Well put, although I have hope that the explanation to my children's generation is unnecessary.
what is good for brand hillary is good for brand democrat because we are identified, as a brand, with everything that happens to anyone with a (d) after their name.
Yep, don't want to upset that brand loyalty. Like I've always said, selecting candidates is akin to choosing the right kind of laundry detergent.
Is Ted Haggard pleased the Romney boyz were pimped out?
It's Saturday morning and the cynic arose with me today, and to be honest, if Chelsea is going to actively campaign for her mom, she's going to be asked questions.
And like any other campaign worker, it behooves her to step and answer them. She's not 12 anymore, she's a grown woman (pretty hot too) who takes the time to call big donors for big bucks, but doesn't have the time to speak with reporters, some of whom may actually ask questions that are pertinent to her mother's campaign.
All of this coy "I don't talk to the press" garbage is now moot. Either she's with the campaign, or she is not.
Shuster made a disparaging remark, I understand that, and yes, I realize that all pimps are not black men driving fifth-wheel Caddies (check out for Tom H. for example), but of all the things that have been said, all of the remarks that have been spit out with a sneer and wink about Hillary, this one falls pretty low on the index.
humboldtblue, I didn't hear anyone accuse Mitt Romney of "pimping out" his sons when he claimed they were serving their country by working on his campaign. I also don't remember them doing a lot of talking to the press, and all but one of them is older than Chelsea Clinton.
If Shuster (or anyone else) had made an offhand remark about Obama "pimping out" his wife by having her work on his campaign, many of the same people aimai is writing about would be screaming bloody murder -- and rightly so. They'd be railing about the racism, but I have a feeling they would miss the implicit sexism.
As far as I'm concerned, Chris Matthews should have been suspended before Shuster was. Matthews has a history of disparaging and patronizing women on the air. Unfortunately for Shuster, he said the wrong thing at a time when MSNBC's tolerance for sexism is in the public spotlight. I'm sure they'll be back to business as usual soon, just like Don Imus.
I think it was a pretty appalling remark, and I think K. Ron Silkwood points to why: nobody would have considered saying it about Mitt's boys. Well, some of us would have...but nobody in the Washington press corps.
And if Clinton can actually cow MSNBC into being a little less obnoxious (not just toward her, but to any Democrats), more power to her.
Hey, the Bush daughters spoke at the '04 GOP Convention but they were off-limits long before and after that. Of course, the Bushes are true aristocrats and nothing like the grasping Clintons. But can you imagine the sh*tstorm if someone had called "the twins" whores or the Chimp a pimp?
Good for Hillary for pushing back.
Calling donors is back-office work; doing it creates no moral or other obligation to get on camera and answer questions, especially if one of the questions is "Don't you find it weird to be out there sucking rich dicks for your momma?"
Maybe if we had a press corps that thought the really weird thing was *coming up with questions like that,* we could play by different rules. But it's not Clinton's fault that presidential campaigns are covered by moral imbeciles.
For one, aimai, you were fighting below your weight class in a venue where someone can get knocked out, wake up seven minutes later, and resume throwing punches. I'm sorry to have to say it, but it's become rather obvious over the past few weeks and months that Maureen Dowd may indeed represent American liberalism to a much greater extent than one believed possible or has any hope of ever becoming comfortable with.
It's like talking to a bunch of people who believe that the only thing that's gone wrong in this country in the past decade is that Hillary Clinton voted for the Iraq War resolution (in which she was joined by the likes of Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, John Kerry, and Tom Harken, but never mind).
And fer chrissakes...this is the same cable media which went on at length about the right of the Bush Twins, both campaigners, to keep their sordid and criminal personal lives out of the public eye, and then backed that up with inaction.
You miscapitalized X-Men.
I hesitate to offer any more substantive comment because I'm rather ambivalent about the whole thing. The real problem as I see it is a systemic one -- our language about these topics is so pro-macho and misogynistic in general that it hardly seems fair to punish one individual for what I might call a technical violation. (Note that there's a wholly separate question as to whether you agree with Schuster substantively that there's something untoward about Chelsea Clinton giving her mother a shoulder up.) It's the same thing as the Tiger Woods lynching comment of a few weeks ago. If you're going to have people on TV whose job it is to talk and talk and talk without a script for large blocs of time, they're occasionally going to say stupid things, not because they themselves are stupid (although certainly some are), but because there are biases in the language. These are things people say; ergo one should not be aghast when he hears a person say them.
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