“Mom, did he just call her a nasty woman?”
“Yes, Toby, he did. But nasty women are the ones who make history.”
Category: politics
In Other News
The final debate is tonight, so get your drink in your paws and grit your teeth as we give a man’s ignorance the same attention and importance as a woman’s experience.
Until then, you may like this: Canada is tweeting nice things about America, just to cheer us up as we careen into November.
“The Garden, a Canadian creative agency that launched the campaign, said it was hoping to cheer up the U.S. during a particularly tough―and sometimes discouraging―election season… ‘As their closest friends and neighbors, we thought it was important for us to do something to cut through the negativity and help remind them that no matter how bad things might seem, there are a lot of reasons to believe that America is still pretty great,’ the agency said.”
Well done, Canada. Gosh, you guys are just so nice.
Politics!
I think this just about sums up the last week: 
For a takedown of why we’re not reacting to the language, but to the sexual assault described by the leaked tapes, watch Trevor Noah.
For an examination of Trump’s really terrifying promise to jail his political opponent if he wins, watch Ezra Klein.
Early voting started this week in many states. Under four weeks to go–stay strong, everyone.
Political Wednesday
Like most of the country, I watched the debate (“Are you not entertained?“) but I’m living for the commentary after. This headline sums it up: “Clinton’s debate performance spoke to every woman who has had to humor an incompetent man.”
As the Belladonna editor quoted in the article puts it, “This election has reinforced that a guy’s ignorance will still be given the same weight as a woman’s experience. He can have emotional outbursts that she would be crucified for having.”
It makes my feminist killjoy heart so happy that people are picking up on this, while at the same time making me want to be more of a feminist killjoy because how is this still happening and she’s really being criticized for smiling too much? and The Economist ran a poll asking if her looking “smug” was worse than a racist lie perpetuated by a power-mad con artist?!”
Hillary’s used to the double standard, though. She’s not getting mad, she’s going to be president.
Political Wednesday
Maybe I should call it, “Is This Really Happening? Wednesday,” because I can’t believe that in the last week Trump not only said, after five years arguing Obama wasn’t born in the US, that he was indeed born here and Trump was the one to prove it–and that the Clinton campaign started the rumor in the first place.
I can’t even.
As the WaPo says:
…it is hard to seriously argue that a man who would lead a racist conspiracy theory and then try to blame his opponent is fit to be president. Drumpf, like a small child caught misbehaving, simply denies the evidence or blames someone else or lashes out in anger. (He also this weekend called former defense secretary Robert Gates a “clown” in response to Gates’s well-reasoned argument that Drumpf is unfit to serve as commander in chief.) Again and again he’s proven his views so extreme (e.g., rounding up 11 million people), his judgement so egregious (e.g., embracing Vladimir Putin) and his character so twisted that only someone in deep denial or blinded by partisanship could defend him and insist he is worthy of the office.
YET PEOPLE ARE. Jesus. The debate Monday night is going to be something…
What He Said
Sigh. 55 days to go until Election Day. If you’re not registered to vote, not sure how or where to vote, need info on voting early, or anything else, just google it. (It’s a far better interface than vote.utah.gov, but that works too.)
Hillary Parody
This piece is 1.) NOT written by Hillary Clinton and 2.) FULL of swearing so don’t read it if you don’t find that sort of thing hilarious, but it is indeed hilarious and I think it’s the kind of open letter to America the real Hillary secretly wants to write. Bonus: It ends with the poem she quoted at her college commencement. (Keeping it classy!)
Wednesday Long Read
Still talking politics, still fascinated by the role gender bias, conscious and unconscious, is playing in this election. This is a long piece from earlier in the primary about Hillary and “The Gap” between how she is perceived and how colleagues describe her: Understanding Hillary.
One way of reading the Democratic primary is that it pitted an unusually pure male leadership style against an unusually pure female leadership style. Sanders is a great talker and a poor relationship builder. Clinton is a great relationship builder and a poor talker. In this case—the first time at the presidential level—the female leadership style won.
But that wasn’t how the primary was understood. Clinton’s endorsements left her excoriated as a tool of the establishment while Sanders’s speeches left people marveling at his political skills. Thus was her core political strength reframed as a weakness.
Political Wednesday!
I came across this long piece a few weeks ago and it’s become my go-to link to respond to Facebook friends complaining about Trump but bemoaning “Hillary is a liar”. She’s not. And it lays out a lot of background about how that charge came to be leveled against her and why the author thinks it sticks (hint: sexism).
Am I not supposed to notice that a media frenzy has been aimed at Hillary Clinton for accepting speaking fees of $225,000 while Donald Trump has been paid $1.5 MILLION on numerous occasions with hardly a word said about it? Am I not supposed to notice that we are now in an election season in which Donald Trump , a proud scam artist whose involvement in “Trump University” alone is being defined by the New York Attorney General as “straight-up fraud”, is regularly calling Hillary Clinton “Crooked Hillary” and getting away with it?
What the actual fuck is going on here? What’s going on is what we all know, but mostly don’t want to admit: presidential campaigns favor men, and the men who campaign in them are rewarded for those traits perceived as being “manly” – physical size, charisma, forceful personality, assertiveness, boldness and volume. Women who evince those same traits, however, are usually punished rather than rewarded, and a lot of the negativity aimed at Hillary over the years, especially when she is seeking office, has been due to these underlying biases. There is simply no question that Hillary has for years been on the business end of an unrelenting double standard. And her battle with societal sexism isn’t going to stop because of her success anymore than Obama’s battle with racism stopped once he was elected. These are generational issues, and we are who we are.
The whole thing is worth 5-10 minutes of your time. And definitely worth sharing with people.
I Can’t
Another day, another cycle of Trump saying something we all think is a new low…until he says something even lower the next day. What’d he do this time? Dog-whistled that maybe “Second Amendment people” would be able to do something about a Clinton presidency.*
I’m just going to let Dan Rather handle my outrage today (although the fact that we need someone to point out that this is bad, this isn’t normal is also pretty outrageous, but I’m out of words right now).
From Mr. Rather’s Facebook post [emphasis mine]:
No trying-to-be objective and fair journalist, no citizen who cares about the country and its future can ignore what Donald Trump said today. When he suggested that “The Second Amendment People” can stop Hillary Clinton he crossed a line with dangerous potential. By any objective analysis, this is a new low and unprecedented in the history of American presidential politics. This is no longer about policy, civility, decency or even temperament. This is a direct threat of violence against a political rival. It is not just against the norms of American politics, it raises a serious question of whether it is against the law. If any other citizen had said this about a Presidential candidate, would the Secret Service be investigating?
Candidate Trump will undoubtably issue an explanation; some of his surrogates are already engaged in trying to gloss it over, but once the words are out there they cannot be taken back. That is what inciting violence means.
To anyone who still pretends this is a normal election of Republican against Democrat, history is watching. And I suspect its verdict will be harsh. Many have tried to do a side-shuffle and issue statements saying they strongly disagree with his rhetoric but still support the candidate. That is becoming woefully insufficient. The rhetoric is the candidate.
This cannot be treated as just another outrageous moment in the campaign. We will see whether major newscasts explain how grave and unprecedented this is and whether the headlines in tomorrow’s newspapers do it justice. We will soon know whether anyone who has publicly supported Trump explains how they can continue to do.
We are a democratic republic governed by the rule of law. We are an honest, fair and decent people. In trying to come to terms with today’s discouraging development the best I can do is to summon our greatest political poet Abraham Lincoln for perspective:
“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
Lincoln used these stirring words to end his First Inaugural Address. It was the eve of the Civil War and sadly his call for sanity, cohesion and peace was met with horrific violence that almost left our precious Union asunder. We cannot let that happen again.
*For more info about the recent “insurrectionist interpretation” of the Second Amendment and how the founders of the nation really meant it, read this good long piece by my friend Francis. As he put it on Facebook, “The threat of violence as a political tool has always been present in our republic but only recently has it been tied to the constitution. But the suggestion that we have a constitutional right to overturn our government through violence is definitely not what the founders had in mind when they created it.”