“What’s that word for the mental disorder that allows its victims to host two utterly incompatible, contradictory ideas within the same cranium?”

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.

:)

Fun is subjective. I’m having fun :P

Hey… you still have my number? Hmm.. I’ll send an email..

“Republicanism”

I was thinking “Scentyism” a slightly rabid and severely delusional strain of Republicanism.

“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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

“…gender is no where near binary.”

*pkhuw!* Arwen, that was the sound of thousands of socon heads exploding. Congratulations!

“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.

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