May 18th, 2008 by ravi
Heckled and Slimed

Hillary bashing is the sport of the day and here is Barbara Ehrenreich taking her best shot:

Hillary Revealed That Women Can Be Nasty, Deceptive Candidates Too

Hillary Clinton smashed the myth of innate female moral superiority in the worst possible way — by demonstrating female moral inferiority.

In case you are tickled by this awesome scientific generalisation (Hillary’s campaign tactics are a demonstration of not her individual moral inferiority but “female moral inferiority”), there is good news — the article is chock full of them, as we have Ehrenreich once again attempting to rationalise her arbitrary preference for Obama, this time using an ill-reasoned attack on Hillary. There are a lot of reasons to reject Clinton’s candidacy, but the problem for such intellectuals (as opposed to the garden variety hipster, who constitutes a good part of the Obama fan base, and who is pleased with the warm fuzzies of “hope” and “unity” and all that rot) is that almost all of those reasons ably apply for Obama as well (hence Ehrenreich’s first attempt, a while ago, to support Obama with a “change for its own sake” argument). So, Hillary’s silly story about Bosnia becomes a damnable lie, in Ehrenreich’s (and Maureen Down and every other self-proclaimed feminist opponent of Hillary’s) defensive arguments that equate “fall guys” like Karpinski and England, the ones who were punished, to the perpetrators of the crimes, Rumsfeld and Bush, who remain unpunished.

A whopping 87% of violent crime (as of 1999) is committed by the male of the species. Comparable, in Ehrenreich’s analysis, to “women’s capacity for aggression”, trivialised as “bitchiness” or “inexplicable, hormonally-driven, hostility”. Not that different, we presume, from rape and murder, 87% of which is accounted for by men. The counter-examples of Thatcher and Clinton, the Ehrenreich reasoning seems to suggest, nullify such statistics.

In one logic-defying stroke, Ehrenreich using the same example(s) — to wit, Hillary Clinton — both rejects female superiority (England, Karpinski and Clinton are the counter-factuals of this hard science) and also proves female moral inferiority.

Supporters of Hillary (and I am not one of them) are told that they should not be supporting her “merely” because she is a woman. That would be foolish, it seems. Is one to prefer then the all-out delusion that is the stock of those who equate Obama to Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King as a man “who best upholds” virtues?

Writings of women like Ehrenreich and her less intellectual counterpart in the Obama fanbase, Maureen Dowd, are a milder form of the betrayal of feminism that are seen in the actions of Rice or Allbright. Few (among feminists) have the goal of elevating woman as an ideal. The goal has always been to defend her against such unfairness as Ehrenreich’s singling out of England and Karpinski or her presentation of Clinton as an aggressive bitch in comparison to the mythical virtuous persona of Obama.

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  • […] broad conclusions about women on the basis of her understanding of Hillary’s campaign (and throwing the few convicted women of the Abu Ghraib scandal under the bus, to arm her arguments), Maureen Down using gender specific adjectives to describe Clinton’s […]

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