It's because she's a WOMAN!
Submitted by mad4clark on April 30, 2008 - 8:42pm.
Hillary Clinton | Media | Democratic politics
Eric Boehlert has a piece up right now talking about the unprecedented treatment Hillary has received from the Media.....
.....And the fact is, the media's get-out-now push is unparalleled. Strong second-place candidates such as Ronald Reagan (1976), Ted Kennedy, Gary Hart, Jesse Jackson, and Jerry Brown, all of whom campaigned through the entire primary season, and most of whom took their fights all the way to their party's nominating conventions, were never tagged by the press and told to go home.
"Clinton is being held to a different standard than virtually any other candidate in history," wrote Steven Stark in the Boston Phoenix. "When Clinton is simply doing what everyone else has always done, she's constantly attacked as an obsessed and crazed egomaniac, bent on self-aggrandizement at the expense of her party."
Indeed, even after Clinton won the Pennsylvania primary convincingly last week, she awoke the next morning to read an angry New York Times editorial, "beseeching her to get the hell out of the race," as Howard Kurtz put it at washingtonpost.com. On the Times opinion page that day same, Maureen Dowd actually turned to Dr. Seuss rhymes to make her point: "The time is now. Just go. ... I don't care how."
And across town at the New York Daily News, a bitter Mike Lupica was steamed over the fact that Clinton "won't quit" the race.
Weeks earlier, New York magazine fretted about which senior Democrats would be able to "step in" and "usher Clinton from the race." Or if Clinton, obsessed with her own "long-range self-aggrandizement," would finally figure it out herself.
Meanwhile, Slate.com's snarky Hillary Deathwatch was created to document, day-by-day, the demise of her campaign, complete with a damsel-in-distress cartoon drawing of Clinton atop a sinking ship.
That represented just a fraction of the often offensive get-out-now proclamations that have become a staple of this campaign. ....
[...]
Indeed, a very strange leap has been made this year by lots of media commentators who argue against Clinton's candidacy. Rather than simply detailing her deficiencies and accentuating the strengths of her opponent, which political observers have done for generations, time and again we saw pundits take the unprecedented step of announcing not only that voters should not support Clinton, but that she should also quit. She should stop competing.
More often than not, the analysis ends up resembling poorly argued temper tantrums....
[...]
....And no, this is not part of some larger liberal media conspiracy where the Beltway press is desperate to elect a Democrat and that's why so many journalists are anxious to get Clinton to quit -- because it might help the party's chances in November. The truth is, as The Daily Howler noted last week, the Beltway media's love affair with John McCain only grows deeper and more affectionate with each passing day.
This is more about media arrogance and unleashed elitism.
In the past there was always an assumption among journalists that candidates had earned the right to decide when they should quit. Journalists also respected the fact that candidates represented a sizable portion of the primary voting public and that the candidates owed it to their supporters to fight on, that there was a symbolic significance for the candidates -- and their supporters -- to persevere.
With Clinton, though, the press seems to have almost complete disregard for the 14 million voters who have backed her candidacy, as well as the idea that she is their representative in this race. Instead, they treat her entire campaign as some sort of vanity exercise in which voters do not exist.....
Much more at Media Matters
While I'm grateful that someone has at last acknowledged this phenomena, I'm disappointed that he did not say why this is happening.
Of course, maybe he really doesn't know.
Any woman could have told him....
Hillary Clinton is being treated with unparalleled disrespect..........because she is a WOMAN.
I can envision no scenario where a MAN....any man (think Dennis Kucinich)...would be consistently told to give up and go home.
This race has exposed the dark underbelly of rampant misogyny amongst the Media Elite.....and of course the Blogger Elite
It is a testament to Hillary Clinton's character that she has stood up to it.....and thrived. And it is a testament to millions voters that they have managed to tune out the Media and decided to believe their own lying eyes instead.
I guarantee you this.........
If Hillary wins the nomination , she will ride a wave of p*ssed off WOMEN ...Democrat and Republican.....right into the Oval Office.
She will. It's going to be so exciting to see the first woman sworn in to the office of the president of the United States! And to have our General in a prominent position in her administration! Whatever the he** he wants! :D
I see you're not here right now, but I'm wondering if this Media Matters piece was linked somewhere or did you go there? Just hoping it's getting widely read!
Once in a while you get shown the light, In the strangest of places if you look at it right.
Also saw brief mentions in comments a few places but not a main post at TM or TL or even NQ, so far.
The always dependable Lambert gives it a mention and ends with this.....
And you know what? If we let them get away with it, they’ll keep doing it.
"A nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood of ideas in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people." JFK
because she's obeying an inner calling. I'm convinced of it. She is a greatly gifted, brilliant, talented woman, who knows she has what it takes to turn this country around and she owes it to us - and to herself - to give it everything she has.
Everything else, all of the noise, the stupidity, the misogyny, she ignores, engages, dismisses, or simply walks past.
Because it doesn't matter. Service matters.
Obamania. You'd think anti-woman statements now would be as taboo as anti-black ones, but the hateful commentators involved may either not be fully aware of their own sexism or may think such vitriol can be disguised as something else. I wonder if this were Claire McCaskell running--would we be treated to all this poisonous rhetoric? Obviously, there exists a virulent anti-Clintonism that I always chalked up to Bill being a hillbilly and thus a D.C. "outsider". I figured it all got passed on to Hillary. And I still maintain that a good bit of the get-out-now has to do with Obama supporters trying to clear the path for him. There's a desperation to do so because they know that race could become an issue and/or his radical baggage could doom him. I'll say it again: Olbermann seemed nicely inclined to Hillary before he became such an Obamaniac. But, one thing is definite--as many of us have stated here--this level of misogynistic bombastic is certain to bring women to the polls in droves! And that's a demographic that can't be beaten!
it's time to start Hillary bashing again. It's never ending b.s. filled chatter all over the news channels this morning. I'll watch the second part of jerk O'Reilly's interview with our Hillary tonight, but probably will grind my teeth every time he opens his rude mouth. He tried his best to trick question her last night, but no way. She's just too smart for him.
The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.
James Branch Cabell (1879 - 1958), The Silver Stallion, 1926
It was interesting that the two follow-up female commentators teased him about her, one even jibing that she was now his "girlfriend"! She had him eating out of her hand, even waggling his head and simpering about a hypothetical "if I vote for you"!
Why do Americans hate Clinton?
JOAN SMITH
GUEST COLUMNIST
Hillary Clinton is a witch who eats babies. She is a modern-day Medusa who turns men to stone. She is a DemocRAT, with a rodent's body and long tail.
She is a mad cow, spreading disease across the country. Hey guys, life's a bitch, so why vote for one? No, I haven't taken leave of my senses: I am simply repeating some of the most vitriolic attacks on a woman who has dared to run for the White House, prompting an outpouring of misogyny on a scale that brings to mind medieval witch hunts. The amazing thing is not that Clinton is trailing Barack Obama, but the fact that she's doing so well.
Last week she won Pennsylvania, despite her campaign being outspent 3-1. She has been written off countless times since January, when commentators gleefully -- and wrongly -- declared that Clinton had been defeated in the New Hampshire primary; one conservative pundit confidently said: "The witch is dead, and life is going to change." Three months later, Clinton is still in the race, but I sometimes wonder how she manages to get up every morning. I'm not a natural supporter, but the degree of vilification she has been subjected to reminds me of the pathological misogyny of the notorious witch-finders' manual, Malleus Maleficarum.
Let's start with the T-shirts, mugs and stickers at the online "Hillary vilification shop" where images of her as a rat, a mad cow and Medusa are on sale. "Hillary will eat our babies," one message proclaims. "Pillory Hillary 2008," says another, next to an image of Clinton in the stocks.
Most sinister of all is "Wanna See Hillary Run? ... Throw Rocks At Her," echoing the barbaric practice of stoning women to death. Take to the airwaves in America, and more bile pours out; the right-wing talk show host Rush Limbaugh, whose show has 14.5 million listeners, has identified something he called a "testicle lockbox" as an attribute of the New York senator. Is this related, I wonder, to a vagina dentata? Perhaps that's what Clifford May, a former Republican National Committee spokesman, had in mind when he called on Clinton to define herself as "a vaginal-merican."
What are they so afraid of? "There's just something about her that feels castrating, overbearing and scary," declared MSNBC host Tucker Carlson.
Scary but pathetic, says Limbaugh: "Will America want to watch a woman get older before their eyes on a daily basis?" Clinton is 60, 11 years younger than the Republican candidate John McCain, but aging "makes men look more authoritative, accomplished and distinguished," according to Limbaugh.
McCain, to his shame, has not remained aloof from the pillorying of Clinton, failing to rebuke a female supporter in South Carolina who asked: "How do we beat the bitch?" Visibly taken aback, McCain laughed and thought for a few seconds. "That's an excellent question," he said. In the following week, the "How do we beat the bitch?" incident was viewed almost a million times on YouTube.
"This is sociopathic woman-hating," the feminist author Robin Morgan. "If it were about Jews, we would recognize it instantly as anti-Semitic propaganda; if about race, as KKK poison. Where is our sense of outrage -- as citizens, voters, Americans?" In fact, Clinton does have people defending her, including Elton John. The singer recently opened a fundraising concert for Clinton in New York and said he was "amazed by the misogynistic attitudes of some people in this country." So are some ordinary voters, including an Obama supporter who expressed his frustration with a Facebook group entitled "Hillary Clinton: Stop Running for President and Make Me a Sandwich." He wrote on his blog: "The last time I checked, it had over 44,000 members, and at least once a week since it was started I receive a request from a Christian asking me to join this group."
The title of the group is revealing because its equivalent -- "Barack Obama: Stop Running for President and Clean My Pool" -- doesn't exist. It would cause outrage. So why, when racial abuse is rightly taboo, is it acceptable to abuse a woman on the grounds of her gender?
Of course, it may be that racism has gone underground, and that doubts about a black presidential candidate are emerging in voting patterns. But this year's race for the White House has undeniably exposed the previously unimaginable degree of misogyny at the heart of American culture. Whoever wins in November, the 2008 election will go down in history as the occasion when lobbyists, pundits and bloggers staged a very public mugging of Hillary Clinton.
Joan Smith is a columnist for The Independent in Britain.