What Would Whitman Say?
What’s that word for the mental disorder that allows its victims to host two utterly incompatible, contradictory ideas within the same cranium?
Idea One: Hillary Clinton is a mean, wilful, domineering, man-eating masculine bitch drunk with power and ambition.
Idea Two: Hillary Clinton is actually just a front for her husband, a meek and passive puppet collaborating in a plot to give him a de-facto third term in the White House.
Oh, yeah. Now I remember the name of that syndrome.
“Republicanism”.
A critical thinker. I do this all the time as an exercise when determining the plausibility of different premises.
However, asserting a belief in both incompatible, contradictory ideas is a sign of insane thinking – that both some Republicans, some Democrats, some Conservatives and some Progressives are guilty of.
Oh, JEEZ. You’re no fun.
Fun is subjective. I’m having fun
Hey… you still have my number? Hmm.. I’ll send an email..
Email sent.. but sometimes hotmail seems to filter email from my network into their “Junk” box because we refuse to apply Non-RFC protocols but that Microsoft wants everyone else to comply with because they decided to create it.
“Republicanism”
I was thinking “Scentyism” a slightly rabid and severely delusional strain of Republicanism.
I was thinking the same thing, but I’m striving for a kinder, gentler me.
“Idea One: Hillary Clinton is a mean, wilful, domineering, man-eating masculine bitch drunk with power and ambition.
Idea Two: Hillary Clinton is actually just a front for her husband, a meek and passive puppet collaborating in a plot to give him a de-facto third term in the White House.”
I call these “worst nightmares” and leave it at that, myself. Her crying probably set women in politics back about 50 years IMHO.
Oh, hey. That’s another one.
Idea One: Hillary Clinton is a cold, unfeeling, inhuman, robotic bitch.
Idea Two: Hillary Clinton’s brief vocal quaver (”crying”? Oh, please…I get tearier than that watching Emma Thompson in “Love, Actually”) confirms that she’s a weak, emotional wimp.
As for “setting women back in politics”…only if you actually buy into the bullshit.
As for “worst nightmares”…listen. As a friend (and I mean that) let me respectfully suggest you cut back on the absurd hyperbole. That’s just so…Scentinel. There is NO candidate on either side who could do more damage to the USA than George W. Bush has already done…and the US is going to come out of it ok. Their economy is in tatters and their international reputation is a train wreck, but they’ll survive: and Hillary, Romney, Obama or even Nader would all be better than Bush has been.
“As for “setting women back in politics”…only if you actually buy into the bullshit.”
Well, I guess I do (buy into it). Do you recall Maggie Thatcher crying at any time? (I wasn’t paying much attention to politics at the time, so that really is a question.) As a woman in the workforce, sorry, Balb, crying doesn’t work and just makes you look like a flake. And that goes for getting teary-eyed and choked up, even though for some women that is just as much a physical response to anger as it is stress, sadness, whatever (me being one of them, drives me nuts).
Tears are for funerals, tragedies, brutal attacks like 9/11. They don’t belong in Whitehall, the White House or 24 Sussex IMHO, nor any boardrooms and certainly not on the campaign trail (unless dealing with funerals, tragedies, etc).
Although I’ll concede that my comment(s) was(are) a tad hyperbolic, I have a visceral dislike for the woman and her style, and have since she was first in the White House. And I have a real problem with her counting her time as First Lady of either Arkansas or the US as “experience” – at least the kind that counts.
And while George W’s legacy will not be much to write home about and I concede that he’s made quite the mess, let’s not forget who was too busy battling scandals at home to pay much attention to what was going on outside (or for that matter, inside) US borders prior to GW’s arrival.
NO candidate that could do worse?
I’ll agree on the Democrats side, but in the Republican camp? There’s Huckabee hoping to amend the Constitution to make it more compatible with the bible, and there’s Guiliani, who had this to say about freedom:
“Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.”
Fortunately neither of them looks like they’ll get the nomination, but I have little doubt that they could carry on the cumulative damage started by W. In fact, given that the damage is generally cumulative, any candidate that doesn’t do repairs will leave the US in worse shape than W has even if they’re a far better president otherwise.
Maggie Thatcher may not have cried, but Kennedy did. And Nixon. And even Reagan. Not out and out sobbed, but moments of verklempt (which is the closest we can say about Senator Clinton), are not unheard of in politics.
And the idea that one instance of one woman’s act puts women all together back 50 years is exactly the kind of sexism I’m hoping to overcome. Anyone who is selling that – that she’s somehow sold me out for having Emotions While Female – is doing all women a disservice. She’s allowed to be a bitchy weeping manipulator (sic) without it saying dick all about you or me, Candace, and any other package is sexist.
You and I each stand by the content of our characters and our brains, and must be taken as individuals: if our ability to lead was weighed against one woman crying once, we haven’t come ANYWHERE in 50 years. Because think of all the other leaders, big and small: Aung Sun Suu Kyu, Bhutto, Thatcher, Ghandi, Catherine the Great, that woman from your PAC meeting, that City Councillor – all of their individualities, their strengths and weakness, their personalities are washed away by some conflation between people because we all Rock The Double X.
Women are people.
(( Rock the double X, excepting those who are intersexed in some way, of course. Since gender is no where near binary. ))
Candace, the point of my post, stated without irony, is simply this: American politics, and primarily Republican politics, have become a matter of conditioning voters to react with visceral horror and without analysis to opposition candidates. And they’ve been so effective at it that the conditioned voters can hold completely contradictory attitudes without even noticing it. What passes for a “left” in the US does it too, but either less effectively or to a lesser degree.
Shortly after the Clinton-Dole election, Harper’s forum ran a fascinating discussion on “Selling the Next President”, in which cocky Democratic and somewhat cooler Republican senior spin doctors had a remarkably frank discussion about their framing strategies. One of the Republicans (the name didn’t mean anything to me at the time, and I’ve been wondering if it was Rove) said they had realized that policy and platform didn’t matter at all: next time, they were simply going to find every chink in the Democrat’s armour they could, and “invent them if we can’t find them”, and hammer home a simple message – this person is unfit. The Democratic reps were amused and condescending. Bad choice.
This, of course, is precisely the advice Mr. Harper received from Republican advisors vis-a-vis the Liberals and the sponsorship scandal, as you will recall.
Hillary would not be my first choice for Democratic leader. It has nothing to do with an exhausted human getting a ten second quaver in her voice after a year of almost unimaginable villification and attacks; there are several elements of her platform (when you can find it) that I don’t like. But the notion that showing emotion unfits someone for the Presidency is incomprehensible to me.
And for equating George Bush’s destruction of the US economy (devastatingly described in great detail in the December Vanity Fair), his alienation of American’s former allies, and the almost inconceivable botch he’s made of his foreign policy with Bill Clinton’s “scandals” – that illustrates just how correct that Republican spin doctor really was.
Whooee! Fer cryin’ out loud!
25 years ago, or so, my dear departed Dad was in his fifties. I noticed he’d become a lot more emotional and he’d choke up about simple things. I had a bit of trouble relaying to the strong father figure on the verge of tears.
Now, I’m pushin’ 60 and I find myself chokin’ up a lot. I think it may be part of a natural process.
The baby boomers are becomin’ grampaws an’ grammaws. We still constitute a powerful demographic and we’re maybe more willing to accept a show of genuine emotion, now that many of us have found our voices inexplicably cracking over important (and sometimes trivial) matters.
Here’s a little paraphrase of a Kenny Rogers song:
It don’t mean you’re weak,
If a tear runs down your cheek.
Sometimes you gotta cry
To be hu-man.
Personally, I’ve thought of Hillary as cold, ambitious and calcualting. Her show of emotion made her more human. I don’t think it set women back, at all. She didn’t break down into sobs of “hysteria.” She showed some humanity and recovered nicely.
She ain’t my choice but that’s got nothing to do with her gender or her emotionalism.
JB
Depressingly, most of the headlines I’m reading from South Carolina this morning are some version of the notion that “RACE TRUMPS GENDER!”
Gosh. Ovaries or melanin – the choice is yours. God forbid “policies” should have anything to do with your selection.
I’ve been doing a lot of reading on blogs written by American women and people of colour, and I think it’s fair to say that for some, race or gender are platform issues of a type, because they always are, only usually it’s about male+white. And when media coverage tends to go with “Her voice quavered OMG SHE’S A GURL”, or “He’s not black enough”, I tend to agree.
That said, and it’s rarely a 1 to 1 correlation, and I read lots of female Dems in the Edwards camp. One recently wrote that she’s backing Edwards but also hoping for Hillary – that when it comes down to it, she wants the three of them to take the presidency together.
“…gender is no where near binary.”
*pkhuw!* Arwen, that was the sound of thousands of socon heads exploding. Congratulations!
OK, I wasn’t very clear about the crying, so will try again quoting JimBobby:
“Personally, I’ve thought of Hillary as cold, ambitious and calcualting. Her show of emotion made her more human.”
The point is, those tears (IMHO) WERE manipulative and calculating.
Arwen, maybe she didn’t set women in politics back 50 years, but I gotta tell ya, looking at her behavior, and the behavior of the goof crying “wolf” on pornography in the House of Commons – if that’s the sort of behavior required to run and win in politics, I’m out and so are most of my thinking female (and for that matter, male) friends.
“The point is, those tears (IMHO) WERE manipulative and calculating.”
Not to flog a dead horse, but Candace, you’re simply applying your preconception to what you saw. You believed Clinton was “manipulative and calculating” – therefore her relatively minor display of human emotion MUST have been “manipulative and calculating.”
I don’t particularly care for the candidate or her policies. But I saw nothing in there that would change my mind, either pro or con.
Politicians do give politicians a bad name, on that I will agree, Candace!
Interestingly, I neither see Clinton’s vocal wavering as manipulative, nor her persona as particularly cold. Very American Politician, sure. I wouldn’t be a supporter, if I were an American Dem, but I’m not seeing her as all that different from the pack of ‘em.
Maggie never cry? Here’s a teary photo of old ‘iron knickers’
http://www.allposters.com/-sp/Tears-in-the-Back-Seat-Posters_i2479531_.htm