In an article published in The Guardian, Melissa McEwan and Maureen McCluskey document the shameful misogyny unleashed upon Hillary Rodham Clinton and all her supporters by the "progressive" blogosphere. An excerpt follows, but I know you will want to read the entire piece.
Please people, do not ever again talk to me about the vileness and deceitfulness of right-wing bloggers. I and countless other Hillary supporters experienced a radical paradigm shift during our defense of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Women have no political party, we have no respectful place in the larger progressive community. In the words of Janis:
[A]s far as women are concerned, there are two parties: those that hate us, and those that don’t. And the boundary line dividing those two parties doesn’t have a damned thing to do with the line dividing Democrat from Republican, or liberal from conservative.
The following account begins to explain the nature of the radically altered world-view of many Hillary supporters to those of you who were not with us in the "progressive" festival of misogyny that was the Democratic primary of 2008.
Destroying Hillary Clinton
Part one - How a bitter primary campaign saw the right's discredited smears gleefully revived and reused by the left
In 1998, as six years of a national campaign to demonize First Lady Hillary Clinton — funded by conservatives and rooted in profound anti-feminism — was reaching a fevered crescendo, then-conservative David Brock (now of Media Matters) penned a book called The Seduction of Hillary Rodham. The publisher's note for the tome says of its subject: "No public figure in contemporary life has elicited more polarized reactions than Hillary Rodham Clinton. The first presidential spouse who pursued a major policymaking role, the beleaguered first lady has been a heroine and role model to her feminist allies - and a malevolent, power-mad shrew to her conservative foes."
Sometime in the last decade, her liberal foes evidently decided that whole "malevolent, power-mad shrew" thing sounded pretty good, too.
Throughout the course of the Democratic primary, it was neatly repackaged as "wildly ambitious person who will do anything in her voracious quest to win including destroying the Democratic Party while cackling monstrously and whose womanness totally doesn't matter we swear." The classic misogynist charge once used against Clinton by the vast right-wing conspiracy became the rallying cry of large swaths of the erstwhile reality-based community.
Without a hint of irony.
Clinton was suddenly a bitch, a witch, the Queen of Hearts "who has parasitically attached herself to the legacy and record of" her husband, the screech on the blackboard with an elitist trademark laugh. "Hitlery," "Hildebeast," and "Billary" - staples of 1990s criticisms of the feminist First Lady have returned with a vengeance. She was a monster, the devil in a pantsuit, targeted with dehumanizing and eliminationist rhetoric to which liberal bloggers used to object when the right used it against liberals, but apparently now consider okay, as long as it's only directed at a candidate they don't like.Read the whole thing. . .
via Shakesville
Misogyny Feminist Backlash Politics News Gender Hillary Clinton Barack Obama Democratic Primary Feminist Trailblazer Progressive Bloggers Sexist Netroots New Politics
