Hating Hillary Clinton, fun for misogynists left and right

Original Link: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23650364-20261,00.html

Bob Ellis, on the ABC's Unleashed website, indulges in some old-fashioned woman hating, disguised as love for Obama

LAST Monday Hillary Clinton said she'd obliterate Iran if Iran attacked Israel and on Tuesday picked up some Jewish, redneck, gun-loving, wog-hating, duck-shooting, Catholic and early dementia votes in nursing homes, and by 10 per cent won handily the "rust belt", "lunch bucket" and Amish-cluttered state of Pennsylvania in which she was leading by 30 per cent a monthbefore.
I'm getting to hate this woman.

Her towering frigidity, blazing hubris, bellowing mendacity, varying accent from region to region, her high school-standard acting and ceaseless haughty impersonation of Debbie Reynolds in The Unsinkable Molly Brown have got me properly simmering, and her confident, thick-witted, fist-in-the-face oratory, in a voice a Spectator columnist once well described as "a half-shout", puts me in mind on some nights of the full moon like the one outside my window of the baleful, cruel contralto of my old lost love Bronwyn Bishop.

She is a stranger to consistency, sincerity and (at a guess) oral sex, a violent critic now and then of NAFTA, which she and her husband thought up, and (it was wittily observed on CNN this week) knows in the end about as much about the inner workings of executive government as the White House pastry cook.

(Barack Obama) is, in short, the present world's likely saviour if he makes it through November and this yapping troll at his ankle may yet bring him down ... In other years I would not have said these rancid, ill-humoured things about Hillary. ... But this year is different. This is the year of Obama.

Noel Sheppard, associate editor of NewsBusters, on the media bias against Hillary Clinton:

HERE'S something you don't see every day: a liberal, female editor of a leading liberal online magazine stating with cameras rolling that most press members "hate, hate Hillary Clinton". Yet that's exactly what occurred (on) Sunday morning when Salon's editor-in-chief Joan Walsh spoke some truths about the media's love affair with Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama, as well as their disdain for the former first lady.

Walsh: "I was struck when I got to Iowa and New Hampshire in January by how our media colleagues were just swooning over Barack Obama. That is not too strong a word. They were swooning. I was at a speech, I remember it, I will write about it some day, in Manchester, and every, the biggest names in our business were there, and they were, they could repeat some of his speech lines to one another. It was like a Bruce Springsteen concert where the fans sing along. And, you know, I respected it to some extent.

"He's a towering political figure. Of our generation, he's probably the best politician, he's inspiring. And, reporters, white reporters, black reporters, we want to get beyond racism in America. So he was, he was inspiring. The downside, though, is that they hate, hate Hillary Clinton, most of them."

Joan Smith, in British newspaper The Independent, catalogues Ellis's counterparts on the Right:

LET'S start with the T-shirts, mugs and stickers at the online "Hillary vilification shop" where images of her as a rat, a mad cow and Medusa are on sale. "Hillary will eat our babies," one message proclaims. "Pillory Hillary 2008," says another, next to an image of Clinton in the stocks. Most sinister of all is "Wanna See Hillary Run? Throw Rocks At Her", echoing the barbaric practice of stoning women to death. Take to the airwaves in America and more bile pours out; right-wing talk show host Rush Limbaugh, whose show has 14.5 million listeners, has identified something he called a "testicle lockbox" as an attribute of the New York senator. Is this related, I wonder, to a vagina dentata? Perhaps that's what Clifford May, a former Republican National Committee spokesman, had in mind when he called on Clinton to define herself as "a Vaginal-American". What are they so afraid of?

"There's just something about her that feels castrating, overbearing and scary," declared MSNBC host Tucker Carlson.

Scary but pathetic, says Limbaugh: "Will America want to watch a woman get older before their eyes on a daily basis?" Clinton is 60, 11 years younger than the Republican candidate John McCain, but ageing "makes men look more authoritative, accomplished and distinguished", according to Limbaugh.

"This is sociopathic woman-hating," (says) feminist author Robin Morgan. "If it were about Jews, we would recognise it instantly as anti-Semitic propaganda; if about race, as KKK poison. Where is our sense of outrage as citizens, voters, Americans?"