Sherry Chandler

In 1650, Anne Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung up in America was published in London. If I remember correctly, it was the first book of poetry to come out of North America, certainly of that area which was to become the United States. And it was written by a woman! Bradstreet knew such a publication could be at the least a scandal. At worst, it could get her in real trouble. Anne lived in Puritan Massachusetts Bay, where women were expected to keep their decidedly secondary place. A decade earlier (1638), another Anne, Anne Hutchinson had been exiled from the colony for the heresy of daring to think for herself and teach religion. Penelope Scambly Schott has published an excellent biography in poetry of Anne Hutchinson, A Is for Anne: Mistress Hutchinson Disturbs the Commonwealth.

In an attempt to forestall a similar fate for herself, Bradstreet included this apparently fawning prologue. Irony and satire are not 20^th century inventions. The poem is a rhetorical masterpiece.

You’ll find a nice hypertext gloss here to help in understanding Bradstreet’s complex word play. Obnoxious, for example, has several meanings more than the one most of us are currently familiar with, though I like it here in the modern sense.

The Prologue

To sing of wars, of captains, and of kings,
Of cities founded, commonwealth begun,
For my mean pen are too superior things:
Or how they all, or each their dates have run
Let poets and historians set these forth,
My obscure lines shall not so dim their worth.

2
But when my wond’ring eyes and envious heart
Great Bartas sugared lines do but read o’er,
Fool I do grudge the Muses did not part
Twixt him and me that overfluent store;
A Bartas can do what a Bartas will
But simple I according to my skill.

3
From schoolboy’s tongue no rhetoric we expect,
Nor yet a sweet consort from broken strings,
Nor perfect beauty where’s a main defect;
My foolish, broken, blemished Muse so sings,
And this to mend, alas, no art is able,
“Cause nature made it so irreparable.

4
Nor can I, like that fluent sweet tongued Greek
Who lisped at first, in future times speak plain.
By art he gladly found what he did seek,
A full requital of his striving pain.
Art can do much, but this maxim’s most sure:
A weak or wounded brain admits no cure.

5
I am obnoxious to each carping tongue
Who says my hand a needle better fits,
A poet’s pen all scorn I should thus wrong,
For such despite they cast on female wits;
If what I do prove well, it won’t advance,
They’ll say it’s stol’n, or else it was by chance.

6
But sure the antique Greeks were far more mild
Else of our sex, why feigned they those nine
And poesy made Calliope’s own child;
So ‘mongst the rest they placed the arts divine;
But this weak knot they will full soon untie,
The Greeks did nought, but play the fools and lie.

7
Let Greeks be Greeks, and women what they are
Men have precedency and still excel,
It is but vain unjustly to wage war;
Men can do best, and women know it well.
Preeminence in all and each is yours;
Yet grant some small acknowledgement of ours.

8
And oh ye high flown quills that soar the skies,
And ever with your prey still catch your praise,
If e’er you deign these lowly lines your eyes,
Give thyme or parsley wreath, I ask no bays;
This mean and unrefined ore of mine
Will make your glist’ring gold but more to shine.

— Anne Bradstreet

Susan Faludi nails it in the NYTimes:

Today, the United States ranks 22nd among the 30 developed nations in its proportion of female federal lawmakers. The proportion of female state legislators has been stuck in the low 20 percent range for 15 years; women’s share of state elective executive offices has fallen consistently since 2000, and is now under 25 percent. The American political pipeline is 86 percent male.

Women’s real annual earnings have fallen for the last four years. Progress in narrowing the wage gap between men and women has slowed considerably since 1990, yet last year the Supreme Court established onerous restrictions on women’s ability to sue for pay discrimination. The salaries of women in managerial positions are on average lower today than in 1983.

Women’s numbers are stalled or falling in fields ranging from executive management to journalism, from computer science to the directing of major motion pictures. The 20 top occupations of women last year were the same as half a century ago: secretary, nurse, grade school teacher, sales clerk, maid, hairdresser, cook and so on. And just as Congress cut funds in 1929 for maternity education, it recently slashed child support enforcement by 20 percent, a decision expected to leave billions of dollars owed to mothers and their children uncollected.

Again, male politicians and pundits indulge in outbursts of “new masculinist” misogyny (witness Mrs. Clinton’s campaign coverage). Again, the news media showcase young women’s “feminist — new style” pseudo-liberation — the flapper is now a girl-gone-wild. Again, many daughters of a feminist generation seem pleased to proclaim themselves so “beyond gender” that they don’t need a female president.

And Garry Trudeau nails it at Gocomics.com

Today is, of course, the anniversary of the passage of the 19th amendment.
__________
Added: from Eric Boehlert:

What’s so startling in watching the coverage of the Clinton convention-speech story has been the complete ignorance displayed about how previous Democratic conventions have dealt with runners-up like Clinton. It’s either complete ignorance or the media’s strong desire to painstakingly avoid any historical context, which, in turn, allows the press to mislead news consumers into thinking Clinton’s appearance (as well as the gracious invitation extended by Obama) represents something unique and unusual. Something newsworthy.

Based on previous conventions, if a candidate had accumulated as many delegates and votes as Clinton did during the primaries and then did not have her name placed into nomination, that would represent a radical departure from the convention norm.

…

Even after all these months, I still don’t completely understand why Clinton’s essentially centrist campaign for the White House ginned up so much open contempt from the press corps, which has felt completely comfortable addressing her in an openly derogatory and condescending manner. The issue of her convention involvement simply allowed the press to whack her around like a piñata one more time, regardless of the facts.

Couldn’t be because she’s a woman?

If you read the whole thing, especially the last three bullet points, you might be led to believe that.

Felicia Mitchell, nominated by the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature for inclusion in Sundress’s 2008 Best of the Net anthology, calls her online chapbook There Is No Map

Here is his Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Will it help if I say that I was so homesick for South Carolina two weeks ago that I got into Google Earth and called up a tiny corner of Williamsburg County, my mother’s birthplace, and then moved to the small town of Sumter, where I was born, to find the exact neighborhood where I once played with my brothers in the dirt with our coal bucket in the backyard? It’s possible that living where I have lived for twenty years, southern Appalachia, could make me a southerner, but that’s not the case. My roots are in South Carolina, and when spring comes I’m like a dog catching a scent in the air. I want to get in the car and drive down the mountain to the low country where I was born and bred, where generations of my family were born and bred. Two years ago I brought my mother, Mama, up near me to live, and you’d think that having her with her equally southern accent and charm ten miles down the road in a cozy nursing home that I visit almost too much would make me feel as if I’d brought the most important part of South Carolina, my father already buried down there, up to me. I’ll tell you the truth. When the two of us get together and sit on the porch (since I picked her nursing home because it has a porch and flowers she can tend and horses across the street that we can watch and all the loving care you’d get in a big extended family living in a big house the way her family did a few generations ago), it’s almost like being back on her porch. But it’s not quite the same.
Would I lose points if I said I qualify for Colonial Dames but am not at all likely ever to join? Having moved away from the South Carolina where my family had lived for generations without straying far, having married a man from New Jersey, having borne a son who doesn’t talk like he comes from South Carolina—these things should not be held against me.

I currently live in Meadowview, a rural town in Virginia near the border of Tennessee, and work in Emory, an even more rural town in the interior of Meadowview (Emory is a village within a town, a very small village within a very small town).

Her nominated poem is also called “There Is No Map.” You can read it here.

__________
There is the list of all six poets nominated by the Mule for The Best of the Net. Like Helen, I hope one of us makes the cut.

But three servants and a free-standing lab with a full-time lab assistant. And of course patronizing friends.

I really didn’t care much at all for Dark Victory, not even for Humphrey Bogart and his faked Irish accent. Sort of fun to see Ronald Reagan playing a drunken playboy, though it’s possible that being incoherently amiable wasn’t a big stretch for him.

I can see that this is a great performance by Bette Davis before she became “Bette Davis” but the plot is so ridiculous and the rest of the cast so lame that I don’t really care much. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen Humphrey Bogart do.

By the way, as a Kentuckian I feel compelled to set the record straight. I’ve seen reviews that say that Bogart is playing a “stable hand.” He is, in fact, the trainer for the heiress’s stable of steeplechasers. Not a lowly job, though it doesn’t exactly make him one of the gentry.

From the ACLU:

WASHINGTON – Today, in a blatant assault upon civil liberties and the right to privacy, the Senate passed an unconstitutional domestic spying bill that violates the Fourth Amendment and eliminates any meaningful role for judicial oversight of government surveillance. The FISA Amendments Act of 2008 was approved by a vote of 69 to 28 and is expected to be signed into law by President Bush shortly. This bill essentially legalizes the president’s unlawful warrantless wiretapping program revealed in December 2005 by the New York Times.

“Once again, Congress blinked and succumbed to the president’s fear-mongering. With today’s vote, the government has been given a green light to expand its power to spy on Americans and run roughshod over the Constitution,” said Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union. “This legislation will give the government unfettered and unchecked access to innocent Americans’ international communications without a warrant. This is not only unconstitutional, but absolutely un-American.”

The FISA Amendments Act nearly eviscerates oversight of government surveillance by allowing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to review only general procedures for spying rather than individual warrants. The FISC will not be told any specifics about who will actually be wiretapped, thereby undercutting any meaningful role for the court and violating the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable search and seizure.

The bill further trivializes court review by authorizing the government to continue a surveillance program even after the government’s general spying procedures are found insufficient or unconstitutional by the FISC. The government has the authority to wiretap through the entire appeals process, and then keep and use whatever information was gathered in the meantime. A provision touted as a major “concession” by proponents of the bill calls for investigations by the inspectors general of four agencies overseeing spying activities. But members of Congress who do not sit on the Judiciary or Intelligence committees will not be guaranteed access to the agencies’ reports.

The bill essentially grants absolute retroactive immunity to telecommunication companies that facilitated the president’s warrantless wiretapping program over the last seven years by ensuring the dismissal of court cases pending against those companies. The test for the companies’ right to immunity is not whether the government certifications they acted on were actually legal – only whether they were issued. Because it is public knowledge that certifications were issued, all of the pending cases will be summarily dismissed. This means Americans may never learn the truth about what the companies and the government did with our private communications.

“With one vote, Congress has strengthened the executive branch, weakened the judiciary and rendered itself irrelevant,” said Caroline Fredrickson, Director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. “This bill – soon to be law – is a constitutional nightmare. Americans should know that if this legislation is enacted and upheld, what they say on international phone calls or emails is no longer private. The government can listen in without having a specific reason to do so. Our rights as Americans have been curtailed and our privacy can no longer be assumed.”

In advance of the president’s signature, the ACLU announced its plan to challenge the new law in court.

“This fight is not over. We intend to challenge this bill as soon as President Bush signs it into law,” said Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU National Security Project. “The bill allows the warrantless and dragnet surveillance of Americans’ international telephone and email communications. It plainly violates the Fourth Amendment.”

You can donate here.

And then there’s this from the Baltimore Sun:

With Congress on the verge of outlining new parameters for National Security Agency eavesdropping between suspicious foreigners and Americans, lawmakers are leaving largely untouched a host of government programs that critics say involves far more domestic surveillance than the wiretaps they sought to remedy.

These programs - most of them highly classified - are run by an alphabet soup of federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies. They sift, store and analyze the communications, spending habits and travel patterns of U.S. citizens, searching for suspicious activity.

The surveillance includes data-mining programs that allow the NSA and the FBI to sift through large databanks of e-mails, phone calls and other communications, not for selective information, but in search of suspicious patterns.

Other information, like routine bank transactions, is kept in databases similarly monitored by the Central Intelligence Agency.

“There’s virtually no branch of the U.S. government that isn’t in some way involved in monitoring or surveillance,” said Matthew Aid, an intelligence historian and fellow at the National Security Archives at The George Washington University. “We’re operating in a brave new world.”

…

“You don’t have to look far into history to know that when the government, any government, is given secret authorities, that those authorities are ultimately abused,” said Mike German, a former FBI agent who is now policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. “You don’t even have to attribute bad motives to anyone. In an intelligence officer’s zeal to protect the country, they often will overstep their bounds.”

In part to assuage privacy concerns, the Department of Homeland Security has established a privacy czar to ensure that the technologies and programs initiated by the federal agency do not erode privacy laws or violate civil liberties.

Read the rest. Somehow I don’t have a lot of faith that our own little caesar for privacy will have much success.

Or, you could just read Lance, who sees what we’ve all been seeing for a while now, The bad guys are going to get away. The movie isn’t supposed to end like this:

They’re going to ride off into the sunset, their saddle bags stuffed with loot, whooping and hollering and laughing at the marshalls who can’t get their boots in their stirrups to get on their horses to ride after them. They’re going to live out their lives on the other side of the Rio, safe and fat and happy in their haciendas, surrounded by friends and fawning servants and beautiful senoritas with roses in their hair playing the guitar and singing ribald songs about limp-dicked Democrats.

George Bush probably doesn’t even know he’s loathed and despised and he probably won’t ever know. He’ll always be in the company of flatterers and sycophants who will assure him over and over again that he was a great President and he saved the country from the terrorists and children will be singing songs about him for the next three hundred years.

Dick Cheney and Karl Rove know they are hated by all decent people, but they think decent people are chumps and saps and to be hated by them is a sure sign of success.

Update: I received this e-mail from Chris Dodd, entitled “A Heavy Heart”:

Yesterday was a sad day for the United States Senate.

It is my hope that the courts will undo the damage done to the Constitution.

But let us stand tall, knowing that by working together we were able to make wiretapping and retroactive immunity part of the national discourse these last number of months.

We came together – all of you, Senator Feingold, bloggers like Jane Hamsher and Glenn Greenwald, organizations like the EFF and ACLU, and untold hundreds of thousands of Americans who simply wanted to make sure that this one, last insult did not happen with ease.

I’m sorry we weren’t successful.

I just hope I’m lucky enough to have you by my side in the next fight, whatever that may be.

Thanks for all you’ve done.

Chris Dodd

from the Boston Herald:

Professor, peacemaker, penman, publican - Padraig O’Malley is many things to many people.

But today, the 64-year-old UMass-Boston professor is set to cement his status as one of the world’s top unsung peace brokers with the announcement of a historic agreement between warring Iraqi factions.

For the past 10 months, O’Malley has been the driving force behind bringing Shi’ite and Sunni parties together to thrash out a pact to ban militias from operating outside the law in Iraq.

“The move to bring people together and march without violence is his inspiration,” said Peter O’Malley, Padraig’s younger brother. “We grew up in Ireland, which was very fractious. So growing up in that atmosphere and, I would say, the influence of Martin Luther King inspired him.”

King’s inspiration, O’Malley said, pushed his brother to play crucial roles in forging peace deals in both Northern Ireland and South Africa.

The Iraqi agreement - described as a framework to allow further discussion between opposing Iraqis - was hammered out during privately funded reconciliation meetings in Helsinki, Finland, organized by O’Malley.

…

But away from the hotbed of violence, the native Dubliner has more modest roots in the heart of Cambridge where, in 1969, he and his brother opened the now landmark Irish bar, The Plough and Stars. They also co-founded poetry magazine Ploughshares.

Via qarrtsiluni

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.
—Oscar Wilde, from The Importance of Being Earnest*

Oscar Wilde’s mother, Jane Francesca Agnes, Lady Wilde (1821-1896), had her own run-ins with the law. She was a fire-brand for Irish independence and women’s rights. Under the pseudonym Speranza, she published poems and commentary in The Nation, a Nationalist newspaper established by the Young Ireland Party. I often see her poetry described as “anti-famine.” Speranza was active in the 1840s; the potato blight struck in 1845.

Up until The Great Hunger, the Young Irelanders had been a nonviolent movement. The famine changed that. When, in 1848, Speranza wrote an article calling for armed rebellion and the paper’s publisher refused to reveal her name, the British government shut the paper down.

The Young Irelander or Famine Rebellion began on July 29, 1848, after the British suspended habeas corpus. It failed rather quickly. One of its leaders, William Smith O’Brien, was found guilty of treason and subsequently sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. Another, Thomas Francis Meagher, found guilty of sedition, was also sentenced to death. Because of “public outcry,” both sentences were commuted to expulsion to Van Diemen’s Land. Meagher later escaped to the United States, where he led the Irish Brigade in the Civil War.

Lady Wilde was widowed at 55 and, discovering that her husband had left her very little, she moved from Dublin to London to live with her older son Willie, who was a journalist. Oscar, of course, was also in London at this time. Lady Wilde eked out a living writing books and articles on Irish folklore.

She was among those who urged Oscar to stick in London and fight his conviction.

At age 75, she contracted bronchitis, and knowing that she was dying, she asked permission to visit Oscar in prison. The permission was denied. She died on February 3, 1896. Oscar paid for her funeral but could not afford a tombstone so she was buried anonymously in common ground.

The Victorian Women Writers Project has an online copy of Poems by Speranza, 2nd edition, published about 1871. I find them the worst kind of patriotic doggerel, the kind of thing Wilfred Owen later condemned in “Dulce et Decorum Est.” Given Lady Wilde’s circumstances, the excessive ardor for heroes might be understood, but that still can’t make her a great poet by modern standards. The example below is the most palatable one I could find.

Her Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland, posted by Library Ireland, is a lot more fun.

There was a man, also, equally dreaded on account of the strange, fatal power of his glance; and so many accidents and misfortunes were traced to his presence that finally the neighbours insisted that he should wear a black patch over the Evil Eye, not to be removed unless by request; for learned gentlemen, curious in such things, sometimes came to him to ask for a proof of his power, and he would try it for a wager while drinking with his friends.

One day, near an old ruin of a castle, he met a boy weeping in great grief for his pet pigeon, which had got up to the very top of the ruin, and could not be coaxed down.

“What will you give me,” asked the man, “if I bring it down for you?”

“I have nothing to give,” said the boy, “but I will pray to God for you. Only get me back my pigeon, and I shall be happy.”

Then the man took off the black patch and looked up steadfastly at the bird; when all of a sudden it fell to the ground and lay motionless, as if stunned; but there was no harm done to it, and the boy took it up and went his way, rejoicing.

Lady Wilde’s poem. I’ve no idea who the traitor is. Tone and Fitzgerald were players in the Rebellion of 1798:

A LAMENT.

I.

GONE from us–dead to us–he whom we worshipped so!
      Low lies the altar we raised to his name;
Madly his own hand hath shattered and laid it low–
      Madly his own breath hath blasted his fame.
He whose proud bosom once raged with humanity,
      He whose broad forehead was circled with might,
Sunk to a time-serving, driv’lling inanity–
      God! Why not spare our loved country the sight?

II.

Was it the gold of the stranger that tempted him?
      Ah! we’d have pledged to him body and soul;
Toiled for him–fought for him–starved for him–died for him–
      Smiled, tho’ our graves were the steps to his goal.
Breathed he one word in his deep, earnest whispering,
      Wealth, crown, and kingdom, were laid at his feet;
Raised he his right hand, the millions would round him cling–
      Hush! ’tis the Sassenach ally you greet.

III.

Leaders have fallen–we wept, but we triumphed, too–
      Patriot blood never sinks in the sod;
He falls, and the jeers of the nation he bent to sue
      Rise like accusing weird spirits to God.
Weep for him–weep for him–deep is the tragedy–
      Angels themselves now might doubt of God’s truth;
Souls from their bloody graves, shuddering, rise to see
      How he avenges their lost, murdered youth.

IV.

Tone, and Fitzgerald, and the pale-brow’d enthusiast–
      He whose heart broke, but shrank not from the strife;
Davis, the latest loved–he who in glory passed,
      Kindling Hope’s lamp with the chrism of life.
Well may they wail for him–power and might were his–
      Loved as no mortal was loved in the land–
What has he sold them for? Sorrow and shame it is,
      Fair words and false from a recreant band.

V.

Time’s shade was on him; what matter? we loved him yet;
      Aye, would have torn the veins with our teeth,
Made him a bath of our young blood to pay the debt–
      Purchased his life, tho’ we bought it by death.
Pray for him–pray: an archangel has fallen low;
      There’s a throne less in Heaven, there is sorrow on earth.
Weep, angels–laugh, demons! When his hand could strike the blow,
      Where shall we seek for truth, honour, or worth?

— Lady Jane Wilde, from Poems
Transcribed and encoded by Carolyn C. Sherayko
Edited by Perry Willett
TEI formatted filesize uncompressed: approx. 339 kbytes
Library Electronic Text Resource Service (LETRS), Indiana University
Bloomington, IN
July 31, 1996

____________
*I found this quote as a head note to Seamus Heaney’s lecture “Speranza in Reading: On ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’” in The Redress of Poetry (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1995). A tidbit from that essay: according to Heaney, Lady Wilde traced her maiden name, Elgee, to Alighieri, and so considered herself a descendant of Dante.

Here is the full text of Hillary Clinton’s speech today, in which she thanked her supporters and endorsed Barack Obama.

It was an excellent speech that made it amply clear why so many people have voted for her this year.

Some clips are floating around but they only pull out the endorsement. I think you need to watch or read the whole thing, not the sound bite.

It was more than just a necessary endorsement of Barack Obama, though it contained that. It was a statement of principle. It was a concession, but there was not much of defeat in it.

To describe it, I yield to one more eloquent than I, Big Tent Democrat:

Hillary Clinton did something that is very difficult in my opinion, she made a great speech out of a concession endorsement speech. Why?

Because she conceded nothing on the issues nor in any way discounted what she and her supporters accomplished. And then she endorsed him, but the endorsement was not the standard stump endorsement. It was an intelligent, rational, respectful argument to her supporters for why she was endorsing Barack Obama. she would speak to the issues and punctuate her line with “and that is why we must elect Barack Obama President.”

She then recognized the historic nature of this election. As I wrote last Tuesday night, while a dream was realized when the Democratic Party nominated an African American as our Presidential candidate, a dream was thwarted also, that of a woman nominee. Hillary Clinton honored BOTH moments in this speech.

It was one of the best speeches I have ever seen.

I watched it on CSPAN, which I hear will re-run it later today.

Thanks to JimT:

Read also Rebecca Traister: Hillary’s Final Curtain

These national discussions just keep coming at us, don’t they?

Clinton Bloc Becomes the Prize for Election Day (I supply emphasis):

…Even the Democratic National Committee chairman is avidly trying to make up for accusations that he allowed sexism in the race to pass unchallenged.

“The wounds of sexism need to be the subject of a national discussion,” the chairman, Howard Dean, said in an interview. “Many of the most prominent people on TV behaved like middle schoolers” toward Mrs. Clinton.

…

Former Gov. Madeleine M. Kunin of Vermont suggested in an interview that Mr. Obama promise to appoint women to half his cabinet positions.

Ms. Steinem advised that Mr. Obama deliver the same sort of ambitious speech about sex that he did on race. An aide said the campaign was considering such an address.

Jenny Backus, a Democratic consultant unaffiliated with either campaign, wondered whether Mr. Obama might give Chelsea Clinton a prominent role in his efforts.

When Mr. Dean reached out to Cynthia Ruccia, who started an organization of female Clinton swing-state voters threatening to vote for Mr. McCain, Ms. Ruccia asked that the Democratic convention include a symbolic first ballot for Mrs. Clinton’s delegates. Mr. Dean discouraged the idea on the grounds of unity.

He has belatedly recognized the cries of sexism, Mr. Dean said, particularly when a friend showed him a video compilation of broadcasters’ comments about Mrs. Clinton.

“We all get over it when our candidates don’t win,” he said. “What you don’t get over is feeling like you’ve been insulted by some of the leading institutions in America and no one said anything about it.”

…

The Obama campaign will fight back, after waiting a respectful beat or two. In conversations with Mr. Obama and his aides, “I’ve tried to make sure that everyone understood that these women have a right to feel frustrated and angry,” said Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri, an important ally who is one of his leading emissaries to women. “To try to make that less than real is a huge mistake.”

As he declared himself the nominee on Tuesday, Mr. Obama cut a particularly woman-friendly figure on stage, dedicating his speech to his grandmother and affectionately bumping fists with his wife, Michelle.

Indeed, descriptions of those women, along with his mother and daughters, will be regular features of Mr. Obama’s speeches, Ms. Sebelius said. Women will ultimately choose Mr. Obama not because of symbolic overtures, she added, but because of his stances on health care, the economy and education, areas where his positions closely resemble Mrs. Clinton’s.

The key, Ms. McCaskill said, is approaching Mrs. Clinton’s supporters with utmost humility. And, Ms. Backus added, that is not always the strongest suit of the young people who are some of Mr. Obama’s most enthusiastic supporters.

“Not nyeh nyeh nyeh nyeh,” Ms. McCaskill said, making a taunting sound. “We need them very, very badly, and we shouldn’t be able to be afraid to say that we need them.”

H/t Big Tent Democrat

But they didn’t need us last week. Weren’t too worried about those adolescent commentators then either.

I wonder how many women are going to see this sort of Damascus Road conversion as conveniently timed? Sort of an “I’m sorry honey. I’ll never do it again.”

They might want to polish up that humble rhetoric too. To quote Paul Lukasiak, “these women have a right to feel frustrated and angry” is not the same as “women have a reason to be angry.”

While I’m not a woman, this “right to be” language is the equivalent of an “I’m sorry that you were offended”, faux-apology — its a failure to acknowledge that the anger is legitimate, and that its not just the media that is at fault, but the candidate and the party itself.

Paul thinks this is all misdirection to distract us from the corruption of the DNC.

And, after all, it is not just women who voted for Senator Clinton over Senator Obama. There’s the question of the “Appalachia problem.”

Speaking of Appalachia, I still want policy specifics. In Bristol, Virginia on Thursday, Senator Obama got an enthusiastic response to promises that he’d provide everybody with health care but he didn’t say how he plans to do that.

Gail Collins is relatively clear-eyed about what Clinton accomplished:

Here’s where the sexism does come in. If Barack had failed in his attempt to make history by becoming the first African-American presidential nominee, you can bet we’d have treated his defeat with the dignity it deserved. Even if he went over the deep end at the finale and found it hard to get around to a graceful concession. [Ed. note: I wish people would get over this meme. The timing of Clinton's concession is well within the tradition and will be perfectly graceful. See Anglachel.]

For a long time, Obama supporters have seen party unity as something that Hillary could provide by capitulating. It also requires the Democrats to acknowledge what she’s achieved. If that makes them feel like wimps, let them take it out on John McCain.

…

Over the past months, Clinton has seemed haunted by the image of the “nice girl” who gives up the fight because she’s afraid the boys will be angry if they don’t get their way. She told people she would never, ever say: “I’m the girl, I give up.” She would never let her daughter, or anybody else’s daughter, think that she quit because things got too tough.

And she never did. Nobody is ever again going to question whether it’s possible for a woman to go toe-to-toe with the toughest male candidate in a race for president of the United States. Or whether a woman could be strong enough to serve as commander in chief.

Her campaign didn’t resolve whether a woman who seems tough enough to run the military can also seem likable enough to get elected. But she helped pave the way. So many battles against prejudice are won when people get used to seeing women and minorities in roles that only white men had held before. By the end of those 54 primaries and caucuses, Hillary had made a woman running for president seem normal.

…

For all her vaunting ambition, she was never a candidate who ran for president just because it’s the presidency. She thought about winning in terms of the things she could accomplish, and she never forgot the women’s issues she had championed all her life — repair of the social safety net, children’s rights, support for working mothers.

It’s not the same as winning the White House. But it’s a lot.

This one’s for Larry, or his alter-ego Slemp, who thanks Africa for the banjo and seems to think both that he knows a lot of women in need of veiling (har har) and that our government needs a purgative. After the hi-jinx of the week-end, I’d say the Democratic party anyway has had a purge.

For full documentation of the atrocities, see Dana Milbank. Iphie saw it a bit differently.

The best version of this song is done by Uncle Dave Macon. This one by Lew Dite is the best I could find on YouTube.

Full lyrics:

I’se gwine down town for to buy me a sack of flour
Gwine cook it every hour
Keep my skillet good and greasy all the time, time, time
Keep my skillet good and greasy all the time

I’se chickens in my sack, bloodhounds on my track
I’m pullin’ for my shanty home, home, home
I’m pullin’ for my shanty home

If they beat me to the door, I’ll put ‘em under the floor
Keep my skillet good and greasy all the time, time, time
Keep my skillet good and greasy all the time

I’se a-walking down the street and I stoled a ham of meat
Got my skillet good and greasy all the time, time, time
Got my skillet good and greasy all the time

I’se gwine to the hills for to buy me a jug of brandy
Gwine give it all to Mandy
Keep her good and drunk and boozy all the time, time, time
Keep her good and drunk and boozy all the time

Honey, if you say so, I’ll never work-a no more
I’ll lay round your shanty all the time, time, time
I’ll lay round your shanty all the time

And if you’ve got this far, you might be interested in this item from the Lexington Herald-Leader:

Kentucky Democrats in Tuesday’s primary vote sent a clear message — by 35 percentage points — that they wanted U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton to be their party’s presidential nominee.

But Kentucky Republicans, on the day after the primary, sent their own signals that they’d be pleased to have the Democrats nominate U.S. Sen. Barack Obama.

“The results speak for themselves,” said GOP U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell, who is up for re-election this fall. “He outspent Hillary Clinton and lost our state 2-to-1 — 65 percent to 30 — and carried only two counties, Jefferson County and Fayette County. That’s not an indication of great appeal to Kentucky voters.”

McConnell, in fact, immediately linked his Democratic opponent in the November race, Bruce Lunsford, to Obama in a statement on election night and the next day to reporters. Expect him to use the phrase “Obama-Lunsford agenda” often this fall.