Blog Nightline
28 May 2008 8:08 pm by Taylor Marsh
Guest post by Grey
Sen. Obama’s false assertion that his uncle was part of the U.S. brigade that helped to liberate Auschwitz is the talk of the wingnut blogospehere. Jennifer Rubin says that “Obama and his staff get a lot of history wrong (and a lot of other stuff wrong, too).” Jeff Emanuel thinks that Obama has “a pathological need to be part of history” and that his statement was “so profane that it borders on evil itself.” Dean Barnett wonders how smart Obama really is and adds that “The mangling of facts here isn’t a lie, just another misstatement and another surprising sign of Obama’s historical ignorance.” More generally, Hugh Hewitt contends that all that Ivy League education didn’t make Obama smart: “Because legal education values certain skills, success at it says almost nothing about a law student’s wisdom or grasp of history. What is becoming obvious is that Senator Obama simply doesn’t know a lot of what we take for granted in presidential nominees –an understanding of how America came to be and why it is so special, so exceptional.”
Jake Tapper cites Gallup’s swing state analysis, compiled by Lydia Saad, and concludes that the result “seems to re-affirm Sen. Hillary Clinton’s argument that she is likelier to beat Sen. John McCain than is Sen. Barack Obama:”
Are the Democrats about to nominate their weaker candidate? What say you?
I certainly hope not. Heck of a way to wake up, Jake.
Yesterday, Hendrick Hetzberg published a new puff piece about Chris Matthews; Andrew Sullivan disagrees with only one point:
[H]ating the Clintons is not reducible to some strange atheist idea of what a Catholic’s idea of forgiveness is. The reason so many people who were brought up in a traditional Catholic household loathe the Clintons – Dowd, Kelly, Russert, Matthews, Sullivan, et al. – is because we were taught the difference between right and wrong, and taught to believe it matters.
This makes me want to gnash my teeth. Catholics are not, in fact, the appointed moral arbiters for the nation and neither is anyone else; press credentials do not change that. Surely, the Clintons can be roundly and soundly criticized without using the altar for cover, something which would allow the great majority of us to do so without slumping hypocrisy on our shoulders. Judgments of what is right and what is wrong are, Andrew might agree, rather subjective even without consideration for the Church’s moral authority, which, at best, is erratic on all kinds of matters. In the future, Andrew might choose to reflect on some of his own writings on the matter before lashing out so enthusiastically and definitively on the lives of others.
Michelle Cottle and Amanda Fortini have a bit of a back and forth about “The Hillary Mystique.” Fortini:
I was surprised to read in a recent New York Times article that some of them have formed a group, “Clinton Supporters Count Too,” and that they plan to campaign against Barack Obama in November, which seemed very surprising to me and certainly counterproductive in terms of women’s rights.
How can it possibly surprise anyone that some women, unhappy with the tone and tenor of the campaign, would gather and plan how to move forward? And isn’t it interesting that, the moment women do decide to organize and buck the system, they’re immediately singled out as traitors to the cause? Naturally, Fortini reduces women’s rights to reproductive rights and equal pay for equal work. I’m a strong believer in both, of course, but that’s not all there is to women’s rights, though those are always the two cards Democrats use in order to cow women into supporting their candidates. If we really want to talk about the politics of fear, let’s look into that.
Cottle, for her part, attempts to explain why some women resent the “media bias against the idea of a female president:”
The best way I’ve found to explain it is through a contrast with the media’s reaction to Barack Obama’s candidacy. You have pundits like Andrew Sullivan waxing rhapsodic about how fantabulous it would be for America’s image, how great and glorious a morning it will be, when we have an African American taking the oath. You would never hear someone say that about a woman. Even if they’re talking about the historic nature of it, they don’t talk about it in such grand and soul-cleansing terms. And I think part of it is that in the history of this country, slavery, Jim Crow, and racism have been much uglier, more overt, nasty phenomena than sexism. [...] Feminism is a different cause than civil rights. Slavery is kind of a moral scar for America, so we can be poetic about how great it’s going to be when we, at last, elect an African American. And we just can’t talk that way about electing a woman. Plus, people seem to be embarrassed–women in particular–to talk about sexism, as though the very notion is kind of retro: “Aren’t we past that?” I think Gloria Steinem’s New York Times Op-Ed was, to some degree, pretty dead-on, and it’s something that younger women aren’t willing to admit to even if they have experienced it.
There is no question that racism is a scar on America’s soul, but the fact that we cannot admit the same about sexism – for different reasons, surely, and manifested in disparate ways – is problematic; whether the form it takes is benign or paternalistic is wholly besides the point. When prejudice is manifested subtly, its insidiousness and corrosiveness are no less present and have no fewer consequences, and it is precisely because it’s arguably more difficult to quantify the many forms sexism takes that it can take root unabated and unchecked.
There is something that is both disingenuous and frightening about our collective inability to discuss electing a woman the way we discuss electing a black man. Perhaps our inability to confront that inequality doesn’t quite underscore the dissimilarity in the prejudice, but that women are second-class citizens – just not second-class citizens enough. And that, in turn, is one of the reasons why this “Oppression Olympics” exercise in which so many are invested is horrendously flawed.
