by Molly Ivors
Sorry for the long silence, folks. It was beginning to feel, at a certain point, like I was picking on the mentally disabled, or at least terminally trivial, and I had to back away. (Thers had the same response to Althouse after a while. We liberals are too nice altogether.)
But shit.
My good friend Hecate says that MoDo must be reading here, and idea I pooh-poohed as utterly foolish, but you have to wonder, since she essentially is stealing my frame of reference for today's column.
Whether or not she wins, Hillary has already given noble service as a sophisticated political tutor for Obama, providing her younger colleague with much-needed seasoning. Who else was going to toughen him up? Howard Dean? John Edwards? Dennis Kucinich?
Obama had not been hit hard until this campaign; he sailed through his Senate race. Without Hillary, he never would have learned to be a good debater. He never would have understood how to robustly answer distorted and personal attacks. He never would have been warned about how harmful an unplugged spouse can be. He never would have realized how a luminous speech can be effective damage control.
When pressed about whether he’s ready for Swift-boating, Obama has seemed a bit cavalier. But the Hillary camp will garrote him with his mistakes until he fully appreciates what garroting feels like. Ickes told a Web site Tuesday that he has been pursuing superdelegates by pressing the Rev. Wright issue.
Besides coaching Obama, Hillary is also shielding him. If she had not fibbed about the Tuzla airport landing, and then fibbed to get out of a fib, the press would have stayed focused on Wright. She has been an invaluable lightning rod.
It is objectively true, I think, that Hillary's shitty coverage makes Barack look good by comparison. I can't count the number of people who've said to me "I just can't go through that again"--a position I'm not wholly unsympathetic to. But Barack takes more than his share of shit-flinging from Maureen this morning, being called "effete," "genteelly sipping" a beer, a "starlet," "languid," and this delightfully cringe-inducing moment:
Hillary has clearly raised Obama’s consciousness about the importance of courting the ladies. Touring a manufacturing plant in Allentown, Pa., Tuesday, he was flirtatious, winking and grinning at the women working there, calling one “Sweetie,” telling another she was “beautiful,” and imitating his daughters’ dance moves by twirling around.
Later, at a Scranton town hall, he went up to Denise Mercuri, a pharmacist from Dunmore wearing a Hillary button. “What do I need to do? Do you want me on my knees?” he charmed, before promising: “I’ll give you a kiss.”
Umm, yeah. Wow.
I guess, somehow, it's supposed to be a compliment to Hillary that MoDo calls her "scrappy," a "blue-collar Mama," and "even tougher" than Ahmedinijad, but since the default position means tarring the presumptive nominee as a pussy who can't even beat a girl, it's typical MoDo crap.
I cannot for the life of me understand why Maureen operates under the concrete assumption that strength must be met by weakness and vice-versa. I mean, I know this is her default gender position, but you'd think the constant stream of evidence to the contrary (starting, but by no means limited to the Clintons and the Obamas) would pierce her intellectual armor eventually. But nope. Men are scared of strong women, no real woman would want a "languid" man, Q E fucking D.
She really needs to get laid.
Below : the Democratic primary season, in MoDo's world.