What’s Next?

Sign 1: Registering woman to vote in the general election is on principle a bad thing because they might prefer Clinton. Clinton voters are the cause of division (the enemy of all Unity Warriors), more are not desirable. (Via TalkLeft)

[I]t should be pointed out that a non-profit group focusing efforts on registering unmarried women in presidential primaries has to know that their activities will almost certainly help Hillary Clinton, as that is probably her strongest demographic.

Sign 2: Matt Drudge is an entirely fair and reliable source of infomation on Democratic Candidates as this reaction to Republicans assuming their opponent in the fall will be Obama shows.

Although it should be noted that the Unity Warriors are taking inspiration from the top on this one. That comment also leads us neatly into…

Sign 3: It’s entirely reasonable to allow Republicans to dictate the Democratic Agenda….unless they’re voting for Clinton, in which case it means they’re trying to give Democrats the weaker and/or evil candidate. This simple rule can easily be demonstrated by this reaction to the news that 62% of former Republican voters went for Obama.

Here we see that 62% of Republicans vote for Obama because they think he’s an amazing unifier who will change the world and give us all rainbows and ponies, whilst the other 42% vote for Clinton because she’s the second coming of Hitler and they approve of such things.

These Unity Warriors should be assumed to be highly impervious to rational thought, if one is encountered do not attempt to engage in debate. If cornered remember that, like religious symbols repel vampires, anything that lacks purely symbolic meaning (such as issues of substance) will ward them off.

As mentioned before McCain believes in the much debunked connection between autism and vaccines,  now it turns out both Obama and Clinton do as well. I can just feel the hope filling me.

Are you having trouble working out exactly what all those statistics on who voted for who actually mean? Here’s a handy guide for working out what Republican voters in open Democratic primaries mean:

No. 1: If Republicans vote for Obama, it’s a sign he’ll bring unity to the fragile and divided country.

No.2: If Republicans vote for Clinton, it’s confirmation that she’s the reincarnation of Hitler.

There, isn’t that simple?

Here’s a comment from Unity on Liberal Conspiracy:

2. You evidence for a misogynistic ‘campaign’ against Clinton is what? A bit of blog chatter from the kind of people who consider NASCAR to be their national sport?

Look, the American right loathes Clinton because she’s a Clinton and not because she’s a woman - gender doesn’t really come into it and I’d be willing to bet that if Bill were running for elected office then some bright spark would still have come up the ‘CUNT’ acronym…

Look, I love Unity as much as anyone, but anyone who says the media and other groups aren’t guilty of frequently throwing misogyny against the Clinton campaign really hasn’t been paying attention. Evidence? I don’t even have to dig that hard, Melissa McEwan has a nice sum up:

In the same world in which that woman turning sexism on its head is framed as Odd News, and in which that woman is called a bitch to the amusement of the other party’s nominee, and is called a she-devil and depicted with horns, and is heckled by jerks demanding she iron their shirts, and is reduced to tea parties and her response to that demeaned as “really be[ing] on edge,” and in which she is cast as a feminazi monster, and has her ability to withstand the rigors of the presidency questioned with an unflattering image, and has a nutcracker designed in her image, and finds her moment of candidly expressed emotion turned into a national story using dog-whistles once removed from “hysterical,” and is routinely accused of playing a victim and of playing the gender card, often erroneously, and is said to need a copy of The Rules, and is accused of having a career only because her husband cheated on her, and is subjected to the swill of online hate groups with names like “Hillary Clinton: Stop Running for President and Make Me a Sandwich” and “Hillary Clinton Shouldn’t Run for President, She Should Just Run the Dishes,” and is regularly featured in sexist political cartoons, and is challenged by a 527 calling itself C.U.N.T., and is called the Crybaby-in-Chief if she shows emotion, and can’t bloody win no matter what she does, but only in the eyes of misogynist wankers because SHE’S. STILL. HERE.

And so I’m actually contributing something myself here, an Obama quote: “I understand that Senator Clinton, periodically when she’s feeling down, launches attacks as a way of trying to boost her appeal.” Yes sir, no hidden meaning to pick out there. Perhaps this sheds some light on why people find it easy to see the sexism in a picture of Clinton with ‘CUNT’ spelled out behind her.

Tina Fay is an award winning American writer and comedian who was head writer at SNL before going on to write, star in, and produce 30 Rock, a show about the behind the scenes of a sketch comedy show. (For UK readers, apparently it’s like Studio 60, but with the show-within-a-show actually being funny. Also: not cancelled). The point I’m trying to make here is this really is quite a talented and funny lady.

In a Reader’s Digest article she let slip some comments that some found objectionable. Now, I LOVE the Daily Show, but I think her point that some jokes get laughs because people approve of them being made rather them than actually being funny is true. I don’t think there’s wrong with that, if the Daily Show didn’t ration out the funny the internet would be full of nothing other than re-postings of Daily Show sketches and we’d never get anything done. I do object to her view of male comedy:

RD: What’s the difference between male and female comics?
Fey: Every comic way of writing is unique, but I think male comedy is more boisterous. Usually it involves robots and sharks and bears. Female comedy is more likely to be about the minutiae of human behavior and relationships.

Because I don’t think that’s true in the slightest, for one thing it ignores the complex minutiae of behaviour you can get through various combinations of robots, sharks and bears. The proper response to this from a male comic should be “F*** you and the robot bear you rode in on!” - instead because the woman in question happens to be a bit of a cutie, we’re informed that Tina Fay’s existence is no longer able to be validated by Daniel O’Brien’s penis (I’m sure she’s weeping). I do appreciate the irony that when male writers are accused of frat boy humour, O’Brien hits back with a hard-hitting piece about how he would no longer sleep with her. I don’t think that was intentional either, I think it was genuinely the funniest thing he thought was possible to say about an attractive woman. This, friend, is why she writes for SNL and you write for Cracked.

Another choice quote:

I’d reference some hilarious female comedian to disprove your point right now, but I can’t fucking think of any.

Hahaha, comedy is a profession that women find hard to break into? Oooh, You crack me up!

In interests of passing on the hat-tip, I got this story through The Largest Minority who also added this comment regarding Fay’s fuckability in relation to her support for Hillary Clinton:

Here’s a tip ladies (that’s not what I meant), if you ever want to get a guy interested, please refrain from mentioning Hillary Clinton… ever. For guys, talking about Hillary with a woman we fancy is like sitting next to grandma at the strip club. Her name is an anti-Viagra neutron bomb destroying the appeal of everything within a hundred block radius.

Remember folks: There is no sexism directed towards the Hillary Campaign or its supporters whatsoever.

Mark Halperin at TIME has come up with 10 reasons why Clinton should quit. Whilst I personally think that she’s dead at this point, this list contains some pretty poor items.

1. She can’t win the nomination without overturning the will of the elected delegates, which will alienate many Democrats.

Look, she’s losing by enough that it’s serious, but let’s not forget the reason the super-delegates are involved at all is because she has almost half the party with her. At this point either candidate winning will alienate a lot of Democrats. As for overturning the will of the elected delegates, the only point this matters is if she’s won the popular vote, and given the bizarrely uneven way the popular vote turns into delegate counts, I think the popular vote is the the better metric. I don’t think it’s likely she’ll win the popular vote at this point,but if it does there’s a serious argument to be made for gong with it over delegates. If we look at it the other way round, I don’t think the line ‘Obama overturns popular vote to gain nomination’ goes down that well either.

7. The Rev. Wright story notwithstanding, the media still wants Obama to be the nominee — and that has an impact every day.

OK, so all that stuff I was saying about the delegates and the popular vote? Forget it, what really matters is who the media want! Think quickly: Is bowing out because the media like the other guy better a good or a bad reason?

When Obama wins the nomination, what on earth makes people think the media will stay with him? There’s some wonderfully naive Obama supporters who come out with stuff like “Yeah, except McCain isn’t as sleazy as the Clintons, and WOULDN’T dredge up such slime” seemingly without irony, there are people out there who really think that Hillary Clinton has been far meaner to Obama than McCain and the right-wing establishment is going to be! They really think that after weeks spent on a remark from Obama’s former pastor who he had previously disowned and zero time spent on McCain welcoming Falwell and Robinson back into the fold that the media will stand by Obama. It boggles belief.

Clinton is beating McCain in polls after months (heck years) of abuse from the press, Obama is beating him after an amazingly friendly press run. The press not liking someone is not an argument. If Obama is the right candidate, he’s the right candidate, what the media think should be of no-consequence. If people start picking candidates based on who the media prefer then that’s a fashion show, not a democracy.

10. She can’t publicly say more than 2% of all the things she would like to say about race, electability, beating McCain and experience.

Subtext: Hillary is a filthy racist who just pretends not to be to get elected.

12. This is a change election, and Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton can never truly be change.

It can be if the voters decide that’s the kind of change they want, Clinton’s healthcare plan would bring more change to more people than Obama’s. Clinton is a natural establishment candidate but let’s not pretend that she anything like Bush or that she’s running for Bill’s third term. Things have changed.

Barring some unlikely huge win in the future or reruns in Florida and Michigan, I don’t see Clinton winning. But for the moment Obama hasn’t won a majority of his party yet, and these are lousy reasons to stop.

ABC News: Hillary Was in White House on ‘Stained Blue Dress’ Day

No, this isn’t The Onion, this is a real news organization trying to pass this off as a real story. What’s worse is it’s immediately qualified after the title that she only ‘may’ have been in the White House that day, but ‘Hillary may have been in White House on ‘Stained Blue Dress’ Day’? That’s a stupid story, who would run that?

Truth Dig - Super Tuesday all over again 

The fear now is that she could be damaging the party’s nominee by using the same attacks on Barack Obama that John McCain certainly will. Experience? More time in the Senate? Tough? We’ll hear all this again if Obama is the nominee, just in a different vocal range.  That is why Hillary Clinton is under immense pressure to hang up her campaign pumps and call it one for the history books.

Almost right, but this is bad for Clinton not for Obama. It does Obama absolutely no harm to hear the same attacks early on and would be worse if we didn’t see how he reacted to them until after he’s the nominee. If Obama wins the nomination he has a history of  rebutting the idea that more experience is always better, his dealing with Clinton now shows he will be able to combat the play when McCain makes it. However if Clinton wins she has a long history of claiming the importance of experience, which McCain arguably has far more of. The worry should be that it’ll be a narrative that’s hard to shake off with all this focus her campaign has given to it.

44 Percent Vote Against Clinton - This was seriously the headline in the Washington Post about the Michigan Primary. An unbelievably blatant attempt to spin a win into a failure. Let’s highlight the words they want you to read:

About 44 percent of Michigan Democrats voted against Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) yesterday in the party’s primary, with the vast majority of that group marking “uncommitted” on ballots that did not include any other major candidates.

So a vast majority of the minority who didn’t vote for Clinton voted uncommitted? A minority of the democratic voters prefered Anyone-But-Clinton to Clinton, now considering her two main competitors weren’t on the ballot that really is impressive (although you’d suspect that that would also have reduced Edwards and Obama voter turnout).

She won guys, you can say it’s meaningless because she was the only mainstream candidate standing but it only makes you look stupid to try to spin a lose out of it.