Ugh, ugh ugh. Ugly. Bleh.
On the other hand...I agree with Bill Whittle. Good thing I'm not in any particular party. I can spend the next nine months hating - and taking potshots at - everyone. And pull the lever for Sunny Lucas, when the time comes, if I want to, because I'm not beholden to any party.
It's good to be independent!
My first reaction was, "I never realized it was in style." More importantly, though, the problem with "feminism" as many of my generation and younger experience it is that, like many orthodoxies of the Left, the establishment that espouses it has a rigid, one-size-fits-all small-tent approach. If you're not burning bras and raising consciousness and sitting on hand mirrors, then you're not "really" a feminist. That's not appealing to me, or to many other people of my generation, who actually do believe that women and men should be treated equally in the eyes of the law and by employers, educators, and other institutions, but who may not subscribe to the man-bashing, lipstick-foreswearing, fish-and-bicycle crowd. Jessica over at Feministing had a similar take.
Just an FYI, I first noticed Feministing because of the infamous boob-gate squabble between the Feministing girls and the Divine Ms. Althouse, and I've been loosely following it ever since. I'm not inclined to share most of the Feministing views, but the posts can be extremely interesting and sometimes even cause my hair to actually burst into flame. Which I like.
AND, by the way, since we're on Feministing: Wow, just wow. That beats the Hillary nutcracker by miles and miles.
Is it too harsh to call a former President (and his wife) shady? Yes, I'm contributing to the lowering of political discourse. Hiring back Mr. Fancy-Pants Sandy Berger is enough to indict Hillary on the shady score, but Bill's got plenty of reasons of his own.
Just the same, I'm thinking: Please, Democrats, please put Hillary Clinton on the ticket. Right now that looks to be the only way a Republican is going to win the White House.
And is anyone else slightly nauseated at the idea of the Clintons, seeking to replace the Bush family, are desperately seeking endorsements from the Kennedys? I thought this was America, and there wasn't supposed to be an aristocracy here, but I could be w
David Brooks writes:
All the habits of verbal thuggery that have long been used against critics of affirmative action, like Ward Connerly and Thomas Sowell, and critics of the radical feminism, like Christina Hoff Sommers, are now being turned inward by the Democratic front-runners. … Clinton’s fallback position is that neither she nor Obama should be judged as representatives of their out-groups. They should be judged as individuals. But the entire theory of identity politics was that we are not mere individuals. We carry the perspectives of our group consciousness. Our social roles and loyalties are defined by race and gender. It’s a black or female thing. You wouldn’t understand.
Even in this moment of stress, Clinton wants to have it both ways. She wants to be emblematic of her gender and liberated from race and gender politics. As she told Tim Russert on Sunday: “You have a woman running to break the highest and hardest glass ceiling. I don’t think either of us wants to inject race or gender in this campaign. We’re running as individuals.”
I'm delighted to see the "group" "victim" card being turned against its purveyors. For all of us who have had to suffer through identity politics, witnessing accusations of "self-hating" gay men or "race-traitor" Condi Rice, at least we can now be entertained by the fact that their own absurd ideas are biting them on their collective asses. I'm doubly enjoying it as a woman who has been exscorciated for saying I would never vote for Hillary Clinton even in spite of our shared chromosomal experience, and told that I'm a traitor to womanhood and (my favorite) that I'm riding on the sacrifices of all of the women who came before me, so the least I can do is "give back" by voting for a female President. When it comes to choosing a national leader, I'll modify the old Edwin Starr song to explain my perspective on the characteristics I consider:
Gender, huh, good God y'all, what is it good for?
Absolutely nothing! (Say it again!)
"Congress set to inject own ass with head."
Though, in fairness, couldn't that be the headline every day Congress is in session?
I'm interested in defending libertarian ideals. So I wanted to share this post from the Volokh Conspiracy:
One of Michael Kinsley's criticisms of libertarianism is based on "externalities" caused by government financing. He argues that people should not be allowed to drive without wearing seatbelts because their risky behavior creates an "externality" - a cost that they don't bear themselves. The externality in question is the fact that government may end up financing their medical treatment.
…
The libertarian solution to this problem is to eliminate the government financing that created the "externality" in the first place. If you are worried about taxpayers having to pay for smokers' medical expenses, then argue for the elimination of government subsidies for the treatment of illnesses caused by smoking. Ditto for injuries caused by not wearing a seatbelt…In some cases, eliminating the government financing externality by eliminating government financing may be impossible for political or technical reasons. In such situations, there really is a difficult tradeoff between individual freedom and taxpayer interests. However, if government financing externalities are your true reasons for favoring any given type of regulation, you should at least consider the possibility of getting rid of the externality without restricting freedom.
That's a nice point, but it oversimplifies by assuming that the government financing externalities can be eliminated. Sure, a direct externality can be removed; in the example given above regarding seat belts, we can eliminate "government subsidies for the treatment of injuries caused by wearing a seatbelt." However, some externalities will always remain merely because of the existence of government in the first place, no matter how much government financing is eliminated. There are more government financing externalities implicated when an individual decides to forgo seatbelt usage than just the subsidies for treating injuries.
For example, people injured in accidents who were not wearing their seatbelts tend to suffer greater injury and have longer recovery times than those involved in accidents while wearing a seatbelt. Thus, injury to a non-seatbelt-wearer impacts tax revenues, if he is an hourly worker out of work for a long period of time. He's not making income, so he's not paying taxes. Or a severely injured non-seatbelt-wearing teenager recovering from his injuries is not attending school. If he's held back an extra year because of it, government financing will pay for an additional year of public schooling that he wouldn't have needed had he been wearing a seatbelt. You see my point: eliminate the direct government financing externality and there are still legitimate justifications for regulating seatbelt use, which stem from government financing in other areas, ones that even libertarians may see as perfectly legitimate exercises of government authority.
None of that is to say that therefore government regulation is justified whenever the behavior of an individual has an impact on society as a whole. From the "circle of life" point of view, after all, every single thing that happens to me at least theoretically has at least some impact on you. (This is a world, remember, wherein my growing wheat for personal consumption on my own farm impacts interstate commerce!) I just wanted to point out that one of the things I find fascinating about libertarianism is that, although we can address and remove the immediate and direct externalities by reducing the amount of government financing in the world, the nature of a society is that the exercise of individual will in any way will always impose some amount of externalities on the rest. It's a zero-sum game! The policy choices involve weighing when the impact on society is greater than the cost to liberty. A libertarian will simply require a much heavier and more direct "cost" on society to justify government intrusion than would, for instance, a socialist. More on this issue here.
And speaking of libertarianism, I'm with Ilya Somin: More money for "beer and skittles," less for Ron Paul.
And he would have gotten away with it all, too, if it weren't for those nosey kids!
Loads of fascinating stuff from Althouse to discuss. I haven't been reading her for a while now, and now that I'm back I can't remember why I ever left. It must have just been my general disengagement from the blogosphere. I'm kicking myself for it now, because I can't think of a pundit who will bring up more interesting – and inflammatory – issues of gender and politics during this season of Hillary v. Obama than Althouse…the anti-Clinton feminist who, according to other feminists, is not allowed to call herself "feminist" because she picked on feminist promoting herself using breasts. All this intra-feminism bitch-slapping has got to make for a rollicking good time during this election season, when suddenly feminists of all stripes are all over the place again.
Anyway, I decided to read her entire front page this morning and came up with quite a few treasures to dissect. Most interestingly, the etymology of Barack Obama's "Yes we can" victory speech.
I link this not as a criticism of Obama or some kind of "warning" about him, but in abject admiration of people who can craft an inspirational speech that appeals to the general public and also has a "hidden meaning" or some "code" phrases to a particular group that may be out of the ken of the general audience. It's the same admiration I feel for people who can read (or write) stories like The Old Man and the Sea, uncovering layer upon layer of symbolic meaning. (I read that in high school and was incredibly bored by it – "So what? The old man catches a fish and it drags him around. What's the big deal?" Even knowing as I did that it was considered a "classic" and a masterpiece of literature, it never occurred to me that it was anything more than a fishing story until we discussed it in class.) If Obama can get an audience full of white people chanting "Yes we can!" and use that same speech to reach out to Hispanic immigrants (legal and otherwise), then bully for him.
Another thing from Althouse: Boy howdy, he said it! Can't wait to see what Mark Steyn says at his inquisition.
I find this kind of coverage to be patronizing and insulting, and ultimately sexist. Is it possible for just one minute that the women voters of Iowa voted for Hillary not because she's a woman, not because they are women, but because she's the candidate with (while admittedly thin) more experience and more leadership qualities? Or perhaps because she's the candidate with a little substance and some policy proposals instead of just warm and happy air? Or because she's a bit hawkish, and no one wants to lose in Iraq? Or because they loved her husband as President and they hope they'll like her too, and Barack has another four elections in him at least? Is it possible, in other words, that voting women consider something other than their gender, and what Iowans thought?
Just wondering, y'all.
Also, I have to say that I had the same response to Hillary's crying episode as Maureen Dowd, who wrote:
But there was a whiff of Nixonian self-pity about her choking up. What was moving her so deeply was her recognition that the country was failing to grasp how much it needs her. In a weirdly narcissistic way, she was crying for us. But it was grimly typical of her that what finally made her break down was the prospect of losing.
and totally worthwhile pursuit. I wish I had a baby so I could try it, too.
