Archive for June 16, 2008

Join or Die: Hillary Democrats for McCain on WordPress

One of my regular commenters recently noted the upswing in pro-Hillary, anti-Obama rhetoric among WordPress’ politics blogs (thanks for the tip!). That’s a disappointing trend, but the actual sites he pointed to are even more disappointing, ranging from the racist to the delusional. I’ve noted before – just click that little “previous post” button above you – that it’s partly worrying, but mostly confusing, to see so many people turn from the Democrats upon Obama’s nomination. It suggests to me that the Clinton supporters who cling to her candidacy were never really about the issues in the first place. America is at a crossroads, and to let anger and resentment at Hillary’s loss defeat us in our last best chance to undo the damage of the Bush years borders on the absurd. It’s cutting off the nose to spite the face, it’s throwing a temper tantrum, it’s..

Irresponsible.

More on the worst offenders, below the line. Continue reading »

Join or Die: A Minor Backbencher Revolt

Update: apparently a journalistic institution more respected than my own has already covered this issue in depth.  Thank you, New York Times, and thank you, Frank Rich, for highlighting a few more reasons why McCain is anti-feminist, why his alleged Clinton coup isn’t really a coup at all, and why the whole thing is a crock of spin… that I fell for.  Barack’s lead in the polls only continues to widen.  However, I still maintain that Hillary should say something about this issue.

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McCain supporters are ecstatic: a high-level Clinton supporter, Debra Bartsoshevich, a delegate to the national convention, has defected and gone to openly supporting McCain.  Her reasons, stated on a local newspaper’s site, give me pause.  Apparently, the defection is partly about national security experience, but Bartoshevich can’t hide a hide that it’s a little bit about resentment too.  Says Bartsoshevich,

No self-respecting woman should wish or work for the success of a party that ignores her — that’s by Susan B. Anthony.

I am disappointed that Obama’s candidacy - and consequentially, should this trend to go too far, the American people – will pay the price for the media’s incompetent and often sexist treatment of Hillary Clinton.  While Obama reaped the benefits therein, Obama never encouraged the media’s witch hunt against Clinton, and laying the blame at his feet is a clear case of misdirected rage.

If Bartsoshevich’s rage is poorly targeted, its result is also poorly planned: while the Democrats have “ignored” women in the sense that they failed to nominate one for the presidency, the Republicans started ignoring women back when it was cool, and they haven’t stopped since.  Bartsoshevich has jumped from a barely-simmering fying pan, into a veritable bonfire of anti-feminism.

Hopefully, some of this will blow over.  When Obama picks a vice president – God willing one with impeccable foreign credentials – Clinton defectors will no longer have that justification at their disposal, and will have to admit to the illogic of their sudden change of heart in McCain’s favor, or come back into the fold.  I don’t blame some Clinton supporters for being upset with their candidate’s loss.  We all knew there would be some unpleasantness afterwards.  But we can’t let McCain tear us apart and waltz into Bush’s third term.

What we need now is a word from Clinton, and a joint appearance or three(-hundred).  If Hillary Clinton is half the magnanimous stateswoman that she says she is – and that her supporters believe her to be – she’d be on the trail defending the Democrats going into November.

Clinton Women: Join or Die

An open letter to Hillary Clinton supporters now considering voting for John McCain:

Don’t.  Although I understand that it would be nice, you do not need a woman president to defend women’s rights, and as far as women’s rights are concerned, this election promises to be one of the most important of our lifetimes.  Now is the time for us to join together and seize back an American culture and an American government that respects women’s rights.  If you truly believe in feminism, you can’t squander our best opportunity in years on a nomination contest dispute.

Let’s look first to the future: if John McCain wins in November, the right to choose will disappear inside of his first term.  Despite his quirky federalist opinion of how abortion should work in America, at the end of the day McCain’s feelings on the issue won’t matter: the right to choose, for better or worse, is at this point in American history defined largely by the courts, and McCain cannot appoint justices who he knows will devolve the issue to the states.  But he can and will appoint Justices who will gut or destroy the Roe right, without his ever needing to pull the trigger.  The McCain Supreme Court would – in a talking point he continually stresses – be one composed of John Roberts and Sam Alito Clones.  These are men who will jump at the first chance to strike Roe and rebuild that side of the paternalistic law.  If McCain wins, Roe will without a doubt be gone by 2012, and then it’s back to the bad old days of coat hangers and trips to Canada.

Now let’s look at the past.  McCain claims to be a moderate.  That’s nice.  But you can’t trust a republican who says he’s a moderate during the campaign season.  The Republican party is more firmly in bed with the Christian Right than ever, if only because the Republicans now realize they can’t win without them.  If there ever was a moderate wing of the Republican party, George W. Bush – to paraphrase Obi Wan – betrayed and murdered it, by choosing to build his base with the fundamentalist, religious right.  If you want to know how McCain would govern, ask yourself how McCain would have to act in office to secure the fundamentalist vote for reelection.  To ensure the Christian fundamentalist vote, McCain would have to talk like a social conservative and act like one, and American women can’t afford another four years of being marginalized by a culture that thinks they should stay in the kitchen.

I realize that the threat to vote for McCain over Obama now that Hillary’s gone is probably just that – a threat.  But please remember who you’re considering casting your protest ballot for, before you give him cause to smile by even making that threat.  This is a man, after all, who called his wife a trollop and a c*nt just because she asked him to brush his hair. Imagine what he’ll call you if you ask him to keep women’s interests at heart.

P.S. – What the heck is a “trollop”? It sounds so much like what a Simpsons writer would imagine an old man’s insult to sound like, like “rapscallion,” “lollygagger,” that it can’t possibly be a real word. I wonder if it’s more offensive than the C-word.