You only have to have been following Andrew Sullivan’s blog this past week to notice a theme.
Mark Kirkorian: “Our commander-in-chief is an effete vacillator who is pushed around by his female subordinates […] Obama’s pusillanimity has been hugely magnified by the contrast with the women directing his foreign policy and the fact that they nagged him to attack Libya until he gave in.”
Frank Gaffney: “I am praying that Barack Obama and his anti-Israel troika of female advisors will not take us all down a road that seems ripe for another, ominous application of this precedent”
Sullivan himself: “This is Clinton’s war, launched on entirely emotional and irrational grounds.”
Weird, huh? Why is it so important that we know this is a girly war? Clinton doesn’t want a second term. By all accounts she has no interest in running for higher office again. Why… oh, why would these conservative men be so hung up on making sure we all know that having a girl with the power to command armies is so terrible?
Hmm.
I just can’t think of why conservative men would want to run down women’s leadership and make the prospect of women controlling the military seem frightening.
I mean, you’d think that, if they were afraid of some woman being in a leadership position, they’d just come out and say something like, “Man, wouldn’t it be scary if she were in charge?” instead of having to make it seem like there’s something uniquely fucked up about any woman having a leadership position, right? I mean, there can’t be… at least, I’m blanking on one… some woman the right is totally fixated on, who the base loves, but the leadership is afraid and mortified by, maybe someone taking a foreign trip right now, embarrassing herself all around the world?
Nope.
Just not thinking of anybody these fools could be so afraid of that they have to slur all women rather than risk taking her on directly. Or in Sullivan’s case, that he’s willing to slur all women in order to also take on some woman he’s been taking on directly. So, I guess Sullivan is less of a fool.
But still.
Apparently getting girl-cooties all over our invasion of Libya has spoiled some folks’ whole week.
Tiny Cat Pants 
Girl-cooties.
Obama’s problem isn’t that he listens to women. It’s that he listens to the wrong women.
Sam – I’m not asking this to be snarky, I promise. But who would be the right women? How would you describe them in contrast to the women he’s listening to now?
Medea Benjamin; Cynthia McKinney; Cindy Sheehan; Arundhati Roy; Kathy Kelly.
These are women who are not invested in the military/industrial/congressional complex. Some of them have personal understanding of the effects of war, and see it as something other than a geopolitical game. The women in Obama’s administration have made careers out of reaching for those diabolical levers of power, and whether they think of themselves a liberals, centrists, or conservatives, they are warmongers and war apologists. If Obama were serious about peacemaking, he’d have hired peacemakers.
That’s hysterical!
Anyone who listens to Cynthia McKinney scares me. She is far too fringe to be considered a credible advisor.
Cynthia McKinney is perennially cast as the lunatic fringe by corporate media, including those considered ‘liberal.’ The reality is much more down-to-earth and mundane. McKinney is an individual who achieved elected office (more than once) without exercising appropriate fealty to the corporate/military/industrial/congressional realm. Like Dennis Kucinich, she was largely ignored by her own party and ridiculed by corporate media.
What’s disturbing about the traction of the propaganda is that politicians like McKinney and Kucinich represent what people claim to want– someone who’s not hopelessly corrupt or who actually puts quaint ideals like democracy and justice ahead of industry lobbyists– may not have shiny p.r. teams and aren’t pretty or eloquent, and so they are easily cast as weirdos and cranks. So we keep getting handsome politicians who smile and tell us what we want to hear (or tell us nothing at all) while they eliminate our jobs and spend our national treasury on meaningless wars and generally shitcan the country, but its alright because at least we can take them seriously.
In short, if McKinney is the lunatic fringe, count me in with her. Because the sensible mainstream is pretty fucked up.
http://www.americanblackout.com
My dislike of McKinney has nothing to do with corporate media coverage–which I haven’t followed for 2+ years–and everything to do with following her record.
I’m libertarian. She’s the closest thing to communitarian we’ve got right now.
Political labels like that are prone to such inaccuracy and subjectivity, but your point about her record is well taken. I am suggesting, per my original point, that the records of the women in the Obama administration– no matter what labels we might slap on them– are bloody awful. The criticisms B. is referring to are even more insane, because they believe that Obama (on account of listening to the girlies) isn’t being awful enough.
Based on McKinney’s record, foreign policy based on her ideals, balanced against the ideals of some of the other women I listed, would most likely result in a lot less needless bloodshed, and a lot less of our national treasury pissed away on the maintenance of empire. We can’t have that now, can we?
But only because she wants to spend the money here instead. In awfully grandiose and unsustainable ways.
Of course I agree not at all with the practice of foreign policy by this administration, who like all other administrations prior, is so great about saying what we want to hear and blithely charging ahead with their own agendas regardless. So I’m not advancing Clinton over McKinney.
I just don’t think the fiscal positions McKinney takes are going to lend credibility to her voice in the wider spectrum.
That must be what the vast majority of us want, because we keep voting for it (when we bother to vote).
Primarily because, for her opponents anyway, they have the benefit of never actually being tried. Also, regarding what the “wider spectrum” finds credible, I need only point to what they’ve been voting for and what we’ve all gotten out of that.
That must be what the vast majority of us want, because we keep voting for it (when we bother to vote).
As an non-voter in protest to the lack of effective choices I would point to my statements in the other thread as the reasoning for the current state of elected leadership.
Also, regarding what the “wider spectrum” finds credible, I need only point to what they’ve been voting for and what we’ve all gotten out of that.
We’re clearly talking in circles at this point. My point is that you have named a bunch of replacement advisors for the President that he will clearly never listen to for political reasons. That puts you in the comfortable position of being able to blame everyone else for the failure of your ideas.
Can you not suggest alternate advisors to whom the President might lend credence but who would also steer him in a less anti-democratic direction? That’s how politics has to work now. Just saying “you all are too dumb to pick the good guys” isn’t really solving anything other than your own ego.
If you think circling the drain is a comfortable position, then I’m happy for you. Personally, I’m not sure I like it.
Regarding ‘my ideas,’ none that I have are all that original, and they all come from people who are way smarter than me. Unfortunately, they are not the ideas and people that are respected by pro-corporate imperialists. In other words, I could accept ‘my ideas’ being failures, because it would mean that they had been tried. As yet they have not, and they won’t be by someone like Obama.
I’d have better luck offering a box of staples to a hammer. Obama isn’t interested in going in a more constructive direction; that’s why he has the advisers he has. If you think getting blood from a turnip is “how politics has to work now”, then I can see why you don’t bother voting.
If others are too dumb, or weak, or selfish, or unimaginative to pick the good guys (and girls), then my ego is kind of irrelevant, isn’t it? We’re all fucked either way, and nothing I feel about myself will change that. My political motto, and I’ll clean it up for the family audience, is “I won’t get beaten with my own cane.” Is that arrogant? Egotistical? Maybe, but I’m not the one who walked into a voting booth and chose this shit that we’re dealing with now.
On the other hand, maybe you’re right, and we are talking in circles. You seem content to abstain from voting because you don’t like the available choices. I’m saying there are better choices, and I’m daring everyone else to try them with me. In the end, though, I’d rather make an honest and futile effort than none at all. It might not save my daughter from dying horribly as she witnesses the end of the species, but at least it will give the cockroaches something from which to learn.