Anything in quotation marks was written by Lyons (or is a quote he used); what's inside parentheses are my brief summaries of parts I had to snip to keep this to 4 paragraphs. I added bolding of parts I thought were especially important.
"Political Awakening Could Be Costly" -- Gene Lyons
March 5, 2008
"So it’s two days before the critical Texas and Ohio primaries, and how does the mighty Washington Post decorate its influential Outlook section ? Well, the online headline kept changing: first, “Women Aren’t Very Bright,” followed by “Why Do Women Act So Dumb ?” and finally, “We Scream, We Swoon. How Dumb Can We Get ?” Author Charlotte Allen’s thesis was that Sen. Barack Obama appeared to be winning the Democratic contest because irrational women fell for him like teenaged Beatles fans circa 1964. Also, because Hillary Clinton “has run one of the worst—and, yes, stupidest—presidential races in recent history, marred by every stereotypical flaw of the female sex.” Specifically, whining, weeping, relying too much on her husband, and worst, hiring women staffers “chosen for loyalty rather than, say, brains or political savvy.”
Allen’s deepest thought, however, is that “Depressing as it is, several of the supposed misogynist myths about female inferiority have been proven true.” Fundamentally stupid, women can’t drive, do math, or much of anything really, apart from care for children and get off on dopey romance novels and TV shows like “Grey’s Anatomy,” allegedly one of Clinton’s favorites. Why, “even men’s brains are bigger than women’s.” Yeah, well, exit polls in 2000 and 2004 showed that women voted against that paragon of masculinity, George W. Bush, both times. So there’s that. Meanwhile, I’ve got a couple of big-brained fellows out in the barn who exchange significant glances whenever I bring them a carrot. Are horses secretly smarter than humans ? Eighteenth century adventurer Lemuel Gulliver suspected so, but he was prone to exaggeration."
"Chastened by reader reaction, Outlook editor John Pomfret alibied that Allen’s article was “tongue-in-cheek.”
To paraphase Eric Altermann, what’s next at the Post ? Satires about shiftless Negroes, greedy Jews, Irish drunks, Italian criminals and happy-go-lucky Mexicans? Editorial advice: If you’ve got to tell people something’s funny, it ain’t."
(But the Charlotte Allen article wasn't all the misogyny written by a woman that the Post offered. Linda Hirshman wrote an article wondering why women support Barrack Obama and came up with more sexist garbage. A quote from that article follows.)
“It could just be that women with more education (and more money ),” she opined, “relate on a subconscious level to the young and handsome Barack and Michelle Obama, with their whiteporticoed mansion in one of the cooler Chicago neighborhoods and her Jimmy Choo shoes.”
See, there’s no possibility that it’s a rational choice.""A few thoughts: First, misogyny may be the last socially acceptable bigotry. On her blog, the inimitable Digby points out that supposedly respectable news networks such as MSNBC “think it’s fine and dandy to repeatedly invite someone who runs an anti-Clinton organization” whose name is an acronym for the crudest slang for the female genitals. It’s safe to say that the network wouldn’t host the founder of “C. O. O. N.” if such an organization existed."<snip> (
In his second of four thoughts, Lyons discusses the "Clinton rules" in a couple of paragraphs, which are that reporters can tell any lies they like about the Clintons and that no one is taken to task for spreading lies about the Clintons. We saw that when Bill Clinton was president. He mentions the fact that John McCain once told a "coarse joke" with the punchline being that Janet Reno was Chelsea Clinton's real father. Lyons asks if any Democrat had told such a crude joke about the Bush daughters, would that Democrat become the party's presidential nominee? We all know the answer, don't we?)
"Digby, who’s refrained from taking sides in the Democratic primary contest, sees it this way: “The fact that Clinton kept going, becoming a senator, then the first woman to ever win a presidential primary, and continues to put herself out there in the face of that kind of psychopathic bile is a testament to her tenacity and commitment. Everybody says they want a fighter. Regardless of who you vote for, the woman deserves respect for refusing to back down from that lizard brain sludge.”
Third, until early March, Obama, as the non-Clinton in the presidential contest, has gotten a virtual free ride in the press. A recent study by the Center for Media Affairs has documented that since the New Hampshire primary, 83 percent of Obama’s coverage has been positive vs. 47 percent of Clinton’s. MSNBC has been laughable. Keith Olbermann’s “news” program the evening before the March 4 contest featured a string of pundits opining that Clinton should quit the race even if she won. Nobody dissented. Fourth, Obama supporters are living in a fool’s paradise if they imagine this will continue. Outlining just a few obvious lines of attack available to GOP smear artists brought a barrage of outraged emails likening me to the Drudge Report or the KKK. “Either you want John McCain to be president,” an overheated Obama supporter wrote, “or you are in league with the Neo-Nazis or other hate groups.”
The awakening, should it come, could prove costly and painful."Read it all at
http://www.nwanews.com/adg/Editorial/218761/
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