The disturbing rise of the “Hillary Harridan”

Dahlia Lithwick knocks one out of the park:

You know her. She’s got wild eyes and rumpled hair. At some point she stopped caring about the stains on her blouse. She’s hurt, angry, rejected, and she’s willing to take the whole damn place down with her. She is Lady Macbeth. She is Jane Eyre‘s deranged pyromaniac Bertha Mason. She is Cruella DeVil and the biblical Lilith. She is Snow White’s wicked stepmother, Miss Havisham, and Emily Bronte’s ghostly Catherine Earnshaw. She is the oldest literary type around—the bitter madwoman, hellbent on revenge and willing to act against her own interest to win some respect. And now, to hear the media tell it, she is a Hillary Holdout; she’s a PUMA (Party Unity My Ass); and she belongs to 18 Million Voices.

Political campaign coverage is always driven by stereotypes. Blue-collar men, soccer moms, and latte-sipping liberals are the blocks on which election stories are built. But the rise of the “Hillary Harridan” is a disturbing development. It unearths a creepy literary type that harms women a lot more than it helps them. The suggestion that irrational, emotional, self-referential women are swinging the election is not a theme any woman should endorse.

That’s just the beginning. It just keeps getting better.  Read it all.

Posted by Kevin K. on 08/20/08 at 08:38 PM • Permalink

You obamatards just don’t know how to let go and move on.

The suggestion that irrational, emotional, self-referential women are swinging the election is not a theme any woman should endorse.

Amen to that. My only quibble is that Lithwick quoted Taylor Marsh as if she were a voice of reason in all of this when Marsh was instrumental in creating that mindset to begin with.

You obamatards just don’t know how to let go and move on.

Says “Obama-Wright-08”.  Solid gold!

Tellingly, Lithwick, supposedly a scholar, gets her Shakespeare wrong. She types:

....willing to stamp their feet and shake their fists and holler, “Out damned spot!” long after it’s clear the spot was imaginary and that women’s political power is finally very real.

Except that the “Out, damned spot!” is from the mad scene in Macbeth, where Lady Macbeth is sleepwalking, and hardly in a position to stamp her feet, shake her fists, or holler (unless the acting is very bad indeed). Nor is it ever anything but clear that the spot (of is imaginary: It’s a mad scene, for pity’s sake.

It’s a shame, it really is.

Well, Shakespeare himself had Lady MacBeth reading, writing, folding and unfolding paper, opening closets and dressing while sleepwalking (according to the testimony of the Gentlewoman in Act 5, Scene 1). So perhaps an actor wouldn’t be taking excessive liberties to have her stamping, shouting and shaking her fists as well; it is, after all, a very emotional scene, and although the spot is clearly imaginary to the audience, it’s real to the deranged Lady MacBeth. Which was Lithwick’s point.

....willing to stamp their feet and shake their fists and holler, “Out damned spot!” long after it’s clear the spot was imaginary and that women’s political power is finally very real.

Out here in the Heartland, we’d call that an allusion… maybe poetic license to make a point on a short internets blurb.

Then again, what the hell do we know, Lambert?  We chewed up all our books.

Lambert linked here using the headline: It Just Never Ends, Does It?.  Kind of an amusing choice coming from someone who’s taken to defending the PUMA movement.

You fuckin’ clowns really CAN’T let go can you?

You fuckin’ clowns really CAN’T let go can you?

Actually, we really CAN’T let go of poking fun at the fuckin’ clowns who really can’t let go.

I was about to say something about the odd quoting of Taylor Marsh in that article, but I see that Betty Cracker beat me to it!

Kind of an amusing choice coming from someone who’s taken to defending the PUMA movement.

The giant concrete building, the bunker of various crackpots, wingnuts and nitwits, featuring the comedy stylings of “myiq1/2xu”.

I find it fascinating, absurd, and hilarious all at once…

People that run into the arms of Jerome Corsi, Andy Martin, Webster Tarpley, Debbie Schlussel, and every type of vermin that plagues humanity, get all finger pointy with wails of “how dare you” when someone dares to suggest that they just might be mentally unstable.

known troublemaker, exactly. That’s when Hillary’s more rabid supporters completely lost me during the primaries. They were promoting and/or colluding with a staggering array of rightwing scumbags.  I lost track of how many times I read “Send it to Hannity!” in comments at pro-Hillary/anti-Obama blogs long before the PUMA movement was birthed. I don’t doubt that some Kossacks were really mean to them and stuff, but I never saw Obama supporters organizing anti-Hillary email dumps directed at Bill O’Reilly or linking favorably to blogs like LGF or Free Republic. The only time PUMAs apply filters is when folks like me call them out on it.

Speaking of right-wing scumbags, didn’t Hillary Herself sit down for an interview with Richard Mellon Scaife?

And yes, I’m glad someone asked this question already: if Hillary has such fervent widespread never-say-die support from her “18 million voters,” why the hell did she have such a large debt load in the first place? Where were these donors when she was actually still in the race? Guess they’d rather flap their gums than open their wallets.

Oh, they donated, Kerry ... it’s just that their donations were converted to consulting income by Hillary’s closest advisors.