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Tuesday, February 05, 2008

Poor Georgia, We Cannot Win

We used to be all about Guns, God and Gays, that is, when we weren't lynching uppity black people. Now that Obama won GA's dem primary (a foregone conclusion, believe me), we're burning uppity witches every Saturday before the NASCAR races. Democratic Underground thread, beginning with the OP:
Hillary, the archetypal "Witch," is enduring the fate of uppity women throughout history.

Early on in Bill's administration, she dared to use her maiden name and she made a joke about staying home and baking cookies. And she's been a marked woman -- a Witch -- ever since.

In the eyes of the Hillary-haters, if a woman is smart and ambitious, then she can't be warm and feeling. She can have brains or heart, but not both. If this smart, ambitious woman shows evidence of human emotion, then it only goes to prove how CALCULATING she is. What a phony, say the haters. She can't be real.

No, she's inhuman. She's a WITCH. Her gifts are supernatural. Her capacity for evil is boundless.

We are living in a country where the current President is blotting out the words of the Constitution, line by line by line. We can't stop him, so we turn to an easy scapegoat. It's all Hillary's fault. Hillary, the witch. Time to dunk her in the pond and see if she lives. (If she does, then it's time to execute her. But at least we saved her soul.)

Anyone who fails to see the misogyny that has been engulfing her is part of the problem.
While this will come as a shock to all the smart, ambitious Georgia women I know, the DU consensus seems so overwhelming that we clearly all need to get out quick before we find ourselves DEAD. Because I gotta tell you girls, we do have a lot of ponds, and quite a few of them are occupied by gators or moccasins, which makes the dunking-stool thing a particularly unpleasant prospect.

I'll call my best ten executive or business-owning friends and tell them to flee on foot tonight after making a batch of homemade cookies to carry. Word has it that you can use them to fool the bloodhounds. And if that fails, we're all good shots. I have a hunch, in fact, that we might just shoot the bloodhounds and divvy up the cookies and eat 'em ourselves. (In GA we're all good cooks, whether we're businesswomen or not. It's just a trait passed down from our uppity mothers.)

The consensus of the thread is that this analysis is BRILLIANT:
1. WoW! that was a great read...scary great...True, too!
...
27. So many women hate women who do not "know their place in life"
...
5. HRC gets the Working Class and Middle Class---=Uppity

Obama gets the LimoLiberals.
'Cause GA is just chock full of God, Gun and Gay-hating LimoLiberals. Lawdy, lawdy. It doesn't seem to occur to any of these types that the rabidity of the Hillary supporters might be more of a problem than Bill. One person protests:
6. Why does it have to be this one or that one?

You assume that because a person thinks she is smart that they will think she is cold? I don't see what one trait has to do with the other. They are not opposite traits.

This makes no sense to me.

And I can't stand her because she is unethical in my eyes. What does that have to do with being a woman or a man?
The reply:
1. It is not all people, it is misogynists who cannot conceive of women being both smart and warm -- smart and feminine. Men are the ones who are "supposed" to be smart. The feminine ideal has never included the gift of intelligence. If a woman is smart, therefore, she can't be feminine -- she can't be warm and caring.

You may be unaware of the degree to which your views of Hillary have been influenced by all the haters who are at large.
And the famous battle cry:
7. Forget the war in Iraq, there is a war on women happening right here in America /nt
Yepper doodles. If Hillary doesn't win tonight it will obviously be proof that the old WASP boys club has conquered using a black guy with the middle name of Hussein. The patriarchy IS COMING. The patriarchy is HERE. The patriarchy is GIGANTIC, nearly the size of Ted Kennedy. Save yourselves!!!! (PS: Save me some of the chocolate chip pecan cookies, okay? I can't believe that I almost sorta vowed to give up chocolate for Lent.)

Update: More trog-women. Dr. M here and here, and my dear Anchoress. She wants neither Romney nor McCain. Weelll. Neither one of them will try to make me watch the Vagina Monologues and applaud.

Comments:
Not even the corruption in Arkansas makes me as angry as the whine about poor Hillary being a victim of misogyny. Arkansas is just up the road from Texas. It does not have all that many educated people, and those who are have connections in Texas. Rumors about Bill's wide swath are not repeated like standard political scandals, delighting in evil about an opponent. The educated people, after all, are usually Democrats. The stories are repeated quietly, pressed lips, send the kids from the room, fumbling questions, "Couldn't she, Didn't she, Is there nothing to be done?" It was all projected, of course, only much larger, on the national scene, as she covered his misdeeds, helped besmirch his kissed-who-told, made sexual harassment a way of life in the White House.

I'd like to thank you for the funny way you told our story. The Melanie Wilkes type is a stock character, of course. So are the Scarlett O'Hara's. I am about ten years older than you, and I can remember some other send-out-the-kids stories, about men who "wore the pants in the family." To say "She is actually afraid of him," carried more scandal-weight than, "She is pregnant by" Husbands thought overbearing men were stupid and churlish. It was the sort of thing about which the men made jokes because the matter was just so tense. It's how we are in the South, both Black and White, the more important an issue, the less we can say about it. It's why we invented the Blues and country music, to talk about the deep matters. My point is, this is nothing new. If we despise Hillary, and many of us do, it has nothing to do with misogyny, which she abetted, and a great deal to do with what we have seen of her in action. we are horrified.
 
It's funny, also sad, that Hillary's character is usually described by pundits as devisive, yet if she were a man, would be described as being a strong leader with clear views on what is needed to be done.

I presume that the Clinton years of balanced budgets and fiscal surplus are but a distant memory!
 
Covey - but the Clinton balanced budget years were only a few, and largely a feature of demographics.

It's totally unfair to the next president and the next Congress to claim that somehow it's all a feature of mismanagement that is causing the federal deficit. It will fluctuate a bit with the economic cycle, but largely it's a product of demographics, and the federal government can only do so much with demographics.

I Digress, we live in an odd world, and far too many of us try to make it comfortable by telling odd stories.
 
Her views and actions both personal and political are antithetical to my understanding of and preference for a well run Federal Republic. I must be a misogynist.
 
The balanced budget years may have been few, but they were there. What you have now is a budget driven by defence spending not only in the DoD budget, but vast sums buried in the budgets of other departments. As an ex soldier, I am all in favor of a proper level of defence spending, but you cannot base an economy on it! The present levels of defence spending in the US gives rise to huge budget deficits which are suddenly difficult to fund. Even here in the UK, our involvement in the Iraq and Afgan wars are bleeding our limited defence spending to the extent that we are consuming military stores, but not replacing them. The end result will be a military devoid of suitable equipment for the wars our political masters think we need to fight.

I am not sure I would invite Hillary out for a beer, but Bill was very popular this side of the pond even though he had to meddle in the Northern Ireland puddle, but given the option of Bill or Bush I know who we would vote for.
 
I'm not the best person to comment on this, given that I no longer desire to have a woman boss. At any rate, since I was dumb enough to vote for Bill twice, and since I was raised by a single mom back in the 50s, I guess I can have my say. We think Hilary is cold because she is. People who lust after power tend to be that and no one would stay with Bill after being publicly humiliated, unless they wanted power. (The Dems seem to like women who don't mind being humiliated by their cheating husbands but loathe the idea of happily married couples.)

There is nothing that says that I have to support a woman just because she is one, than there is some rule that I have to support someone based on their race or religion. And if Hilary can't take that, then she needs to find another line of work.
 
But Covey, to achieve that "balance", (which only occurred because we don't properly account for accrual for retirement benefits), we cut defense spending way below sustainable unless we get out of Korea and a number of other places, including Germany.

Still we only achieved it in the dip which was mainly demographic left from the Great Depression.

Also, we only achieved it while we had a split Democratic/Republican administration. We do not seem to be able to constrain our federal government over the last few decades with a one party administration.

Finally, we achieved it with the dot.com bubble.

Now, the only one of those the next administration can reproduce would be the split party government, and it won't achieve a balanced budget. That's reality. Plus, Hillary ain't Bill.

It's highly questionable whether we would have had the recent declining cash flow deficits without the RE bubble, but now we are in an era in which we have exhausted our supply of soapy water and those little ring thingies you dip into it to generate the bubbles, we have to start paying out on retirement benefits (the recent surpluses of which have been used to subsidize general operations, so it is a double hit), and we are going to suffer the slower growth trend of economies with demographics like ours.

Here's a link showing the history of our SS worker/beneficiary ratio. The first trough was in the late 70s to the mid 80's, when there it fell to 3.2. By 1989 it had moved back to 3.4, dropped to 3.3 in 1991. It then improved up to 3.4 in 1998. It fell to 3.3 in 2002, and it is about to start falling again from what I see in the stats. The major variable is how many people pull early retirement at 62 rather than 65, and how many do some work.

But given the 18 month trend on small businesses and the likely demographic concentration among self-employed individuals, it appears that the ratio is slated for a slightly quicker drop than hoped a few years ago.

Our higher wage earners tend to retire earlier, so that is an unfavorable.
 
Teri - I certainly don't disagree with your sentiments, but in this post at least, the rabidity is emerging from her supporters.

I have to question why there are so many apparent fanatics in the campaign, but this lot were just run-of-the-mill bystander types as far as I can see.
 
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