The plight of women’s health in Texas has always been a concern of mine. One of my earliest memories involves sitting in a car outside an abortion clinic in Dallas waiting for my mother to come back out of the clinic so that we could drive back home to Sweetwater. From that day to this one, women’s health has figured highly in my thoughts because my mother forbid me or the rest of the children from ever admitting that the trip had even happened. It was that verboten as a subject in Texas. You simply were not allowed to discuss it in polite company.
We had to drive to Dallas because there was no clinic closer to us in Sweetwater than the clinic four hours away in Dallas. Women’s health has only gotten harder to address since that time in the early eighties when we made that road trip.
When the Abortion Barbie, the Texas Republican male’s label for Wendy Davis, stood up and filibustered the latest restrictions on abortion to be proposed by the troglodytes that run our state in 2013, I was one of her greatest supporters. I went out and proudly cast my vote for her in the governor’s race the next year. Anyone who was brave enough to stand up and talk about how essential women’s health is, and how much of women’s health is being made illegal in Texas, was the kind of straight talker I wanted to run my state government.
But she lost, of course. The attacks on women’s health continued unabated. The Republican legislature passed the bill that Wendy Davis had filibustered in the next session of the legislature. Then in 2017 they passed SB8. Slowly, one by one, the remaining women’s health clinics in Texas are closing.
Planned Parenthood was the only place in the region that a woman could go to get birth control pills at a reduced cost. To get mammograms and pap smears done. The only place that poor women could go to see to their basic health needs. I know this because The Wife and I relied on that clinic when we lived in San Angelo. Now that clinic is closed and those women who are still in San Angelo have nowhere else to go.
The promise that Conservative Christianists made, that women’s health would not suffer in Texas because of their war on Planned Parenthood, was an outright lie.
They don’t care about women’s health, they only care about maintaining male control over the female’s reproductive system. That is the beginning, the middle and the end of the story when it comes to why they hate Planned Parenthood.
It is the same reason why the founder of Planned Parenthood was reviled when she started this movement to care for women’s health first and foremost. She was liberating women from their reliance on men, and men don’t like that. It would be nice if these liars were better at telling the lies they tell. At least you could be comfortable in the lies that way.
Intimate terrorism is a better descriptive phrase for what occurs in an abusive relationship than domestic abuse or violence ever could be. This segment of On The Media was brought back to mind by this segment of Morning Edition, a podcast feed I only discovered after changing my preferred podcast player to player.fm from beyondpod. I’m not signing up for a subscription to player.fm, mind you, I just like the intuitive interface in player.fm‘s app. I don’t have enough money to allow me to give money to everyone who deserves to be paid. It is a failing in the monetary system that I don’t have enough to cover the costs of essentials. Essentials like easy access to the information that keeps you alive. But I digress.
Someone should probably engage in some counter-terrorism. Say, publish Youtube videos of these murderous men being tracked down and emasculated. A literal or actual emasculation, I don’t think it matters much which it is. Some of these men deserve to be physically emasculated, but I won’t call for harm being caused to anyone, not even those who so richly deserve it. These videos would serve as an example to other abusive men. An example of what will happen to the men who think they can get away with their behavior.
Intimate terrorism reminds me of this episode of The Stakes. A podcast series I started listening to because of On The Media‘s rebroadcasting of the three-part miniseries on A History of Persuasion. The Stakes deals with the fraught nature of modern American society, and what it is we stand to lose if we don’t take the threats represented in the Trump presidency seriously enough.
The ERA, abortion, rape, you know, issues — women were organizing all over the place. But in some ways abortion and rape are more visible issues. This was sort of background noise. You know, the background hum that you get used to and you don’t notice anymore? That was the status of sexual harassment. Between 1960 and 1980 women’s participation in the workforce went from 38 percent to 51 percent. A huge jump. Men were threatened. They were women coming into the old boys club. They needed to assert their dominance, and make sure that women knew their place. And this was one of the ways to do that.
All of this is related. All of it. Male domination of society is coming to an end, and small-minded men are threatened by this fact. They hope to force women back into the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant. The rest of us should be properly outraged by this fact. The Trump presidency is a physical manifestation of this reflexive male panic. Don’t believe that? Secretary of Labor Alexander Acosta resigned because he got caught giving a serial pedophile and rapist a free ride. A serial pedophile that Trump called a good friend and used hang out with extensively, to paraphrase Stonekettle Station.
I have a solution to this problem. Men like Trump will not like it. In fact, it is probably their worst nightmare, the kind they wake up screaming from. We (the big we, we as a society or we as the world’s human population) we should train every girl in self defense. We should start this training when they are girls, not women, so that we can get a jump on the passive conditioning forced on most girls in most societies at an early age. Four or five years of age should be young enough. We should train them and then arm them with their weapon of choice. Guns, knives, whatever. Then you give these women one free pass on killing a man. Not two or three, just one. If you kill two or three men, you are probably one of those rare serial killing women. We don’t want to encourage that. Nope, they get one free pass, if… If they present themselves to a police officer or prosecutor and officially make the claim that a rape occurred.
No inquiries, no grand jury, no nothing. A free pass for killing rapists.
I predict that the problem of violence against women will be cleared up in a single generation if we were to install this anti-misogyny policy. If you just pissed yourself, you are probably one of the men that has nightmares about women you’ve mistreated tracking you down after the policy went into effect. Maybe you should try apologizing.
Let’s imagine if 80,000 votes in the Rust Belt had gone the other way in 2016 and Hillary Clinton were president. Let’s also imagine there were controversial circumstances surrounding her victory – a foreign adversary attacked our political system in the hopes of putting her in power – and reasons to believe the Democratic campaign may have cooperated in some way with the attackers.
…Would there be widespread hand-wringing about those who dared to question Clinton’s earlier denials of wrongdoing? Would congressional Democrats call for Republicans’ resignations and demand new investigations into federal law enforcement?
Hillary Clinton has been the prime target of hatred for women for most of my life. If you had a problem with women in general it was Hillary Clinton that was cited as evidence of this problem. From the moment she stepped upon the national stage and presented herself and her husband as two sides of the same coin, she has been the target of ire for females by both males and females alike. I should have remembered this fact before thinking that she could ever be president, but my desire to not see the United States descend into the hellhole it is now on the path to becoming blinded me to that painful truth. The painful truth that is still reiterated in every chant of #lockherup, in the constant conservative and #MAGA refrain of What about Hillary? in the face of any criticism of their lord and savior, Donald Trump.
I have a pretty clear memory of the first time she strutted onto my radar, back in the early days of Bill Clinton’s first term in office. It was during the rollout of what conservatives derogatively called Hillarycare. I bought the lie back then, not understanding just how skewed the information that I was consuming was. How conservative everywhere in Texas is, even in the bluest of blue parts of Texas. Women had a place and Hillary Clinton wasn’t conforming to what was expected of women, behaviorally, back in the eighties.
I don’t want to put her on a pedestal. There are things she did that were objectively wrong. That isn’t the point of this article. The point is that if you pretend that everything she did was done by a man, you wouldn’t even have batted an eye at her behavior. This is probably the most telling argument against her as a leader, that she was and is absolutely ordinary from a human perspective. She compromised her values to protect her husband, just like anyone else would do. She waited to discover what the polls would tell her before taking a stand on a subject, just like every other career politician does. There is not one thing that she is castigated for that men have not done and been forgiven for. It is because she is a woman that people hate her.
Bad news for the haters: History is decidedly unafraid of “the woman card.” It doesn’t care how many people will stand on tables today and swear they’d feel the same if she were a man. It will see us for what we are—a sick society, driven by misogyny and pathetically struggling to come to terms with the fact that women do not exist solely to nurture.
Hillary Clinton was nowhere near as unpopular as her haters think, as pundits are now saying retroactively. Rather, what was underestimated was the misogynistic influence. What do I mean by that? I mean the people who blamed her for her husband’s presidency, or credited her with the same. She isn’t Bill Clinton and all the baggage that name and presidency entails. Whether she had covered for him or castigated him would have made no difference, and the failure to separate her from her husband’s behavior is the clearest form of misogyny that I can point to. But it’s hardly the only example.
When the person was presented as a high powered person, who was very ambitious, we found that the person was seen as much more unlikable when it was a woman than when it was a man
But let’s forget about the hatred leveled at powerful women. Women of status in the US today. Let’s go to the other end of the social spectrum. From the wealthy and powerful and the unjustified treatment they suffer, to the women with nothing. Let’s look at what happens to the victims of war. American women who were radicalized and joined the Islamic State in Syria.
Read through the comments under that video. The calls to refuse these women re-entry to the United States, even though they have no other nationality to claim. We cannot make them stateless by revoking their citizenship, and we cannot keep them from returning if they are citizens. If we violate international law in this case, we will have no grounds to hold other countries to international law later. To keep these people from being radicalized again, we HAVE TO make sure they are fully engaged in society for the foreseeable future.
I don’t know the particulars of each case. It’s entirely possible that they deserve prison time for their actions in Syria. That isn’t the question here. The particular woman who was interviewed for the television segment expects to get a prison sentence. However, Donald Trump has revoked her passport. He has rendered her stateless. He has violated international law, at the same time as he is harassing other countries to abide by international law.
Hold on, I hear you saying. We can’t just let these people come back here. That’s the catch. We already have. American men who have surrendered under similar circumstances have been repatriated. The women, though? We don’t want those women back. That’ll teach the rest of the women to stay in line. Never mind that we cannot legally denaturalize a citizen. Only the court can do that, and we have to bring them back here to put them on trial. It’s a catch-22. We can’t keep her out, and we can’t say she doesn’t belong here without first bringing her home. All of them have to come home, but the women most of all. Most of all, because singling them out for different treatment is a hallmark of misogyny.
I want to live in a world where women are encouraged to fight back. In that world men will treat women better. But instead of teaching them to fight back we train girls to be passive. To smile meaninglessly. To never let a moment of anger show. Passivity gets you beaten to death while you sit and take it, and the women who do fight back are punished, punished more harshly than we punish men.
Think of the strongest, surest woman you know, and then think about what is said about her. Now think about that person as a man. See the problem now? I’m familiar with the argument. I’ve been around the park a few times now. A life without conflict is not really living, is expecting too much from others. Standing on “no conflict” as an achievable goal ignores the natural world around us where conflict is everywhere.
The misunderstanding originated with the separation of physical violence from verbal violence. Passivity starts with being afraid to speak your mind, not with the refusal to come to blows. Passivity is present in hiding in the “safe room” rather than fleeing from the aggressor or fighting back if necessary. Of being prepared to gut that bastard the next time he comes near, rather than forgive him. You can forgive his corpse, sweetheart. Forgive it all you like. Make sure it is a corpse first.
What? Too harsh? You’ve never seen your mother beaten. Never been beaten yourself. You’ve never discovered that rage within yourself and wondered where it came from. Walk a mile in my shoes. In a partner I wanted someone that would have my back because she wanted to protect me as much as I wanted to protect her. I taught my daughter to defend herself, that it was okay to defend herself. If women are our equals, they don’t need our permission to be in our faces all the time. They simply will be, and we (the men) will just have to take it. Hopefully we’ll manage as well as the women have.
I’ve been sitting on this one for quite a while. What we did to Hillary Clinton was misogyny and she’s not the only victim of our misogyny. Apologize to your daughters and your wives. Thank them for not gutting your heartless ass. That they haven’t thought about doing this is possibly because they are also misogynists. It is also possible that women don’t contemplate life in that way. You should also be thankful for that fact, if it is one.
I want to tell you a story. No, scratch that introduction. This is not something I want to do. I need to tell you a story. This is a story that has needed to be told for quite some time. It’s a true story, so I will take a little literary license with the details to masque the identities of those involved; but the story remains true enough that those involved will know the truth of this story. Both the guilty and the innocent will know the truth of this.
It was 40 years ago. A young woman stumbled into a frat party near a lake. She was naked. Her hair was matted with twigs and dirt. She was half-drowned, very drunk and confused. She said she had escaped from someone trying to kill her. She was raving. She sounded crazy. Someone had snuck up behind her while she was answering the call of nature. A few too many beers, she said. He had raped her, tried to strangle her, and then dumped what he thought was her dead body in the lake. “I’m a good swimmer” she declared, triumphantly.
No one that found her knew who she was. She had been brought to the party by friends from another frat. Just looking at her, you could tell, she had been through some serious trauma. So these benefactors, these people who had no idea who she was, took her to the hospital where it was confirmed that she had been raped by someone. The police were called. Yes, she said. I want to press charges. Yes, she said, I know who it was that raped me and tried to kill me. She gave his name to the police.
…and that was when the trouble started. This young man was well known, a hometown kid. She was a nobody. She had been shipped off to this far-away place because she had gotten pregnant.
Her high school sweetheart had been insisting they should have sex for most of their senior year. They had just graduated. It was time to celebrate, so she finally gave in to his desires and her own. And why not? She wasn’t going to the college she wanted to attend. Her parents had refused to send her to Europe, to the conservatory that had invited her to attend. A full scholarship, if she could only get there. To Europe, where her musical talents could be properly honed. They refused to buy her a plane ticket, even though they could pay for it. “You can’t make a living playing music” they told her. So here she was, in the arms of the man she thought she would marry. There was little else to look forward to, from her perspective.
She wasn’t stupid. She knew that she could get pregnant, but she loved him. She thought he loved her, until she found out she was pregnant and told him. Then he disavowed her. He said he’d never had sex with her, so it couldn’t be his child. He was going to the college he wanted, after all. He couldn’t stay there, get married and raise kids. That just wasn’t his plans for his future.
Alone and pregnant, she was sent away to live with foster parents. Sent away to a place where none of the friends and family would know of her dirty little secret. The dirty secret that she had been foolish enough to believe a man when he told her he loved her.
She did the right thing. She carried the child to term, because that’s what you are supposed to do. She carried the child to term and gave it up for adoption. That was the christian thing to do. Accept your punishment for having sex, and give birth to children you can’t afford. Children that you give away to strangers who can afford to raise them for you. She went through all of that, because that was what she was supposed to do.
With the embarrassment of nine months of a belly she didn’t want, a child she couldn’t keep, couped up with people she barely knew but strangely adopted as parents anyway; with all of that behind her, she set her sights on doing the best with what she had left of her life plans.
She still had her musical talent, even if she wouldn’t be touring Europe as part of an orchestra, the role she really was suited for. Her college friends envied her her gift, a natural ear for music and the ability to pick up nearly any instrument and play it well enough to shine in state competitions. But teaching music was the best she could hope for now. She didn’t relish the thought of teaching others to play, but if that was the best she could do, that is what she would shoot for.
A few months into her delayed college education, she was invited to that fateful party. She had a little too much to drink. She had the misfortune of needing to relieve herself. She left herself vulnerable to the jealous and the talentless, albeit well-liked, hometown boy. A hometown boy with a grudge.
Once again, she did the right thing. The thing you are supposed to do. She knew her attacker, even though she was drunk at the time. She knew what he had tried to do to her, had actually thought he had achieved. He thought she was dead when he left her floating in the water. She would be just another body found washed up on a beach somewhere.
A tragic accident. Except it was rape and attempted murder, and you don’t let that go unpunished. She pressed charges against the hometown boy, faced him in court. She accused him of the crimes that there was far more than sufficient evidence for. She accused him from the stand, and yet he was found not guilty by the jury.
Why was he found not guilty? Because she had done the right thing, over and over. She had yielded to the man she wanted to marry. She had carried the resultant child to birth and given it away. She had shrugged it all off and made the best of what she had left. She had the temerity to stand tall and not be embarrassed by the things society told her were embarrassing. Why should it be embarrassing? Doing the right thing should be praiseworthy. Shouldn’t it? Shouldn’t it?
“But,” they said, “she was a loose woman.” This was evident because she had given birth recently. Given birth instead of having an abortion and hiding the evidence of her improprieties, her loose ways. Loose women just want to have sex, and clearly she wanted to have sex with this hometown boy. When he rejected her, she staged the entire scene. Choked herself, tried to drown herself, rolled around in the dirt, naked, and threw herself on unsuspecting strangers in order to malign the hometown boy. Who was the court to believe? This loose woman, spirited away from her family and friends in order to save their reputations? Or should the court believe this fine, upstanding hometown boy who, while musically talentless, was still a handsome young man with a promising future? Who indeed?
Who indeed? Not guilty. Case dismissed. Free as a bird, he flew. Still flies. As I said, a true story. True enough, anyway.
So when I read stories about why didn’t they come forward? In the news these days, news about high profile judges and corporate leaders and politicians galore, men of high stature accused of the wrongs that they’ve hidden in plain sight until finally some woman has had enough that she just won’t take it anymore and risks everything to shine the light of justice on these loathsome individuals, I don’t even have to ask
Why don’t they come forward?
I know why.
They didn’t come forward before, and most of them will not come forward now because they won’t be believed. As the latest accusations about Brett Kavanaugh circulate, while the Pussy Grabber-in-Chief defends him, and the same old song and dance plays out. The women are condemned while the guilty men fly free. Just like it always has happened before.
These women are not believed by far, far too many people. It’s too convenient not to believe if believing means you have to change who and what you think is right in the world. You wouldn’t come forward if you were them, and you are deluded if you think otherwise. Until these guilty men are punished there are not enough people who believe the women. That is the simple fact in front of all of us right now. Until they are punished, there will be no justice for women in this world.
You tell me the world has changed much since 1994.
And yet here you are, telling me that we should put that same old mindset, boys will be boys, all boys do it, on the Supreme Court and you know, it’s hard for me to see that much of anything has changed at all.
Lets put that shoe on the other foot. Instead of slut shaming one of a choice of many women that fit into the category of “having sex with someone that they regret,” let’s focus on the real culprits here. Bill Clinton forced me to explain what a blowjob was to my pre-teen daughter. Luckily both children were adults by the time Donald Trump ran for office, because I would have committed suicide before attempting to explain golden showers and watersports to children.
My now-adult children had unlimited broadband access for years by that point. They didn’t need me to explain sexual deviancy; but they did helpfully ask if I needed it explained.
So, dad, a golden shower is when…
Thanks, son. I got it. I’m gonna need a mental emetic to get those images out of my head, but I got it. You can stop now. Please stop now.
The point here is, let’s talk about the true guilty parties in these relationships. The 900 pound silverbacks in the room. That would be the men. The men with their loose private parts finding their way into places they don’t belong. I would happily two-man loft Slick Willy under the nearest moving bus, if.
If.
If it meant that stormtrumpers would throw the Orange Hate-Monkey under the exact same bus. Who’s taking bets on that happening?
I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t because the people making these comparisons between Bill Clinton’s victims and Donald Trump’s victims would rather slut shame the victims themselves than prosecute the guilty men. And that, dear reader, is your teachable moment for today.
It will never cease to amaze me the numbers of people who insist on further victimizing victims. As another commenter pointed out, Lewinsky gave the blowjob. She was merely there and attracted to a man with power. A man who should have known better than to get involved with a staff member since he had been caught with his pants down previously and that event had already cost him.
Bill Clinton did force me to discuss oral sex with my daughter. That is simply the fact of the matter. Had he not engaged in questionable practices with his staff (repeatedly) he wouldn’t have had an improper relationship with his staff that could trip up his testimony in court making “blowjob” a news item that had to be explained.
Donald Trump has brought watersports into the political sphere. As if politics needed more perversion attached to it. What I find tiresomely predictable are the people who insist on making this about the women. As if Russian hookers forced Donald Trump to lie under them so they could pee on him. At least the Republicans will no longer be the party of values voters, at least not without a significant amount of hypocrisy and sarcasm. If they claim to have values in 2018, I’m going to have to ask them what part of family values involves whorish men dicking around like they were sailors on leave.
In defending the president you love, be careful you don’t throw your own sanity under the bus with him in defense of him. Bill Clinton was a bad person and a mediocre president, and the truth will out eventually. Bill Clinton is the reason Hillary lost. The stupid people who wouldn’t vote for Hillary blame her for sticking with Bill. Blame her for the things he did. Had she thrown him under the bus in 1998, she’d be president right now. That’s how good she actually is as a person. If she was the power-hungry monster that the Hillary haters make her out to be, willing to destroy the person who is her greatest liability, her husband, she’d be President. Think about that.
Donald Trump’s sex life is now all of our business, now that the stormtrumpers have made him their emperor. His crimes with minors, prostitutes and porn stars are just one more reason why he has to be removed from office ASAP, because those idiots need to understand just how wrong they are. He is the president, the leader of our country. He is willfully ignorant and happy to be that way. He takes what he wants and demands unquestioning loyalty. He is not the kind of person who should ever have power. He has to go, and he has to go now.
I don’t actually care about his sex life or even want to know if and how he engages in sex. Images I don’t want and now can’t be removed from inside my head. But because he holds the office of president, we own all his bullshit. It’s ours now. Donald Trump’s whim-worshipping is our major problem, an example of which is his willingness to lob nukes at North Korea. A verbal assault that he engaged in in response to provocations that his predecessors managed to handle without threatening the world with nuclear war. His unabashed willingness to destroy the world with nuclear war (options for which were discussed seriously with generals over the last few months) has forced our ally South Korea to submit itself to talks with the only government it is more afraid of than China. I predict that there won’t be two Koreas for very much longer, because the Koreans don’t want their homes to be reduced to radioactive rubble in the name of proving that the Orange Hate-Monkey has the bigger red button.
…and one of the most obvious examples of this dangerous behavior on his part is his inability to keep it in his pants. It has cost him millions, cost him entire businesses, and it will possibly cost the world the ability to sustain human life if we leave him in office. So, yeah. I think that acknowledging his obvious failings like whoring around while married is pertinent. The only way it would not be pertinent is if he were still a private citizen. I wish he was.
Despite a great deal of evidence that connects the dots between these mass killers and radical misogynist groups, we still largely refer to the attackers as “lone wolves” — a mistake that ignores the preventable way these men’s fear and anger are deliberately cultivated and fed online.
Here’s the term we should all use instead: misogynist terrorism. Until we grapple with the disdain for women that drives these mass murderers, and the way that the killers are increasingly radicalized on the internet, there will be no stopping future tragedies.
This little gem showed up as a notification on my phone today, Sessions Speeds Up Clinton Email Case. Just in case anyone is mystified by how this is still a thing we talk about, I will direct you to the Orange Hate-Monkey‘s (OHM) need to beat the dead horse of Hillary Clinton’s political aspirations on a near-daily basis. He rage tweets so often about Hillary Clinton you would have good reason to think that she won the office that he now occupies. And while she did win the office by a landslide in the popular vote (three million more votes than the OHM) we all know that the slavery compromise of the Electoral College has corrupted the intentions of the authors of the Constitution we still live under, requiring us to pay lip service to the OHM as president when he is quite literally the furthest thing from presidential that most of us can imagine. There is no more visible example in the United States today that the system we live under is corrupt and requires maintenance and repair, than the fact that the OHM sits in an office that he has no traceable ability to perform in even a substandard fashion, and that he was given the office by people who could have done otherwise but felt they were powerless to do so.
So the OHM has gained the office of President of the United States. He has personal control over the largest military ever assembled on the face of the Earth, with more destructive capability than is needed to reduce the Earth to an essentially lifeless husk. If you have half the imagination that I do, this prospect gives you nightmares you awaken screaming from several times a week. That kind of power is resting in the hands of our Presidential real estate developer and Russian money launderer. The fact that he laundered and continues to launder money for the Russian mob will be demonstrable by the time that Robert Mueller finishes his investigation into Trump’s business practices, and anyone who thinks that isn’t grounds for impeachment all on its own doesn’t understand business or politics. Why the OHM continues to pretend that he didn’t coordinate with his buddy Vladimir Putin, even though half his campaign staff has now been brought up on charges relating to the investigation of Russia meddling in the 2016 presidential election, is anyone’s guess. Only his stormtrumpers are dumb enough to believe the theater he creates daily to distract us from the fact that the proverbialManchurian Candidatesits in the office of the president. Oh, what about Crooked Hillary? What about the other losers that I beat to get here? Why aren’t they under investigation?
Let’s talk about the OHM’s predecessors, then. Let’s talk about their use of email to avoid embarrassment at having their machinations revealed to the voting public. And since we are talking about crimes that went down in previous administrations, let’s go all the way back. Not just to Hillary and her nearly unprecedented willingness to cooperate with investigators on the subject of her email correspondence, but all the way back to George W. Bush, the infamous W, and his administration’s completely different take on public access to correspondence that they didn’t want us to have,
Like Clinton, the Bush White House used a private email server—its was owned by the Republican National Committee. And the Bush administration failed to store its emails, as required by law, and then refused to comply with a congressional subpoena seeking some of those emails. “It’s about as amazing a double standard as you can get,” says Eric Boehlert, who works with the pro-Clinton group Media Matters. “If you look at the Bush emails, he was a sitting president, and 95 percent of his chief advisers’ emails were on a private email system set up by the RNC. Imagine if for the last year and a half we had been talking about Hillary Clinton’s emails set up on a private DNC server? ”
Eventually, the Bush White House admitted it had lost 22 million emails, not 5 million. Then, in December 2009—well into Barack Obama’s administration—the White House said it found 22 million emails, dated between 2003 and 2005, that it claimed had been mislabeled. That cache was given to the National Archives, and it and other plaintiffs agreed, on December 14, 2009, to settle their lawsuit. But the emails have not yet been made available to the public.
When the Republicans pictured above are on trial for deleting their records rather than hand them over, I will care about the records that Hillary Clinton turned over. Millions of messages deleted by every significant figure in the W Administration, and no one is investigating these very real crimes. Not one official has been charged with a crime relating to their destroying this information, no one has gone to jail. The selective memory of stormtrumpers and GOPpers is the problem here, not Clinton’s public records.
For those of you who think this is a smokescreen, that what I am and others are suggesting, is that Hillary Clinton be let off on a technicality, let me set you straight. Hillary Clinton surrendered her emails that weren’t her private correspondence. I know that the idea that politicians don’t have something to hide (especially female politicians. Female politicians who seem overly fond of privacy) just strikes the average cynic as implausible, but there it is. She complied with the request from legitimate authority and has suffered no end of pain over it. People are convinced there is a crime there somewhere. There just has to be, after eight inquests and millions of dollars spent. Surely there is something?
No. No there isn’t. I know this breaks your heart but if you want to satisfy your intense interest in other people’s private correspondence, why don’t you go look through George W. Bush’s email records? Why? Because you can’t. Because they destroyed that information rather than turn it over when it was requested by legitimate authority.
But really, why go back in time at all? There is no need to look any further than the sitting president, since an example of the kinds of transgressions that drive stormtrumpers and GOPpers alike into frothing fury when it comes to Hillary Clinton can be found sitting at the right hand of the OHM. His son-in-law was recently reported to be using a private email server to conduct official White House business,
As a candidate, Mr. Trump aggressively attacked Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee, for her use of private email while she was secretary of state. Some of Mr. Trump’s allies outside the White House are urging him to press for a prosecution of Mrs. Clinton, even though an F.B.I. investigation into her handling of classified information has been closed. At Mr. Trump’s rallies, his supporters still break into cheers of “lock her up!”
So we can add this hypocrisy to the list of administration officials past and now present, officials who have also not been indicted for using a private email server to conduct government business. Will the Republicans now be chanting Lock Him Up? Don’t hold your breath.
A version of this was originally posted here, I let the freak flag fly this time out. I don’t think I can get more pissed off that this is still a thing than I am right now. I can give it a shot if you think more visible anger would help.
The sad thing about this?Only MSNBC seems to understand the larger story here. That one group seems to be attempting the fix the problem while the other group embraces their misogynistic vision. Here’s hoping the GOP finally gets the comeuppance it has deserved since Reagan. Since Nixon. The GOP is far more complicit in the promotion of these kinds of dangerous people to seats of power than the average American would be comfortable admitting, without attempting to tar both parties equally. The Democrats are actually doing something positive on this subject. I do hope women are watching and voting their interests.
Media, like most industries, is still dominated by straight, white, cisgender men ― at least at the top. How many women have been pushed aside over the years professionally because of the preferences of more powerful men who turn out to be predators? How many predatory men have been propped up by other predatory men? And how many stories have gone untold in the process?
Naked and wet, she stumbles out of the tall grass near the lake’s edge and collapses at my feet. To my eyes she looked like a goddess, limned in a halo of light from the far-off city streets behind her, as I caught first sight of her. It’s probably the alcohol we’ve all been drinking affecting my judgement. Or maybe she was a ghost, a vengeful spirit come to exact her toll upon unsuspecting campers and night fishermen. And then there she was as real as the beer can in my hand lying at my feet in her birthday suit.
“I made it” she giggles and then burps prodigiously, shattering the unearthly image. “Excuse me!” she exclaims and seems genuinely mortified. “I’ve had a little too much to drink” she offers “maybe even a lot too much” she adds hesitantly, looking around and suddenly noticing things are not quite adding up right, that there seems to be a few things missing.
“You’re gonna want to go find your clothes” I offered helpfully. Ever a gentleman, I think to myself. “Yep” she says “I am naked alright” as if finally figuring out what was missing in the equation. “How did I get naked?” she starts to cry “Where are my clothes?”
Editor’s note. A fictionalized intro to the true story I created a narrative for in this article.
