Photo by Flickr user chrisdonia. Used under a Creative Commons license.
After my little parenting-instinct tirade last evening I suppose I ought to feel better about David Kurtz of TalkingPointsMemo note that, unlike ten years ago, backers of the Dirty Reds confined their jokes to opposing candidates instead of their children…
A throwaway line in a Politico piece on this weekend’s RNC “winter retreat” for major donors at Los Angeles’ Beverly Wilshire Hotel:
Plenty of lowbrow Hillary Rodham Clinton jokes were tossed around at the three-day event, but of highest concern was the notion of Obama seizing the Oval Office in a contest against presumptive GOP nominee John McCain.
I guess it just goes without saying that Republican officialdom and their fat cat backers toss off “lowbrow” jokes about Clinton, even in a public setting like an official party event.
...and I suppose that if by “lowbrow” the Politico reporter meant Sen. Clinton was mocked for, say, her retarded, Republican-like, strategy-distorting unlimited cost-plus fee structure for her campaign consultants, or her Giuliani-like strategy of narrowly targeting a few big-state late-season primaries and neocon-like failure to plan how to win those big states, or her family’s disturbingly Cheney-like fondness for secrecy and paranoia, or her choice at least during her primary campaign to surround herself with generally we-need-to-be-hawkish-so-no-one-notices-we-never-wore-a-uniform foreign policy advisors, perhaps it was their instinctive distain for those who earn rather than inherit their millions. If so then… whatever, those are the sorts of qualities I’d poke fun at if I were running against her, and they’re certainly qualities I’d poke fun at their candidate for (with considerably greater justification!)
However I suspect the jokes are not about policy or procedural differences. I think instead that Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon had the best analysis for the New Red Menace’s disquiet about Senator Clinton that drives their desperate, “iron my shirts” attempts at humor: she’s charismatic, she’s got sex appeal, she’s an evidently very happily married and heterosexual feminist, all of which just breaks their saliva-flecked scripts about powerful women (let alone powerful feminist women.) In which case those “lowbrow” jokes were almost certainly more of the same.
