As we watch Senator Kelly Ayotte be targeted non-stop, we're reminded of just how sexist the left can be. With Ayotte, it started last fall when she dared to question the Benghazi story. She was correct to question it and questions still remain. There are those who insists that's not the case, from their easy recliners, sipping from their Hope 'N Change mugs. But we were at the House hearings and the Senate hearings on Benghazi. We've heard it all.
Ayotte, if you've forgotten, was dumb or racist or really dumb or any number of things because she questioned the official line on Benghazi. That resulted in the first round of bashings. The second round only recently started. If you missed it, April 17th, one of the gun control bills went down in flames -- in a 54 to 46 vote. (60 votes were needed for it to pass because, Ted Barrett and Tom Cohen of CNN explain, "Due to procedural steps agreed to by both sides, all the amendments considered Wednesday required 60 votes to pass in the 100-member chamber, meaning Democrats and their independent allies who hold 55 seats needed support from some GOP senators to push through the Manchin-Toomey proposal.") Five Democrats voted against it (Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid only after it was clear it didn't have 60 votes). Most Republicans also voted against it. Kelly Ayotte is a Republican.
Our impression of Senator Ayotte wasn't formed last fall. Our impression came as a result of her work in Senate Committee hearings. A November 10, 2011 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing resulted in Isaiah's The World Today Just Nuts "Portions."
Ayotte is not a joke in that comic because she's not a joke in the hearings. (The idiot insisting that veterans' remains weren't put in landfills "these were portions" is a joke -- a very sad and sick joke and he is Chief of Staff of the Air Force General Norton Schwartz..) She's not an idiot. She's not an airhead. You may or may not agree with a vote she casts, but she is a smart person. She was a prosecutor and she was also New Hampshire's Attorney General.
She was one of 46 senators to vote against the gun control bill.
She somehow ended up the only one targeted.
Last week Cedric's "Was she lost? Did she cross state lines accidentally?" and Wally's "THIS JUST IN! BAG LADY WITH 100 CATS OR ACTIVIST?" (joint-post) offended some. It didn't offend us. Erica Lafferty is not a resident of New Hampshire. Ayotte held a town hall for constituents. Lafferty, whose mother died in the Sandy Hook massacre showed up to hector Ayotte about her vote. Cedric and Wally were right. It was a stunt.
If Lafferty wants to interrupt a fundraiser, if she wants to occupy Ayotte's office, we're fine with that. But town halls are for residents. Our representative in the House? She doesn't do them anymore. They got a little too real for Nancy Pelosi. If she were to do some again and we had someone from outside our district asking questions, we'd be offended. Town halls are for constituents. Take your stunts somewhere else.
Ayotte has faced questions about her vote on that bill from her constituents including at town halls. Cedric and Wally didn't criticize that nor do we. But Lafferty needs to grasp that her mourning does not trump everything in the whole wide world nor does it allow her to be a resident of all fifty states. She needs to learn to work with her own senators and her own representative.
Watching the coverage of Lafferty's nonsense, we were reminded of just how ugly the left can be. It was all so much like 2007 and 2008 when CODEPINK was 'bird-dogging.'
You may remember that they were going to bird-dog pro-war senators. Somehow that just came down to Hillary Clinton. Barack Obama voted for funding the war over and over but CODEPINK couldn't protest him (of course not, Jodi was a bundler for Barack -- a detail she 'forgot' to reveal when CODEPINK announced their bird dogging campaign). They also avoided John Edwards who did vote for the authorization.
They went after Hillary. And did so pretending to be feminists.
But feminists don't start hunger strikes in a country filled with young girls and women with eating disorders. Nor do feminists hold Hillary to a standard higher than the one that have for Barack, John Edwards or any other Democratic male.
It's sort of like the current Ayotte standard. Though four Democrats voted against it (five if you count Reid but, again, he only voted "no" after the votes were known and supposedly so that the measure could come for a vote again), Republican Ayotte was the one targeted. Though the Senate is overwhelmingly male, Ayotte is the senator targeted.
Bernard. a Libertarian who's been a reader of this site for five years, e-mailed Ty "MSNBC Has A Kelly Ayotte Obsession" -- an article by Jeff Poor for The Daily Caller. Bernard asked in his e-mail, "Am I wrong to be bothered by what MSNBC is doing?" Over a 24 hour period, Poor counted 11 segments on Ayotte's vote where she was hectored by the likes of Melissa Lie Face Lacewell Harris Perry, the woman who Princeton dropped after Perry went on various TV programs in 2008 claiming to be an independent analysts when in fact she'd been volunteering for the Barack Obama presidential campaign since 2007. The failure to make that disclosure is a huge ethical lapse and why she's no longer at an ivy league school. (We documented it all in real time. Far too many times to note in this. Check the archives or Google her name and "lie face.")
No, Bernard, you're not wrong to be upset. 11 segments?
And how many did they have on Iraq? Where over 700 people died from violence last month, according to the United Nations, the highest death toll in five years. Where Nouri al-Maliki attacked a sit-in in Hawija. How many segments did they do on Iraq?
See, it's all the same, it's Hillary all over again.
The left likes to pretend it's not sexist but sexism is all that drives it most days. So they glom on a woman and try to destroy her. Last fall was about trying to turn Ayotte into a village idiot. You may remember Katha Pollitt was impressed with Sarah Palin's 2008 GOP Convention speech, she even said so on Journo-list. But when it came to write about it for the public, Katha took part in the non-stop attacks on Palin. Katha wasn't alone. And last fall was all about trying to do to Ayotte what they did to Palin.
That didn't work.
But they're not done with her yet. Since their attempts to make her an idiot didn't work, they're now trying to destroy her character.
11 segments in 24 hours? It's an echo chamber. And you can find it all over the place because when a woman is attacked, there are always people rushing to join in. (See "Media: The allure of Bash The Bitch.")
Now women can be criticized and in many forms and ways. And that doesn't mean sexism.
But 46 senators voted against the gun bill -- including Democrats -- and yet the person the 'movement' is focusing on is a woman? That's your first hint that it's all about sexism.
You're second is the CODEPINK style attempts at stunt publicity.
CODEPINK isn't about feminism and their (mis)leader Medea Benjamin reminded the country of that as April drew to a close (see Trina's "F**k Medea Benajmin -- Rape is not "Sex," you stupid b**ch" and Ann's "This rape victim says CODEPINK is no friend of women"). There was Medea writing about a man facing charges of rape but she termed it "sex allegations."
That's not feminism.
In the past, we've noted Bob Somerby's sexism. There have been many e-mails since the last time we called him out for it. Ty counted 115 thanking us because, in his rush to prove us wrong, Somerby (briefly) found a woman other than long dead Laura Ingalls Wilder that he could praise.
Sexism is ingrained with Bob Somerby so you knew he wouldn't be able to resist for long. Sure enough, Wednesday kicked off the 'fun.' Here, here, here, here and here -- five time from Wednesday to Friday, five posts -- he attacked Maureen Dowd.
Goodness, what had Maureen just done to prompt five posts in three days from Somerby? She wrote a column that was published . . . April 21st. Are we the only ones who wonder if Bob Somerby is a really slow reader and that's why he spends so many days and posts on the same topic?
And this column, what was its problem? In it, Dowd wrote of the failure of the gun control bill, "The White House should have created a war room full of charts with the names of pols they had to capture, like they had in The American President. Soaring speeches have their place, but this was about blocking and tackling."
Somerby just knew he was right because, after all, sexist pig Kevin Drum was also calling out Maureen Dowd. And calling out Dana Milbanks and "Fourniers" (we have no idea). Really? Because the piece we enjoyed the most about Barack's leadership problems was Lara Brown's "Sorry Honey, I Shrunk the Presidency" (US News and World Reports).
Actually, Maureen was right. The idiots were Somerby and Drum. We'll slide Barack over to the category of "liar." Here's how Barack presented Maureen's column as last month's White House Correspondents Dinner:
Maureen Dowd said I could solve all my problems if I were just more like Michael Douglas in The American President. And I know Michael is here tonight. Michael, what's your secret, man? Could it be that you were an actor in an Aaron Sorkin liberal fantasy? Might that have something to do with it?
That got a lot of easy laughs . . . from a lot of stupid people. And Somerby grabbed that lie and ran with it, Dowd didn't know the difference between a movie and real life!!!!!
But what Dowd wrote was, "The White House should have created a war room full of charts with the names of pols they had to capture, like they had in The American President. Soaring speeches have their place, but this was about blocking and tackling."
The war room she's speaking of? Not a Sorkin fantasy. You count the votes and you re-count them and you don't consider it over until after the vote is called as LBJ repeatedly stressed back in the day. If Barack's administration is doing what they should be doing, they're not doing it very well. Dowd's column, after the section we're quoting, also includes this:
Instead of the pit-bull legislative aides in Aaron Sorkin’s movie, Obama has Miguel Rodriguez, an arm-twister so genteel that The Washington Post's Philip Rucker wrote recently that no one in Congress even knows who he is.
The president was oblivious to red-state Democrats facing tough elections. Bring the Alaskan Democrat Mark Begich to the White House residence, hand him a drink, and say, "How can we make this a bill you can vote for and defend?"
Yeah, Maureen Dowd has a point.
And that's what always brings the sexist out in Somerby. He just can't stand a woman being right.
So he offers "Why we lumped Collins in with Dowd: The New York Times has two female columnists. Each seems to think it's 1955 and that she has been hired to write standard old piddle for the old 'women's pages.' Why does this seem to make sense at the Times? We hate to be the tattletales here, but it’s part of their throwback culture." There is truth in that when it comes to Gail Colllins. There's no truth at all in that when it comes to Maureen Dowd.
Collins is forever trying to think of a joke and then, mistakenly thinking she's found it (the Romney dog and the car roof), writes one column after another riffing on it. That doesn't distract from her flaccid nature or lifeless prose. By contrast, whether you agree with Dowd's points or not, she can write. She earned her Pulitzer. That doesn't mean everything she writes is a winner and we've called her out on many things in the past (and we have praised her as well).
But Dowd re-invented the column. Bob Somerby acknowledges that with his 'creeping Dowdism' fears. He thinks she did it in a bad way. He thinks she's destroyed writing. But whatever the impact you think she's having, if you agree that the world of columns changes with Dowd you can't honestly compare her to the "women's pages" of the fifties.
Somerby makes the comparison because it's a sexist insult.
He likes to make sexist insults.
In his five posts last week, he made time to call out Maureen for likening Barack to a debutante. That's so wrong, he wants you to know, so, so wrong. He praised Clark Hoyt yet again for calling Maureen out.
He can never shut up about that, although usually he uses Al Gore lactating as his example.
But thing is: Lord Dowdinpantz.
What is that?
It's the name he has for Dana Milbank. Dana is a man who writes for The Washington Post.
And for Bob Somerby, the best way to insult this man is to call him "Lord Dowd In Pants."
Are you grasping it?
Dana Milbank is so stupid, Somerby insists, that he's Maureen Dowd in pants.
But it's wrong for Maureen to compare Barack to a debutante?
It's okay for Somerby to insult a man by calling him a woman in pants but it's wrong for Maureen to compare Barack to a debutante?
For eight years now, we've been tracking sexism for this site. If there's a level playing field out there, we've yet to spot it.
