that away. In one of her apparently brief moments of insight, Naomi Wolfe wrote about this in her book, “Fire With Fire” – that abortion was a horrifically misguided conflict for those doctrinaire Feminists to pick as their defining sticking point. In one fell swoop, they alienated women who were all for equal political and economic rights, but drew the line at pre-partum infanticide.
She also, in that book, made a case for women to be mature and realistic about their particular battles, not to give way to hatred of men, and above all to not draw such narrow boundaries around what constituted feminism as to deprive them of allies.
Which the doctrinaire feminists went ahead and did, full steam ahead. I think that they got to Naomi and pretty well steamrollered her over for bad-think, for she has been a good comrade ever since. Which was a pity, as I thought that Fire with Fire proposed a pretty sensible thesis; women have power, how about using it as mature and responsible grownups, ‘kay?