Hillary’s Latest Addition to Her Lengthy “Why She Lost” List: Misogynist Sexual Predators in the Media
It’s hard not to feel sorry for Hillary Clinton at times. Here she was the heir apparent to the White House, a long-time party go-along and malleable puff of air ready to say she believed whatever the driving trend of a given historical moment might be, and at the last minute, her turn was snatched away from her by the American people. She was left spinning, angry and bemused, and she’s still not sure what happened.
But it’s not complicated. At rock-bottom, it was Hillary’s go-along readiness to manifest Obama’s third term and “protect” his legacy, that ever-shifting never-quite-real belief system that Americans rejected. Hillary was for DADT before she was against it, she was for military engagement in the Middle East before she was against it, she pilloried and destroyed women who alleged sexual assaults before she thought they should be believed, she was for more taxes before she was against—and then once more for—them, she supported single-payer healthcare before she didn’t (and then did again), she wanted lower taxes before she wanted to gouge the “rich,” she was a foreign policy hawk before she was a dove. The list goes on. And on.
Hillary changed with the times—and the opinion polls—so much that I can think of no other politician (including the mercurial poll-product, finger-to-the-wind cut-out Mitt Romney) who has been, at various times, both for and against the same multitude of issues, policies, and opinions.
It mattered that she is deeply unlikable. When she wasn’t dodging imaginary bullets while lugging bottles of hot sauce in her purse, Hillary was busy feigning Southern accents and crying crocodile tears. She walked in a cloud of misdirection and insincerity and carried a whiff of corruption and phoniness that make her distinctly and perhaps uniquely repellent to a large swath of American voters.
Needless to say, she and her devotees don’t want to hear that truth. Instead, they see misogyny in Hillary’s defeat. She’s not flawed, and her insistence on running on being the “first female president” wasn’t flawed. Instead, misogynist American voters are flawed for not wanting a female president. The fact that Hillary Clinton was the female offered up—and rejected on her own merits or lack thereof—didn’t matter, apparently. Instead, misogyny did her in, as she’s been saying when she wasn’t blaming Comey, we “deplorables,” Bernie Sanders, “white resentment,” and that funky sunspot thing (okay, I made that last sunspot thing up, but why not blame sunspots? She’s blamed everyone and everything else.).
Misogyny, the narrative is now being spun, manifested throughout her failed presidential campaign and sunk her chance to be president because the media has now proven to be swarming with sexual predators. That’s the argument she’s making and that the New York Times is somehow, coincidentally, echoing.
Yes, really. Hillary lost because Matt Lauer and his perverted media ilk are misogynists who wanted her to fail. You can’t make this stuff up.
On Thursday of last week, Hillary ventured this latest theory at some book tour stop in Philidelphia.
The Philly Voice reports:
When it came to sexism and the media, it was [Jennifer] Weiner who brought up the elephant in the room, reading out a section of What Happened about the September 2016 Commander-in-Chief Forum on NBC, in which the host separately interviewed both candidates but was notably tougher on Clinton than Trump. That host? Matt Lauer.“Every day I believe more in karma,” Clinton said to that, referring further to several “men who shaped the narrative” during the campaign who have since been sidelined in the wave of sexual harassment scandals.“The only way we will get sexism out of politics is to get more women in politics,” she said, adding that she has encouraged many young women to get involved with politics, sometimes by running for office themselves. Clinton also declared that “I resign from being Fox News’ president,” noting the absurdity of personalities on the news network continuing to rail against her for hours each day, even with the election long over and someone else in the White House.
I’m not sure if Hillary actually believes this “the media is a sexist and against me because I have a vagina” narrative, but it didn’t take long for the New York Times to pick up that narrative and run with it.
On Saturday, the NYT, in an article entitled “The Men Who Cost Clinton the Election,” opined:
Many of the male journalists who stand accused of sexual harassment were on the forefront of covering the presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Matt Lauer interviewed Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Trump in an official “commander-in-chief forum” for NBC. He notoriously peppered and interrupted Mrs. Clinton with cold, aggressive, condescending questions hyper-focused on her emails, only to pitch softballs at Mr. Trump and treat him with gentle collegiality a half-hour later.Mark Halperin and Charlie Rose set much of the televised political discourse on the race, interviewing other pundits, opining themselves and obsessing over the electoral play-by-play. Mr. Rose, after the election, took a tone similar to Mr. Lauer’s with Mrs. Clinton — talking down to her, interrupting her, portraying her as untrustworthy. Mr. Halperin was a harsh critic of Mrs. Clinton, painting her as ruthless and corrupt, while going surprisingly easy on Mr. Trump. The reporter Glenn Thrush, currently on leave from The New York Times because of sexual harassment allegations, covered Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 campaign when he was at Newsday and continued to write about her over the next eight years for Politico.
The NYT bemoans the fact that these misogynist journalists with sexual predation on their minds focused on the fact that Hillary is “dishonest and unlikable” (she is, and I’m not a sexual predator, a male, or a member of the media).
A pervasive theme of all of these men’s coverage of Mrs. Clinton was that she was dishonest and unlikable. These recent harassment allegations suggest that perhaps the problem wasn’t that Mrs. Clinton was untruthful or inherently hard to connect with, but that these particular men hold deep biases against women who seek power instead of sticking to acquiescent sex-object status.
A month ago, Rebecca Traister wrote in New York magazine that with the flood of sexual harassment charges, “we see that the men who have had the power to abuse women’s bodies and psyches throughout their careers are in many cases also the ones in charge of our political and cultural stories.” With the Lauer accusations, this observation has come into sharper focus on one particular picture: the media sexism that contributed to Hillary Clinton’s loss.
The NYT then goes on to list an absurdly long series of persons and factors that effectively stole the White House from the benighted and worthy Hillary.
The 2016 presidential race was so close that any of a half-dozen factors surely influenced the outcome: James Comey, racial politics, Clinton family baggage, the contentious Democratic primary, third-party spoilers, Russian interference, fake news. But when one of the best-qualified candidates for the presidency in American history and the first woman to get close to the Oval Office loses to an opponent who had not dedicated a nanosecond of his life to public service and ran a blatantly misogynist campaign, it’s hard to conclude that gender didn’t play a role.
For arguing that gender shaped the election narrative and its result, feminists have been pooh-poohed, simultaneously told that it was Clinton, not her gender, that was the problem and that her female supporters were voting with their vaginas instead of their brains.
The latest harassment and assault allegations complicate that account and suggest that perhaps many of the high-profile media men covering Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Trump were the ones leading with their genitals. Mr. Trump was notoriously accused of multiple acts of sexual harassment and assault, and was caught on tape bragging about his proclivity for grabbing women. That several of the men covering the race — shaping the way American voters understood the candidates and what was at stake — were apparently behaving in similarly appalling ways off-camera calls into question not just their objectivity but also their ability to cover the story with the seriousness and urgency it demanded.
Ah, yes, we rubes in deplorable boondocks-land would have voted for Hillary if only those misogynist journos hadn’t been such misogynist journos. Wow.
This is straight out of Orwell. The delusion and PC-laden indoctrination of a distorted feminist/SJW socio-cultural education system has never been more clear nor more clearly flawed than it is in this moment, with this argument.
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