This just in: Hillary is a lady

Not pictured: A communist Nazi shark chewing on my leg and denigrating the constitution to make me cry.

Someone should put the American political press and a good portion of the electorate into a bag and whack it with a hammer.

For those of you not in America or otherwise not fit to vote in our general elections due to criminal lack of political attention, here's what happened recently to bring Hillary’s gender to light for our cherished fourth estate.

Senator Hillary Clinton, who was recently whupped in Iowa’s primary by Senator and spokesmodel-for-change Barack Obama, found herself on the receiving end of the powder-puffiest question since Christie Brinkley asked Billy Joel if he wanted to come up for coffee, viz: "how do you do it". The question may or may not have been asked in the context of "I'm a woman and I'd like to know how you keep your hair looking so nice." A few blogs - like the WSJ's - say that was the context, but I couldn't find video to that effect and besides the WSJ is now owned by Rupert Murdoch, so they can bark their conservative, misogynist banter down a well as far as I'm concerned.

Was it a planted question? Could be, but the world will never know because our political press has (yet a-fucking-gain) been distracted by the shininess of a brand new human interest drama masquerading as a proper story. Here, watch the video. I expected to be cynical and appalled by it, but if you can put aside the worry that the whole thing’s a setup, it may be quite affecting.



When I saw this, it reminded me of my stepfather, M. (not a woman). For years he’s been a gruff political commentator in our house. Of a morning, he’d gently intimate to us all at breakfast that a speck of political dissent was germinating in his head by slamming the paper down on the table and bellowing

"Those!"

"BASTARDS!"

“What is it?” we’d ask, and he’d take Reagan, the elder Bush, or a local politician to task for fucking up the world for us kids. “They’re making it worse for you,” he’d say. “We almost had it so good, and now they’re making it worse.” He’s 83 years old, so he should know if the world is getting better or worse.

M. is grimly patriotic about the U.S.A.’s potential and furious about the current state of it. (Distinguish this, please, from the current brand of popular patriotism which is more like supporting your high school football team – your team sucks; you cheer for them; rinse; repeat. If anyone tells you your team sucks, you tell them to fuck off – because you secretly know it but you can’t change schools and you can’t improve the goddamned team.)

Anyway, M. can’t even talk about our current neo-con administration because he can’t reconcile their actions with caring about the country more than they care about themselves, and by the country I mean all of us people in said country, and by themselves I mean themselves and Halliburton!).

Now, all along I’ve thought Hillary to be a self-serving, calculating, killbot (like most politicians – see, in particular, the newly minted John McCain who no longer seems to believe in anything but getting elected). It comes with the territory and I just have to vote for the pantomiming reptile who mums a political agenda closest to mine and hope that the “lies” term in the equation, “what they say” + “lies” = “what they’ll do”, is roughly the same for all the candidates.

So when I saw Hillary getting choked up about the responsibility she feels for the country and the fear she feels about what’s happening to it, I thought, “aha, perhaps behind that killbot skin she’s cultivated for political survival, she actually gives a rat’s ass about the citizens of the U.S. – including Time’s Man of 2006, yours truly.

But here's the thing, again for you non-US folk: It's still a serious debate in this horrifyingly misogynist country whether or not a woman can successfully run a country. No, I’m not kidding. It’s as though (“as though” he says coyly) they didn’t know about other countries. India anyone? Canada? The U.K (okay, it was Margaret Thatcher and she ruined the U.K. as savagely as Reagan screwed up things in the U.S. (and, I'll concede, the USSR), but no one thought the island would sink into the sea while she closeted herself for a good cry).

It turns out it's such a debate that people are saying - pay attention now - that Hillary's display of emotions has made her more feminine in the eyes of female voters and so now they’re voting for her. This might be an opportune place to point out that the whole premise of that is also hugely misogynist. So, men vote for Hillary because of her stance on the issues whereas women vote for her because she's a member of the sisterhood of the traveling pants? Give me a break you hypocrites.

I was just listening to a show on NPR (national public radio) where the host(-ess if you must know) asked three women who voted for Hillary if they’d voted for her on the strength of her crying and her newly revealed womanness. “Oh, yes”, they all responded. One went so far as to say she was voting for Hillary because the U.S. needed a woman president to clean up the mess made by the men.

Oh Christ! I cringed particularly at that because nothing galvanizes crazy misogynist voters like feeling there are crazy misandronist voters out there who need stopping. Not to mention, some of the Presidents of this country have been pretty good despite bearing the burden of a Y chromosome.

So I'm cheesed off at all of this nonsense about gender. Is it possible that a person's motivations for doing the job (plus perhaps their skill once they're elected) are more important than his or her race or color?

I guess, like M., I'd thought it was getting better, but where are my liberal peeps at? Bringing race and gender into serious discussion of an election is crazy. It's single-issue voting for the intellectually and emotionally retarded.

It drives me batty because it's such a stark reminder that the press isn't covering the candidates or their positions so much as it's covering the election. It's not your job to predict the goddamn election you opportunistic jackals! It's your job to pull back the shades and shine some light on the candidates so we can do a better job separating them from their lies come election day.

Speaking of, I’m probably going to vote for a black fellow or a woman in November, but God as my witness, I’ll cast a ballot for a white dude if I he’s my alternative to a whacked out evangelist who’s publicly stated he doesn’t believe in evolution. Sounds silly when you put it like that doesn’t it. Goddamned American politics!