Women pundits who despise women

I've done my best to ignore the sleazy Anthony Weiner stories that have dominated the news over the last couple of weeks. After all, that is New York's business and I am fully confident in New Yorkers' ability to handle it.

Besides, slimeball though he may be, Weiner's transgressions are personal and his actions have humiliated one woman. Here in Texas, we have the yahoos of  the Texas legislature and the chief yahoo in the governor's office seeking to humiliate and abnegate the entire female population of the state. If we weigh the two sins against women in the balance, it is easy to see where the greater guilt lies.

One thing I haven't been able to completely ignore though is the extent to which certain female pundits have rushed to excoriate and blame Weiner's wife, Huma Abedin, in this affair, and, through her, to splash whatever mud they can onto her long-time employer and friend, Hillary Clinton. As an avowed admirer of both Abedin and Clinton, I am appalled by these so-called journalists. Not that female journalists should never write anything negative about or criticize women in any way, but that these particular women writers exhibit in their writing the very worst stereotypes of unthinking, totally un-self-aware cattiness.

There is no better example of what I am talking about than Maureen Dowd, the New York Times columnist who, as far as I am concerned, lost all credibility and relevance somewhere back in the late '90s when she became totally obsessed  and unhinged by her hatred of the Clintons. She despises Bill and Hillary Clinton and loses no opportunity to criticize them in print. Her revulsion is, in many ways, just as knee-jerk as the Republicans' revulsion against all things Obama. Namely, if it is an idea espoused by either Bill or Hillary, it is only worthy of derision and contempt.

So far, Dowd has written two columns about the latest Weiner debacle and in both instances she has managed to turn her criticism against Huma Abedin and, through her, against her favorite target, the Clintons. When she, herself, was criticized for her first column, she doubled down with an even more egregiously misogynist second column. In it, she wrote snidely and dismissively about how Abedin had learned how to deal with a philandering husband from her mentor, Clinton, and that she had absorbed all the wrong lessons from her.

Now, no one outside a marriage ever truly knows what goes on in that relationship, least of all Maureen Dowd, who, as far as I know, has never been married. It is likely that in most marriages, at some point, the wife - and the husband, for that matter - has had to look at things squarely and decide whether it is worth it to continue. No one else can make that judgment for the individuals in the relationship and, really, no one else has any business weighing in on the decision. It is highly personal. (Yes, I know in our society we seem to have lost all concept of that idea, but it still exists for some of us.)

Huma Abedin, by all accounts is a highly intelligent, accomplished, and competent woman and she knows her circumstances and the circumstances of her marriage better than anyone else. She has apparently weighed the pros and cons and decided to stick with it and to stand by her man and keep her family intact. That takes courage, especially when she is being pilloried daily by women pundits like Maureen Dowd, Sally Quinn, and Jennifer Rubin.

Oh, yes, Dowd may be the chief offender but she is far from the only one. Sally Quinn of the Washington Post, who had an affair with her husband Ben Bradlee while he was married to another woman and broke up that marriage, wrote of Huma Abedin that she had seen the Clintons "get away with infidelity" and so she believed that she and Weiner could ride out the controversy. Really, Sally? Really? Is that the lesson you draw from this whole sad affair? 

Perhaps the most predictable is Jennifer Rubin, also of the Post. She is a rabid right-winger and all of her columns flow from that viewpoint. She, too, blames the Clintons and Abedin. You see, Abedin learned her lessons at Hillary's knee and now she is simply fulfilling that playbook, and how appalled the Clintons must be to see these amateurs, Anthony and Huma, trying to follow in their footsteps!

These are just three of the women pundits who seem to despise successful women. There are others, but I am too depressed to continue. They disgust me. Again, not that women in politics or in public life should be immune from criticism, if they do something wrong, but that these columnists take the sins of a man in politics and use that as an excuse to beat up his wife and her friends. It must take some strong hatred and an abundant lack of self awareness to do that.

I support Huma Abedin

The whole sick drama about Anthony Weiner's - um - weiner just gets scuzzier and scuzzier. Whenever I read more about it, I feel an irresistable urge to go and wash my hands, not to mention wash my eyes with saline solution.

Actually, I've tried avoiding reading about it as much as possible, but if one is connected at all to the outside world, it seems impossible to avoid it altogether. Then I saw the headline in The New York Times yesterday that Weiner's wife of one year is in the "first stages of pregnancy." It just made me want to weep for her.

Huma Abedin is a beautiful, intelligent woman. I don't know her personally, of course, but I've seen her picture, and I know she has worked for Hillary Clinton for a number of years, going all the way back to when she was a senator. She would not have survived in that position unless she had unusual intelligence and unusual toughness. She now works for Clinton at the State Department as her close adviser and unofficial chief of staff and often travels with her on her diplomatic missions. When Abedin and Weiner got married last year, Bill Clinton performed the ceremony and Hillary Clinton threw a big party for them.

Abedin is in her mid-thirties, a hard-working career woman with enormous responsibilities and now, apparently, after being married for just a year, she is just barely pregnant. And now she learns that her husband who she obviously thought was worthy of being the father of her children is a sick, self-indulgent, sex-obsessed scuzzbag.

Well, it's up to her to decide what to do with this guy and it's really nobody's business what her choice is. She may decide that his good points outweigh his bad and that he is redeemable. Or she may decide to cut her losses and move on. And, speaking of cutting things, she might decide to take a rusty carving knife and whack off the offending organ. That would be his head, of course. The one on top of his body, because that's where the sickness dwells.

Whatever Huma Abedin decides to do, I support her. She would never be convicted by a jury of her peers.

The crotch shot heard 'round the world

If you've been watching television or reading newspapers at all this week, you probably cannot have escaped seeing the picture of a man's bulging crotch in his tidy whities that is alleged to be of Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY). Weiner is alleged by right-wing scumbag Andrew Breitbart to have taken the picture and sent it via Twitter to a young college student. Weiner denies that he sent the picture. He says his Twitter account was hacked and he has hired a legal firm to look into what happened.

Several bloggers, doing what the mainstream media would do if it had not completly abdicated its responsibility, have investigated the matter and turned up some evidence supporting Weiner's denial. Personally, I am inclined to give the benefit of a doubt to anyone attacked by Breitbart, given his history of fabrication of scandals such as the ACORN vs. the pimp story or the tale of Shirley Sherrod's racism.

Both stories were completely false, but Breitbart and his henchmen, along with their Republican cohorts in Congress, did manage nevertheless to destroy ACORN, the advocacy group that had, for decades, worked with the poor and disadvantaged of the country to ensure that their rights were not trampled. They did not destroy Shirley Sherrod because a full tape of the speech where she was alleged to have made racist comments soon came out and proved that what she had actually said was just the opposite of what Breitbart's doctored tape had claimed.

So Breitbart is a despicable liar and we cannot believe anything that he says. I would accept Anthony Weiner's denial and give him a full pass on the story except for one thing. He says that although he didn't send the picture he cannot say "with certitude" that the picture is not of him. Really, Anthony?

So, how many pictures of your bulging crotch are out there, Rep. Weiner? Are there really so many and are they so available that you just can't say whether this one is one of yours? Or not?

And what is it with men and their penises anyway? Why are they so sure that the whole world is jonesing for a look? Or to put it another way, why do men take crotch shots? Apparently a lot of them do, although I admit that I live in such a naive sheltered world that I wasn't aware of it until this story came out.

Frankly, I'll never understand why a man, particularly a man in the public eye, would be so stupid as to do such a thing - i.e., take a picture of his penis and post it ANYWHERE electronically so that any hacker can grab it (so to speak) and distribute it to the world. Perhaps it just goes to prove once again that the hubris and utter fecklessness of male political figures know no bounds when it comes to sex. They all think they are God's gift to women - or men, as the case may be.

Maybe you just have to be a man to understand.

9/11 ain't what it used to be

Remember when it was treasonous, in fact downright sacrilegious, to be against anything related to 9/11? That, after all, is how George Bush and the neo-cons sold their bogus war in Iraq, so that people wouldn't dare oppose it. It was all to do with 9/11 - and weapons of mass destruction - except that there was no link between Iraq and 9/11; we would have been more justified in attacking Saudi Arabia. And the weapons of mass destruction didn't exist. But I digress.

These days, though, it seems that 9/11 just doesn't carry the cachet that it once did. The House of Representatives has just proved it.

When the attack on New York came on that perfect late summer day in 2001, it wasn't only the emergency personnel in the city who responded. People from all over the country - some of them even from Texas - dropped what they were doing and went there to help. Some spent weeks or even months there amid the toxic air and debris combing through the rubble to recover bodies and body parts and clearing away that rubble so that New York could move on and rebuild. Many of those people are now suffering chronic and disabling illnesses because of that experience and their exposure to the things that were in the air or in that debris. Last week, there was a bill before the House to assist those people to get the medical care that they need, but because of "procedures", the bill needed a 2/3 majority vote to pass. It got a hefty majority, but not 2/3 and so the measure failed. Truly, 9/11 ain't what it used to be.

Anthony Weiner, the Democratic Representative of Queens and Brooklyn in New York, was infuriated by the Congress's action and didn't hesitate to let his colleagues have the full force of that fury in a rant on the House floor. Last night, on The Daily Show, Weiner's childhood friend, Jon Stewart, also weighed in on the issue in a segment called "I Give Up".

So what is the proper response to "politics as usual" in our government today? To get mad? To give up? I certainly understand the impulse for either action. It sometimes seems that our legislative process is so broken that it can never be fixed, and yet, if we are to survive as a nation, then it must be fixed. There must be a way found to get us back to a democracy, where majority rules. Not 2/3 or 3/4 majority - just a simple majority. Wasn't that what we were supposed to be about as a country? We apparently have forgotten a lot of the principles that are supposed to guide us as a people - just as we have forgotten the people who gave up their time and their good health to respond to 9/11.