I’ve taken the liberty of highlighting this question, which may lead us toward the heart of the matter.
I agree that it’s lazy to attribute *all *the dislike to misogyny, and that there were plenty of substantive reasons to vote against Hillary. I’ll also grant you that it’s perfectly natural to like or dislike a candidate on a superficial level, regardless of policy positions.
But “likeability” plays a much larger role in the way female candidates are discussed than it does for males, and when a female candidate scores low in that regard, the dislike comes across as unmistakably misogynistic. As reviled as Nixon, Reagan and GWB may have been, you rarely heard lefties criticizing their wardrobe choices or lack of sex appeal.
And has it escaped your notice that most prominent female American conservative politicians and commentators are conventionally good-looking?
Likeability shouldn’t really be a criteria for favoring a candidate, male or female – but female politicians are held to a different standard. That’s misogyny.
After reading the Wiki entry on Judicial Watch, I think that they contributed quite a bit of hate for Hillary.
There is some Hillary-hate and there is IMO substantial misogyny. Nonetheless Secretary Clinton was a very flawed candidate.
I voted for her only because of Donald Trump.
There are quite a few reasons I am not a fan. Most of them have to do with lack of ethics. Here are the top three.
- Her vote on the Iraq war. Her apologists can spin it any way they want to, but she chose political expediency over doing what was right. Unlike some of her fervent supporters, I actually believe she is intelligent. Thus she knew that George W Bush did not ask for authorization in order to pressure Hussein. Clinton probably thought that they Iraq war would go well and didn’t want to hurt her political future by voting against it. It was probably a good political gamble but it cost the lives of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and has resulted in the destabilization of the region that will most likely take decades to resolve.
Incidentally, I have equal disdain for Kerry and Biden. I also held my nose and voted for Kerry, and will vote for Biden if the Democrats shoot themselves in the foot and nominate him.
- The unambiguous racism in her 2008 campaign. When things started going the wrong way for her in 2008, both she and her husband played the race card in West Virginia. This was candidate Clinton:
"Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”
“Hard-working Americans, white Americans”. Really. She went there. Can you imagine the uproar if Senator Sanders or any other candidate had uttered such an unbelievably racist comment.
IMHO this is par for the course for the Clintons. I still remember his “Sister Souljah” moment. Read Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. Again perceived political expediency takes precedence over ethical behavior.
- I didn’t mind Secretary Clinton standing by her husband after the accusations of sexual impropriety arose, but she attacked his accusers. After the Gennifer Flowers episode, a person with Secretary Clinton’s intelligence had to know her husband’s lack of character, and yet she went on the offense. Apparently women are only to be believed if they are accusing those whom we despise.
Ironically, this was the gift that kept on giving. IMO (again) the “Big Dog’s” behavior was instrumental in Gore’s loss and in his wife’s defeat. When Trump brought Clinton’s accusers to the debate, he effectively countered the accusations made against him. It may have been sleazy but it worked. He would never have been able to do that against Obama.
So yes, I voted for her, but I felt quite uncomfortable, to say the least.
This is fascinating. You formed a fully fleshed out opinion of a book, not by reading it, but by considering an excerpt. And that excerpt is the exact one I later quoted on a message board! What are the chances? (Or did I misunderstand again? I thought that your opinion was formed a while ago, not after I offered up a quote).
Ultimately, your highlights still don’t say what you think they say.
“It takes a village to raise a child” - This isn’t some secret code for socializing wealth. As Clinton explains, the term is an African proverb which refers to the fact that a childhood is shaped by the community in which one is raised. Her references to growing up in a successful middle class mid-American family in the 1950’s - where people knew and respected their local police officers, postal workers, teachers, bus drivers, et al - is a quaint American version of this notion.
[Children] “will thrive only if their families thrive and if the whole of society cares enough to provide for them” - from this, you respond with the argument that ‘The whole of society caring to provide for children is not a necessary condition for children to thrive’? How about something a little more mundane and in line with a light First Lady book about good communities, like “A rising tide lifts all boats” or any number of other platitudes that American politicians make about being a collective community of people working towards a common prosperity (e.g. Ronald Reagan: “…a growing economy and support from family and community offer our best chance for a society where compassion is a way of life, where the old and infirm are cared for, the young and, yes, the unborn protected, and the unfortunate looked after and made self-sufficient.”)
“and governments to do a better job raising our own children” - I trust you realize that you only highlighted a section of a sentence, and that your highlighting changed the meaning. This sentence was not about, as you say, “changing child rearing by force of government.” It was listing different arenas which impact children (besides ‘government’, the sentence also listed homes, schools, hospitals, businesses, media, and churches) in saying that the book is about ideas on how they can be improved. If force of government is involved, you will need to show where that comes from, because it doesn’t come from a sentence that instead previews “big and bite-sized ideas”. It’s your own imagination that is leaping from there to force of law.
And why is that? She was trying to tell you what to feed your kids! Just like Melania is trying to tell them how to behave when online. Why doesn’t that rankle you: how come you aren’t worried that they are suggesting using “force of government” to change how children are raised?
If your complaint about Clinton is that she took bad policy positions, then the book is an outlier, because it advocates ‘family values’ the same way that other First Wives have done.
I submit that it is only because of Clinton’s already prejudged reputation that such a book could be used as evidence of her divisiveness, which just begs for another origin to her reputation. If it’s the health care thing, that’s fine: she sullied the benefit of the doubt by being too involved in her husband’s administration, so everything that came after was viewed with a jaundiced view that she had ulterior motives. But listing this book as one reason people don’t like her is nonsensical unless you already understand that her reputation was poisoned.
So “some” of the criticism is due to misogyny, right?
Accurate answers are being posted, but minds appear set on ‘Misogyny’!
I don’t hate HRC, but she has given people reasons to dislike her personally. Hell, she flat stated that women should vote for her because she was female, and that is as wrong as voting against her for that reason. I do perceive her as lying and saying what she thinks will fool we sheep into voting for her, then paying no attention to her words later. The email server and other actions, some listed abovethread, are shady moves by someone who professes to be better than that. Stop looking for ‘gotchas!’ in these posts, and read them.
Rush? I have listened to 3 of his shows, none since since he derided Bill Clinton for being elected without a majority (because Perot). Fox News? I stopped watching all ‘news’ networks when they became wall-to-wall hosted arguments.
Stop writing off opponents as fools, stop assuming policies are not noted. It may make you feel good to ‘other’ those you should want to convince, but it won’t help change anything.
Citation, please. I don’t think she ever said this; in fact, quite the opposite. But spin has a nasty way of creating facts about Clinton that are only shades (sometimes very, very pale shades) of the truth.
You think she said the opposite? Do you have a cite for that?
Not sure if it’s “spin” to note Clinton had a nice little laugh onstage with Albright when she gave the “special place in hell for women who don’t support each other”.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/02/08/madeleine_albright_at_clinton_rally_special_place_in_hell_for_women_who_dont_help_each_other.html
That’s really weak.
The FBI letter showed that the narrative wasn’t entirely false. She really is paranoid and arrogant and dishonest. And un-likeable and un-charismatic to the point that people wouldn’t turn out for her anyway, the way they did for Bill (although he never gained the majority of the votes either time he ran for President).
The idea was that Bill would be the politician and she would be the policy wonk. Then he got elected, and she was going to put HilaryCare into place. It failed, because he was only good at politics, and she was terrible at it. So they dropped that idea in favor of just getting him re-elected, in return for her chance to become President in her own right. “It’s Her Turn!” and that attitude. And that failed, twice, because she is arrogant and un-likeable and terrible at politics.
Spin doesn’t always work. Right now her spin seems to be that she is arrogant and un-likeable and dishonest, and she lost because she’s a woman.
:shrugs: It’s fine with me if the Dems don’t want to learn from experience.
Regards,
Shodan
And the unrelenting hate, the loathing? Why do the things you describe account for hatred? A deep visceral hatred.
Hate, loathing, visceral hatred. Pretty strong. Do people generally like Hillary? No I don’t think so. I don’t think that Democrats on the whole lover her either. And Republicans on the whole don’t like the Clintons. But I think this may be overblown a bit
But I’d put the dislike for Hillary by Republicans, just slightly above the dislike for Reagan by Democrats. I continue to be concerned that people on the left think this
deep visceral hatred" exists only on the right. The left hated Reagan, made fun of him, called him old, and “a dumb actor” “doesn’t have all his marbles” and the like. Where is this on your “deep visceral hatred” scale.
And while we’re at it, where is Trump on that scale?
The far left and far right are closer than you’re admitting.
Not really. A star supporter is saying women should vote for Hillary because she’s a woman, with Hillary right there on stage with her, clearly happy with it. It got some press at the time. You’re welcome to take the challenge of showing that Hillary felt “quite the opposite” to the way Albright did.
Some people hate politicians from the other side. It really isn’t any different for Hilary than for any other Presidential candidate.
Regards,
Shodan
CarnalK, you never responded to my explanation of my usage of “reasonable”. Do you care to?
No, I don’t care to. I think I spent enough time discussing you as a poster for an Elections thread.
That’s a shame. I’m always trying to improve myself as a poster, so I’m interested in how my approach is understood, especially after I explain it, by the posters (2 of them have spoken up) who have expressed negative feelings about the language I use.
Not without reason, some of which I already mentioned.
No. And no. It was a non-issue.
Agreed. 
Uhhhh, yeah, Kennedy and Johnson did throw a lot of men and resources into Vietnam, but really, the whole mess started with Eisenhower in the fifties. Be that as it may, Nixon deliberately undercut the Paris Peace Talks while campaigning in '68. He expanded the war into Laos and Cambodia. Gave the orders that let to the Kent State massacre in '70. Kept the war going long after the big brass came to the conclusion that it was a no-winner, and only started pulling out when his numbers started to tank.
Surprisingly enough, Republican Presidents have policy initiations that you don’t like. Democrats have issues that the right doesn’t like.
Don’t watch either of them, but my understanding is neither Maddow nor Matthews have been caught in nearly as many egregious half-truths, distortions and flat-out whoppers as Limbaugh. And neither of them have financed a cottage industry of checkbook journalism and BS investigations the way Scaife did against the Clintons. That guy is a walking argument for the estate tax.
Buy an island.
:rolleyes:
I am not sure if you follow politics but apparently a lot of people hate Trump too.
Post #119 beat you to this cunning comment. Naturally I’m sure you understand that the same people who hate Clinton’s corruption, misogyny, lack of experience, greed, and paranoia view Trump’s as no big deal.
(And don’t say it goes both ways because I’m not buying that cow)