Sherry Chandler

Too little, too late, on CNN Howard Kurtz examines the question with a panel of (gasp!) women journalists. He predicts a backlash. Ya think?:

Watch at YouTube

Link via Tennessee Guerilla Women.

I do not have cable tv, let alone HBO, so I did not watch Recount, but Jane Smiley did and she came to conclusion that Al Gore was right to concede because, in part, it allowed the Republicans to show themselves:

Winning to them trumped every other consideration. It is also evident that they learned from their “victory” in Florida that bullying was the way to go, and so they attempted to use the same strategy and tactics in Iraq. The last eight years show that ethics, law, and human decency meant nothing to these Republicans. And their current pleasure in the depiction of their own rottenness shows that they have learned nothing.

I would like to be a fly on the wall in the room where John McCain is watching Recount. In the course of the next few months, knowing that bullying, cheating, and subverting the election might or might not work, he will have to make a choice. He can run an honorable campaign and lose or a dishonorable campaign that shames him. Does he watch Recount and see Warren Christopher as a “wimp” and James Baker as “tough”? Or does he watch Recount and feel the humiliation that every Republican should feel? He is the carrier of the Bush poison now. The sooner he recognizes it, the better off the nation will be.

My thought? Maybe the Democrats should examine their own house.

Link courtesy of Avedon.

Aside: Kurtz can’t resist a bit of blame the victim in his Washington Post venue:

Somewhere in Hillary’s inevitability phase, the trailblazing nature of her effort got lost. She became the establishment candidate, the return-to-the-’90s candidate, and the wow factor–which has always surrounded Obama–simply faded.

Simply faded? How about was stomped on and crushed and still wouldn’t die? See Avedon below.

Update: Over at Suburban Guerilla, zuzu asks Obama supporters how they’re going to reach out to disgruntled Clinton supporters in the event that Obama is the nominee. Interesting lot of replies. Go read. (Short version: they got nothin’)

and less of “women will wake up to reality once Obama is the nominee,” a paraphrase of a comment I saw at TalkLeft and an attitude that has seemed endemic.

From Obama’s Memorial Day speech:

We’re going to have hundreds of thousands of new veterans coming in, many of them who suffer post-traumatic stress disorder. They are not being diagnosed quickly enough, they’re not getting the services that they need quickly enough.

And, sadly, the group of veterans that are probably being most neglected in this area are women veterans. We’ve got to do a better job of creating facilities…. specifically for women veterans.

And part of what we need is to recognize that oftentimes our women servicemembers are more prone to post-traumatic stress disorder partly because they — there’s a sad, but real, problem of sexual harassment and sexual abuse for women veterans, and that makes them much more prone, then, to have post-traumatic stress disorder.

Maybe a a bit patronizing. Obviously pandering, but I’m ready to be pandered to, big time.

He also made a quick promise to stop protests at military funerals, a thing that needs to be done.

Now how about some promises to protect Social Security and work hard for universal health care??

You can watch the speech at YouTube here.

…from Avedon, who is neutral* and doesn’t usually say too much (emphasis mine):

Digby noted the other day: “I just heard Chris Cilizza suggest on MSNBC that this charge of sexism is impossible to quantify, but Obama is winning partially because he turned his historic candidacy into a movement, while Clinton failed to turn hers into one. That may be true. But I can’t see how she ever could have done it with coverage like this:” - such as the attack on her when she said at Wellesley, “In so many ways this all women’s college prepared me to compete in the all-boys club of presidential politics.” Of course, she was simply saying something good about what she learned at Wellesley, but the media excoriated her for “playing the victim”. The media worked very, very hard to make it impossible for Clinton to highlight the historic nature of her campaign. You’d have thought that after her win in New Hampshire, they’d at least allow a mention of the fact that it was completely unprecedented for a woman to have won a state primary, but no - it devolved into an entirely counterfactual exclamation of surprise that Hillary was not dead yet, and an “explanation” that all those Clinton voters were a bunch of racists who’d lied about how they were going to vote - although, in fact, they hadn’t lied at all, and she’d been leading in the polls all year.

Also, this:

I really look forward to the day when I don’t get up in the morning and find my formerly favorite blogs littered with so many stupid posts attempting to twist statements by Hillary Clinton into Proof of Evil. When the Republicans say stupid things about Obama, everyone is perfectly capable of seeing through it and tearing it apart - in fact, y’all do it so well that I have little to add. Why can’t we do that for Hillary? And why is it that when I try to do that, I get attacked as a “Hillary supporter”, even though I’ve made it clear that I can’t choose between her and Obama? What’s wrong with you people? Do the Republicans spend half their time trying to destroy the reputation of the Reagans, or Gingrich, or any of their standard-bearers? Do you think they would spend five seconds doing this kind of self-immolation? Pull yourselves together

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*I believe Avedon is neutral but being neutral is all it takes in some quarters to be smeared as a rabid Clinton supporter. Because in some quarters, apparently, “Clinton supporter” is an accusation.