I am not much of an admirer of Hillary Clinton and I certainly am an opponent of her campaign for the 2008 nomination. But that has to do with my distaste for the Democratic Leadership Council and their brand of politics. I am beginning to get pissed off at the crap people are spewing about her. Howard Kurtz has noticed too. Look at these excerpts he pulled from a Mother Jones article about her.
“Most men . . . long before they get to her politics, they gossip about her comeliness, and the judgment is always harsh. Busting Hillary back down to mere dame, and a rejected one whose sexual allures fail, seems to be a necessary preamble to any discussion of her . . .
“Hillary is an avatar of an existential dread skulking in the hearts of every couple who’ve tried to put together a life since the feminist revolution. This anxiety explains why the darkest question a liberal feminist can ask is: Why didn’t she leave the [SOB]? And it’s why the coarsest question a conservative man can ask is: Who would do the [B-word]? . . . Hillary has come to embody a dark fear in the hearts of modern men: the wife who neglects the joys of the bedroom for her career . . .
“The flip side to Hillary’s ambition evokes every career woman’s greatest fear. How fragile is marriage? It can come apart as quickly as that girl delivering the pizza can snap her thong . . .
“It’s why the kind of anger liberal women feel toward Hillary always circles back around to the issue of why she stayed in the marriage. Why didn’t she take a stand against male grossness? . . .
“To the right, she stayed not for any principle or for Chelsea but because she’s a clawing shrew who will suffer any ignominy to attain power. To the left, she had a chance to take a stand for all the women who’ve been humiliated, and she didn’t.”
Seriously, WTF?? That is just not right.
And she hasn’t yet announced she’s in the race.
Hillary has high disapproval ratings; at 42% and this is a preview of what’s ahead.
There’s deep hate out there especially in evangelical and right wingnut lands. It’s ALL the Clinton’s fault. Everything.
I detest her because she’s “moderate Democrat”. And because it is the Clintons’ fault that we ended up with Bush and with the liberal wing of the Democratic Party crying in the wilderness.
Hillary Clinton does not get my vote. I wouldn’t go as far as to protest by voting for whatever thinly-veiled fascist the GOP offers in 2008, but I will decline to vote in the presidential election if she is the Dem candidate. I’ve learned my lesson about voting for centrists. Never again.
eodell, that’s a party foul. No refusing to vote for candidates until at least 2007.
I mean, it’s Christmas time 😉
Should Hillary win the Dem nomination, it’ll amount to political suicide.
No one said everyone on the left was perfect. I agree with your assessment of my dislike of Hillary – it’s of her as a politician. I’m sure she’s a great person personally.
Sure, I’d like to talk to her about literature or something. But I am not a fan of the Clintons. If we nominate her I will consider it a failure of our whole movement. I’d probably see her opponent as unacceptable and support her candidacy, but not without deep regrets.
I am not sure she is the perfect candidate but then I am not to damn sure any of the front runners are really progressive or liberal in anyway. I get the feeling they can talk the talk to get a vote but in office would be totally different. That is why we need someone to appear on the scene and kick all their collective asses in the primaries.
How Hillary and Bill handled his stupidity is their business and no one else’s. I might have handled the same situation differently but I am not them and it is not my relationship. I like Hillary but have not chosen who I am supporting out of the top 3 contenders and am still hoping someone comes out of the woodwork simillar to the way Bill did in the 90’s and takes the country by storm. I think Hillary would actually be a damn fine President if she won. If She winds up getting the nomination, I will bust my ass to get her elected!!!
First of all, as is well known around these parts, I find the pantsuit attractive. So, I don’t know what all the fuss is about women “who neglects the joys of the bedroom for [their] career.”
If there is no joy in the bedroom, it ain’t the woman’s fault.
Wow. That’s the first time I’ve heard a man say that. Thank you!!!!! (Re if the woman’s not having a good time… that is sooooo true. We sure WANT to have a good time, trust me!)
Of course, there have been patent rumors about Bill having a special friend in Canada who’s also a powerful broad in their political circles. Maybe he’s giving the girl some tips, like Hillary. Maybe there is fire in that smoke. Who knows?
Who the f*ck really cares about how these people cavort between the sheets? Why does this marriage continue to fascinate people from the NYT to Mother Jones?
I just detest the woman for how she keeps positioning herself vis-a-vis her run for the presidency, while cutting the legs off progressive Dems’ efforts (she is an old Goldwater Girl after all), and how she and Bill just deep-sixed former friends and allies during the Clinton era without a word, when they seemed to threaten the peace of the throne.
The ballbusting shyt, I agree, has got to go.
I have a feeling that the Clintons are doing some negotiated thang that people do with marital probs.
Recently, some woman told me about her worst Thanksgiving: sitting at the family table, her SIL remarked: well, you’re taking this quite well. this woman remarks “Well, I only had to do the turkey and the mashed potatoes”
But the story was that the hubby announced his intent to divorce said woman to his SIL the previous night, before informing the wife-woman.
Today they are back together, and she got the permission to go back and pursue her degree, etc.
Ok, it’s a bit more elevated with the Clintons.
But still. Hillary of Chicago-burbs follows her Yalemate to Arkansas. After his first political flop, she decides she has to ditch her own last name to accomodate.
Speed ahead to to the half-time Hil & Bill, saying it’s more than just standing by my man, in Tammy Wynette sense. Gets pilloried.
During the rest of the campaign, she even gives out cookie recipes.
And despite all her sacrifices for him, he takes up with some silly socal young girl. And gathers his female-peppered cabinet to stand behind him when he denies it happened.
I’m sure it occurred to her “I was the better person all along!”
But she spent a lot of her life adjusting herself to fit him, and, in a public sense, ends up with power by association, cunning, & fundraising capabilities. Somehow, she doesn’t seem capable of recovering herself out of the morass.
I have some sympathy for her for having to bridge many cultural changes publicly.
But I can’t think of anything about her that would convince me that she could provide the compelling leadership that we need quite desperately now.
I have a feeling that the Clintons are doing some negotiated thang that people do with marital probs.
Somebody else upthread said this, too. I’ve been thinking the same thing for a while in light of what I’ve seen go down today in certain literary marriages.
I’m beginning to think that it is not quite Hillary that gets their guff, but that Bill probably has permission to roam this time, in turn for his support and connections and all sorts of advice and money.
These nitwits are jealous. They wish that they could do that! But not all women are the same and would put up with that shyt.
So she’s vilified for not assuaging men’s egos and comfort zones, and for allowing (and for/giving) Bill his trespasses so long as they don’t hit the front page.
I don’t buy it that they don’t have sex any more either. It’s the mind first, and then the body. I think that they’re still attuned to each other, but in different ways, especially since Har-Monica and his leaving office.
I apologize; I’ve been speculating. In fact, we don’t know shyt.
But if something like this ever happened to me, I would be readying the hot grits and lye.
Fair enough. Hitt’s article attempts to examine why public opinion of Hillary is apparently so visceral & why any talk about her is always borne ceaselessly back to her intimacies, her appearance, her sexuality, her femininity.
I just don’t think his prose is very intelligent.
woman at that, I take great offense at this piece of trash writing. I wish I had my fly zapper then he would be singing new notes!
Come on now…didn’t people learn their lesson from Ralph Nader? (I lost a friend in Florida telling him how stupid a vote for Nader was in 2000).
For Progressives to treat Hillary Clinton as some bimbo is criminal. Just “troll” rate anyone who acts like that.
When I set up a spreadsheet of the issues that mean the most to me (privacy, separation of Church and State, constitutional rights, poverty, care for Earth, peace…) Senator Clinton doesn’t rate nearly as highly as Obama, Edwards or several others. In a primary, that matrix will guide my vote. But when my fellow progressives have selected a candidate, I’ll support that candidate because the alternative is disaster!
The problem with democrats is that they are far too democratic! We respect one another far too much to tell one another when it’s appropriate to simply shut up!
Study the issues, make your contributions, work for your primary candidates, vote…and then make peace. Otherwise, you get Nader, or Leiberman, or even worse…W!
she would have been vilified by the Religious Reich for “breaking up her marriage”. Dr. Phil would’ve had a week of infidelity shows.
Look, we don’t know what kind of arrangement Bill and Hillary have. Many couples where one (or both) members seek extra-curricular sexual activity have an agreement: “Don’t ask, don’t tell, just play safe and come home.” Those couples may enjoy each other’s company intellectually and/or socially, but for some reason not sexually — yet they want to stay together for the kids or their image, or need to stay together so the spouse has health insurance coverage. So Bill’s “sin” in that case was not that he played in someone else’s backyard, but that it became a public embarrassment. In any case, it’s none of our f-ing business, and should have nothing to do with whether HRC would make a good President.
I’m not supporting her, for reasons other than what Bill did (her stand for the “war”, her dragging the Democrats to the Right are just a couple), but I’m sure she’d do a helluva better job in the Oval Office than the guy currently keeping the seat warm…
It is exactly crap like these drag-her-through-the-mud-no-matter which way she responded to Bill that has made me say many times to many people: I’d fall on my sword for Hillary. Yes, I would.
But NOT as a Presidential candidate. No.
It is that I’m sick of seeing women with power trashed. Trashed for being married and not tying on the lace apron. Trashed for staying married when spouse, who likely has the genes of a tomcat, doesn’t exactly park those genes in cold storage after the wedding. Trashed for having kids. Trashed for not having kids. Trashed for having an IQ above that of a cephalopod, or trashed for daring to show that she speaks in words longer than single syllables.
It’s being done to Hillary, as it was to Pat Schroeder and Barbara Jordan, and . . .
OK, that’s all the time I have for a rant, tonight.
Now, I don’t like HC’s flavor of Democratic-tude. Nor her triangulation, nor holding up the damp finger in the air to check the direction of the wind before uttering an opinion on most controversial issues. Those are some of the reasons why I don’t want her as a Presidential candidate.
But I am extremely off-put by any person – be they winger on the left or right, who focuses on her “female failures” as opposed to her politics.
Has Mother Jones recently been acquired by a supermarket tabloid? Jeebus – what trash! No wonder so many are turned off by politics and want nothing to do with the process.
Let`s say they were talking about your mom, sister, daughter, girlfriend. Nobody would put up with it. I personally think it`s rude, crude & has no place in civil discourse. On the other hand, she`d be crazy to think she could be the potus.
So, what did anyone expect? C’mon, tell me, what did any of you expect?
For 8 years Mrs. Clinton was painted as Lady MacBeth for cripes sake, she was vilified, pounded, bashed, berated, and had every aspect of her life smeared and questioned.
She was called a Lesbian.
Her daughter was vilified.
Her husband was so vilified that I honestly think he did the Lewinsky thing simply out of foolish self-destruction.
Now, guys like Kurtz have the gall to be aghast? What hypocrisy.
Kurtz was a braying jackass about Clinton for years, and now he claims to be “shocked, shocked I tell ya” at the outbursts from so-called “liberal” sources? What stuff!
One of the reasons for my staunch opposition to Senator Clinton running is exactly what you are seeing. The nation is so brainwashed by years on end of anti-Clinton this and that that her candidacy is ruined before she starts. so, pardon me if I am amused by the belching and farting from the left and right about Senator Clinton….you see the fruits of so many years of scurrilous labor.
My advise to the Senator is to forget the Presidency, and move to get into the Senate leadership far deeper. Republicans truly fear Senator Clinton. She’s very good in the Senate.
They can surely come up with all kinds of real reasons to dislike Hillary.
Free Trade (nafta)
the war
video games
pandering
ultimate insider
bubble woman
I do not like Hillary, obviously. But, I don’t need to go to appearance or silly reasons. She has enough solid reasons for me to not vote for her under any circumstance.
Hillary and Bill have realized that at the root of all our problems is the desire for hegemony.That has infected the body politic so thoroughly, it is not posor liberals to be blatant about their beliefs.The MSM and the rightwing media will kill them for even holding such beliefs.
As pragmatists, they are trying to find ways to inject some of liberalism’s most cherished dreams like health care, education,child development etc. without calling them by their liberal names.
I think this has been a wise strategy at least until the rightwing is totally discredited in this country.That day may be closing in.
I actually thought the Mother Jones article was rather interesting. I don’t thing it was meant to be a hit piece, but rather an article about how people perceive Senator Clinton, and how those perceptions reflect our own views and experiences rather than who Sen. Clinton really is.
I see those same perceptions reflected in the comments here, and it saddens me. The unfortunate reality is that any woman who has any measure of independence faces the same sorts of questions as Clinton, and we all have to find our own way to deal with them. She just does it in a much more public way and, I think, with a lot more grace than many of us.
If you don’t read the whole article, read the last page.
One has to wonder, especially considering the massive voter support she’s received in two elections, if Hillary doesn’t already have her own hidden vote: not just feminist columnists, but moderate and even Republican women who might exult in Hillarating until they step into the seclusion of the voting booth, where all the watercooler chitchat, pissy remarks, and catty complaints fall away to reveal a working woman getting harassed in a man’s world–and they recognize what they see.
I’m no fan of Ms. Clinton, but this is just personal projection of their own inadaquate marriage woes by the the writer who has given us a glimpse into their West-port bedroom’s fears and jeers. Their life is as two dimensional in real life as their analysis is.
Besides, Mother Jones became irrelevant decades ago. It must be someones tax write off.