Hillary Clinton

Trying To Defend Some But Not All Tasteless Remarks

Posted by figleaf | Tags:

Mon, 2008-05-26 09:38

Photo by Flickr user g-hat. Used under a Creative Commons license.

“I don’t know if she really wants Obama dead, but to say that she was “calling for his assassination” is a little absurd.” — Anonymous commenter on Liz Trotta’s Wikipedia:talk page

Via multiple sources but this one’s via Firedoglake

Liz Trotta: “and now we have what … uh…some are reading as a suggestion that somebody knock off Osama …uh..um..Obama [after being prompted by the FNC anchor]....well both if we could [laughing]”

Other Fox News talking head: Talk about how you really feel?

Read the quote in context here.

It seems to me that everyone who’s willing to give Hillary Clinton the benefit of the doubt on her remarks about Robert Kennedy’s assassination ought to be willing to give Liz Trotta the benefit of the doubt as well.

Sure, with Ronald Reagan’s Roger Ailes running it FOX News has been a purely Republican organization. It’s less well known, however, that FOX owner Rupurt Murdoch backs Clinton, at least to the extent of having held a fundraiser for her. Also her husband Bill included Murdoch in at least two of his Clinton Global Initiative conferences.

So my point is that Liz Trotta, a Murcoch employee, yes, but also a Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism alum from back in the early 1960’s, the first woman war reporter on television**, a three-time Emmy and two-time Overseas Press Club award winner who’s biography, Fighting for Air: In the Trenches With Television News includes accounts of her front-line reporting from Viet Nam to Terhan as well as the incredible sex discrimination she faced in the newsrooms at home, probably intended “somebody knock off… Obama” to mean only “electorally remove an obstacle to a FOX-favored candidate” as “assassinate” when making yet another routinely tasteless joke reflecting her, her colleagues, and her employer’s strong preferences for the two remaining candidates other than Barack Obama.

I mean, if you don’t give Senator Clinton the benefit of the doubt then it’s fine not to extend it to Trotta either. On the other hand if you’re going to give Clinton the benefit of the doubt then you ought to be willing to let Trotta’s remarks slide as well. (Full disclosure: Like the original Wikipedia commenter I’m sure neither Clinton nor Trotta hopes Obama will be assassinated, but at this point I don’t have much respect left for them either.)

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Update Here’s another charming little brick in the wall: It’s a Craig’s List item and so I don’t know how long it’ll remain available, but just so you know, there’s an anonymous post titled “Liz Trotta of Fox deserves cancer” that opines that she’s “nothing more than a [all-caps anatomical Anglo-Saxon noun]” and “[Anglo-Saxon verb] her if you can stand the stench.” Sentiments she’s no doubt had to endure since she had the temerity to enroll in Columbia roughly the same year Betty Friedan was finishing The Feminine Mystique. But in fact Trotta deserves neither cancer or the gendered aspersions. Sure, like the rest of her colleagues she’s a contemptable, tasteless, nominally conservative partisan hack who’s serially in need of the benefit of the doubt, but gender has nothing to do with that.

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Update:

On the other hand, via Shakespeare’s Sister, Kevin of A Slant Truth points out that both Liz Trotta and Hillary Clinton (who would also have been 16 in 1963 and in college in 1968) ought to remember the murders of John Kennedy, Malcom X, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, and crippling of George Wallace pretty bloody well — well enough to remember darn well how that seemingly endless stream of mid-day announcements affected America (as it affected my elementary school teachers… as it affected even little 3rd-graders like me, and later, again, even 5th- or 6th-graders like me.) So if they do remember then it’s even more tasteless to mention it, if they don’t remember they must have been really busy with something else!

Yet another update: Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo says

Yesterday, we flagged the comments of Liz Trotta, a Fox News contributor, joking about wanting to off both Osama bin Laden and Barack Obama. A laugh a minute, you might say. Today she gave what I guess is called an ‘apology.’ Says Trotta, it was a “lame attempt at humor.”

Another “sorry you were offended apologies, and not quite owning her shit, but a start.

[** Link via Juan Cole. —fl]

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Pronouncing Gender and Patriotism: Tearing Up vs. Tearing Down

Posted by figleaf | Tags:

Sat, 2008-02-02 14:20

Photo by Flickr user lissalou66. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Even though it’s old news now I’ve been meaning to blog about this for more than a month. A class assignment on gender, status, and power as it relates to presidential candidates is as good an excuse as any.

The funny thing about that “Hillary Clinton cried“ thing last month is even right after it happened you sort of had to dig to learn what she was saying when she did.

Photo by Flickr user lissalou66.
Used under a Creative Commons license.“I just don’t want to see us fall backward as a nation. I mean, this is very personal for me. Not just political. I see what’s happening. We have to reverse it.”

I don’t want to sound all goopy, or old, but when I was growing up we didn’t call that “gender,” or “weakness,” we called it patriotism.

It’s what the old guys in their old uniforms, sometimes with an empty sleeve pinned up, did in the middle of their speeches on Veteran’s Day, on Memorial Day, and on the 4th of July, when the enormity of what they’d done, or the enormity of what needed to be done welled hot inside them, and they’d have to stop for a moment and look up blinking, and you’d look around at the grownups around you and see the eyes of other old men, World War I vets my grandfathers’ ages, and younger men, World War II vets my father and uncles’ and neighbors’ ages looking not all that different.

And if they mentioned it at all, when children my age would ask “why’s that man crying” we were never told, “They’re not being ready for the Presidency.” Instead we were told that was love of country.

Photo by Flickr user lissalou66.
Used under a Creative Commons license. So anyway while I don’t intend to vote for Senator Clinton in this month’s caucus, to the extent anyone, man or woman, says “Hillary crying” makes her somehow unfit is actually saying far less about her than they are about their own connection to their country.

Me? I guess if it’s good enough for those who cared enough to fight and win World Wars I and II then I guess it’s good enough for any Presidential candidate you care to name.

Not that there’s anything magical about military service or militarism, and chickenhawk conservative squalling to the contrary there are only casual links between militarism and love of country. In fact I will support Senator Clinton’s opponent, Senator Obama, in my state’s upcoming primary because I believe he’s far more steadfastly opposed the kind of “fear-of-wimpiness” adventurism that conservatives so often confuse with patriotism and love of country. But from the bottom of my heart I’m thankful that at least one White House contender understands what it takes to love his or her country till it hurts.

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Note: When I grab illustrations for posts I tend to make up sort-of-related sets of keywords, check the “creative commons only” box, and take whatever looks like fun regardless of context. In this case I wanted to quote the text from photo caption at the top.

This man, Doug (who I later met) changed what Veteran’s Day now means to me in the matter of 2 hours. He personally thanked each group of men and women walking in the parade, some individually. He saluted, he welcomed home those who have been home for decades, he wept and wiped tears from his eyes more than once. He later thanked me for my service in the Army as well. I, in return, thanked him for his and told him how his actions welled tears in my eyes too.

Source: Flickr user LissaLou66

Rest my case.

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The "no-sex" class: Hillary Clinton's cleavage

Posted by figleaf | Tags:

Fri, 2007-07-20 21:56

While tackling Washington Post fashion writer Robin Givhan’s of otherwise inexplicable condemnation of Senator Clinton for a “Tentative Dip Into New Neckline Territory,” Sassywho of I never leave the house without incident mentioned my theory of the dominant paradigm that paints women as the “no-sex” class. Sassywho says

I think that [the “no-sex” class theory] intersects with Hillary because it is so often assumed that women are not wired for sex the same as men in our culture. So society has created a whole code/decoder system that functions on the interpretation of others rather than the individual. Sexy and being a sexual person are assumed to be one in the same for women, wear the wrong outfit one day and you are denied the right to be who you are.
Look how easily the Washington Post does it:

When she appeared on the cover of the December 1998 issue of Vogue, just after the Monica Lewinsky scandal had peaked, she wore another de la Renta gown, this one with a boat neck and long sleeves. She looked glamorous, regal and defiant. But one was not even tempted to mention the s-word.

Clearly there was no way that she could have been sexy then, can you blame her man for stepping out? Now that Hillary struts around in anything less than formal wear she is a stumbling block for those who appreciate modesty:

With Clinton, there was the sense that you were catching a surreptitious glimpse at something private. You were intruding — being a voyeur. Showing cleavage is a request to be engaged in a particular way. It doesn’t necessarily mean that a woman is asking to be objectified, but it does suggest a certain confidence and physical ease. It means that a woman is content being perceived as a sexual person in addition to being seen as someone who is intelligent, authoritative, witty and whatever else might define her personality.

Sassywho said it here.

“There wasn’t an unseemly amount of
cleavage showing, but there it was.
Undeniable.” — Robin Givhan

I agree the adolescent Clinton titterfest nicely illuminates two major arms of the dominant “no-sex” class paradigm. First there’s the total denial that women are sexual at all, which manifests here as bafflement that a woman who “doesn’t have to” should even hint that she might have a sexual side. For instance check out Givhan’s gushing expressions of admiration for Clinton’s erstwhile sexless appearance in her boat-necked gown and contrast it with dismay that her current appearance hints at a bosom

Next there’s the enforcement arm, the retribution that’s brought down on women at any hint of self-instigated sexuality — the squalling condemnation that a woman with Clinton’s status might have done so. Inside the paradigm women simply never manifest sexuality without ulterior motives generally related to trying to get something or other in exchange. Clinton, a woman but extremely highly placed and married to a highly-placed man, “should” have no reason to use sex to get anything… and (since, sez the paradigm, there’s no other conceivable reason) it’s somewhere between inconceivable and inexcusable.

Absent the “no-sex” paradigm there’s no foundation for the article at all. So why has it come up? Because it provided an opportunity both to preserve and enforce the dominant male paradigm that women are the “no-sex” class.

Reminder: While my theory might seem superficially contrary to the classic radical feminist theory that women are the “sex class,” nothing about the “no-sex” class theory directly contradicts feminist theory. The difference for me is it provides a more rational explanation for men’s behavior towards women. Where “rational” in this case means “presents more opportunities for transforming or overturning” and not “gee, fellas, it makes perfect sense to imagine women don’t have sex drives like people do.”

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