COUNTERCOLUMN: All Your Bias Are Belong to Us

That's not funny, dammit!

Here's Dee Dee Myers, former press secretary for Bill Clinton (and one of my great secret crushes in politics) on Jon Favreau's shenanegans with a cardboard cutout of Hillary Clinton:

I can’t stop thinking about this picture, and I confess I find it really upsetting. And, no, it’s not because I don’t have a sense of humor. I like to think I have a well-earned reputation for often irreverent, sometimes ill-advised humor. But I’m not laughing now.

That's not funny, dammit!

And it’s not that I was never young. My friends from college and in the years just beyond can testify that I did some things then that I wouldn’t want to see on the Internet now. But I had a big job in the White House at a young age too; at 31—just a few years older than Favreau is now—I became White House press secretary.

Shorter Dee Dee: "I was never young."

If he’s old enough and wise enough and mature enough to write for the president of the United States—and not just any president but one who seems poised to take words more seriously than any since Abraham Lincoln—

HUUUUUUUUUURRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRLLLLLLLLL!!!!!!!!

HURRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRLLLLLLL!!!!!!!!!!

HUUUUUUURRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRLLLLLLLLL!!!!!!!

(spit spit, retch retch)

Geez, what a twit.

than he’s clearly old enough and wise enough and mature enough to avoid getting his picture taken behaving in a way that is embarrassing to him, his boss, the secretary of state–designate, his family, and, one hopes, a majority of 27-year-old males (though that may be too optimistic.) It’s indefensible. But that’s still not what’s bugging me.

What's bugging me right now is that when Bill Clinton cheated on his wife and used a 21-year-old intern as his personal sperm receptacle in the Oval Office, Myers was considerably more circumspect about calling for accountability.

Update: The next issue of Vanity Fair has nude photos of Kate Winslet.

Jus' sayin, y'all.

Update II: Read this, too, though, from Dee Dee Myers back in 1998: "The President's relationship with Monica Lewinsky was so reckless as to seem pathological."No call for accountability in sight, though. Indeed, she takes the opportunity to criticize Ken Starr.

Splash, out

Jason

Labels: Democrats, Feminism, women

Alternet has the "details."

Earlier this year, using the clout that only major broadcast networks seem capable of mustering, CBS News contacted the governments of all 50 states requesting their official records of death by suicide going back 12 years. They heard back from 45 of the 50. From the mountains of gathered information, they sifted out the suicides of those Americans who had served in the armed forces. What they discovered is that in 2005 alone -- and remember, this is just in 45 states -- there were at least 6,256 veteran suicides, 120 every week for a year and an average of 17 every day.

I'm getting all emo and shit. I think this is up there with Gloria Steinem's idiotic claim that 150,000 women were dying of anorexia every year.

JustOneMinute has perspective.

These people will do anything ... ANYTHING ... to infantilize veterans or turn them into victims.

Splash, out

Jason

Labels: Feminism, The Left, VA, veterans

Ouch. That's gonna leave a mark.

The Times didn't see fit to cover Lt. Michael Murphy's Medal of Honor. But they found room in the paper for their reliably liberal reviewer to tear Faludi a new asshole for her (apparent) abortion of a book.

I'll leave it to Kakutani, who wastes no time in cutting to the bone in her fin her first paragraph:

This, sadly, is the sort of tendentious, self-important, sloppily reasoned book that gives feminism a bad name.

Then again, feminist writers have been able to get away with anything, thanks to the kind of muddleheaded intellectual slobs that make up most of the commenters on Feministing.

With “The Terror Dream,” Susan Faludi has taken the momentous subject of 9/11 and come to the conclusion that it led to ... an assault on the freedom and independence of American women. In the wake of 9/11, she argues, the great American cultural machine churned out a myth meant to “restore the image of an America invulnerable to attack” — “the illusion of a mythic America where women needed men’s protection and men succeeded in providing it.”

Well, it wasn't protection so much as women needed someone around who could open the pickle jar.

This girl-in-need-of-rescue paradigm, Ms. Faludi argues, dates back to frontier-days captivity narratives, which recounted the ordeals of settlers captured by Indians. She further contends that these narratives embodied the notion of shame (a “largely male burden, the result of recurring attacks in which the captivity of women and children served to spotlight male protective failures”), and that to counter this humiliation, there evolved redemption tales in which a maiden, taken against her will by “savages,” is rescued by a brawny white man.

This “mass dream,” Ms. Faludi goes on, “conceals the shaming memory, as it was meant to, but can’t expel it”: “The humiliating residue still circulates in our cultural bloodstream, awaiting provocation to bring it to the surface. And with each provocation, we salve our insecurities by invoking the same consoling formula of heroic men saving threatened women — even in provocations that have involved few women and no female captives, like the Revolutionary-era kidnapping of American sailors on the Barbary Coast. Or the terrorist attack on 9/11.”

Funny she should mention this. I was sitting in a communist beer hall/cafe in Miami, hanging out with a good friend of mine who says she'd love to live under Castro, and two college English profs, and talking about schools of literary criticism.

Look, I needed the money, ok!?!?!?!?!!?

Anyway, one of them said that he was a postmodernist, but not a deconstructionist NTTATWWT, and I let slip that I considered myself to be an archetypalist critic, if I had to pigeonhole myself. Like many who came before me, back into the earliest, embryonic stages of our cultural memory.

Long story.

Anyway, Faludi takes a page out of the archetypal critic's book here, which is surprising, because I figured archetypal criticism was one of the last vestiges of conservatism in literary criticism. But here is a liberal, applying an archetypal model on the explanation of history.

Of course, being a liberal, Faludi is therefore stupid, and makes a hash of the attempt. Being an archetypal critic doesn't mean you get to deliberately ignore evidence that doesn't fit your model, a cardinal intellectual sin for which Faludi is eviscerated by the Times.

(I much prefer Rebecca Onion's take on the female captivity narrative. But she never got back to me on that lunch date request.

Closing paragraph from Kakutani:

Not only are many of these assertions highly debatable in themselves, but Ms. Faludi’s overarching thesis in this book rings false too. In fact, her suggestion that the 9/11 attacks catalyzed the same fears and narrative impulses as those unleashed by our frontier ancestors’ “original war on terror,” leading to a muffling of feminist voices and a veneration of “the virtues of nesting,” runs smack up against her own “Backlash,” which suggested that similar assaults on women’s independence were being unleashed in the 1980s — a time not of war or threat but a decade that witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall and the coming end of the cold war.

Such errors of logic are typical of this ill-conceived and poorly executed book — a book that stands as one of the more nonsensical volumes yet published about the aftermath of 9/11.

I can't wait to read the response at Feministing!

Better put some ice on that, Susan.

Oops...was I being repressive? Soooooooory.

Newsbusters excoriates the Times for being so lovingly fellative (cunnilinguative?) during the hype phase of the book, having already devoted some 9 thousand words and several articles to Faludi's "splendid provocation" of a book that apparently no one had read yet, assuming the book reviewer gets the advances in the galley phase.

Why? How is this possible? Simple: Feminists and liberals can get away with intellectual and logical murder and the Times and their enablers will provide reliable cover.

Conservatives need to have 30 extra IQ points to get the same breaks that dumbass liberals with tired, predictable, and provably false ideas get.

If I were a liberal, the Democrats would have invited me to give the stupid Democratic Response to the Presidential Radio Address in 2004.

Shows how dumb they are.


Splash, out

Jason

Labels: Feminism, New York Times, The Left