I, among many others, had for several years held out the hope that the political blogs would continue to grow in legitimate authority such that they would be able to serve as a necessary corrective and supplement to the flaws in the traditional media.  Not, as some would have had it, to supplant and replace those older forms, but to act in a sense as sort of collective ombudsman, pushing and prodding the traditional media towards higher standards and doing a "better" job overall.

Now, however, far too many prominent blogs and bloggers have fallen into the same traps which we used to decry, allowing double-standards and hypocrisy run rampant and uncorrected.  This damage will take a long, long time to repair, if indeed it ever can be.

The danger is that, in their headlong rush to stop the first major female candidate (aka "Hildebeast" and "Hitlery") from becoming president, the punditocracy may have landed the Democrats with perhaps the least qualified presidential nominee ever.

Grossly sexist, and misogynist language and actions are now sanctioned at the highest (or, rather, lowest and scummiest) levels of our society.

Those affected would be your daughters, wives, mothers, grandmothers, friends, and so on and so forth. And we men, of course, if we put up with it or enable it.

How is that good?

From "how do we beat the b***h" to "Iron my shirt" to "pimping her out" to "cleavage" to use of words like "shrew" "harridan" "shrill" the nastiness has come from all sides. I don't recall any point at which anyone from the Dem leadership-or the Obama campaign- has spoken out against these slurs contemporaneously. It's been up to Hillary and her campaign to fight back against them, and for that she was also pilloried.

Coco actually named Shuster and the NMB/MSNBC crowd.  While Shuster was the only person called out by name, for his "pimping out" Chelsea comment, she did talk about millionaire pundits and analysts.

What strikes me, coup d'main, about the lame stream media, the blogs & the rightwingnutz noise machine is the absolutely vitriolic hatred of Hillary Rodham Clinton.  It seems to me that she is targeted with a radically more vicious level of disdain than females in general.

And, while internet psychoanalysis is silly, the attitudes toward Sen. Clinton by these kreeeepy people (male & female) seems pathological.

It really is astonishing to realize the insane behavior she can inspire, especially in comparison to, e.g., Pelosi, Boxer, Feinstein, Murray, Lincoln, Stabenow, Mikulski, Hutchinson, Snowe, Frahm, Landrieu, Collins, etc.  And notice: all of those named are senior to her in their respective elected roles &, presumably, in many ways, more powerful.  Even so, while they have their detractors, they have no comparison to the attacks on "Mrs." Clinton.

I suggest a review of Altemeyer's work, which is available for free online, as well as a review of Eric Hoffer's "True Believers:  The Psychology of Mass Movements."

Well, at least somebody gets it.  

I thought the quote by Krugman was good.  He's a real hero in all of this, IMHO, but boy, has he taken a beating for it.  I will always be grateful to him for standing up though, just as he stood up and spoke the truth about the Bush/Cheney administration when it was a very unpopular thing to do.  He's earned a rare distinction as one who is trustworthy in the media.

"What's particularly saddening," says Paul Krugman, professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton and a rare dissenting voice from the left as a columnist in the New York Times, "is the way many Obama supporters seem happy with the . . . way pundits and some news organisations treat any action or statement by the Clintons, no matter how innocuous, as proof of evil intent." Despite widespread reporting to the contrary, Krugman believes that most of the "venom" in the campaign "is coming from supporters of Obama".

Does it seem at all familiar to anyone that Axelrove is successfully accusing Hillary of doing what he himself is doing?  Does anyone feel the Orwellian nature of this campaign?  It's the Republican Smear Machine adapted for so-called liberals.  It's got all my red flags waving, and it has from the start.

They simply don't care nor do they have any shame.  

It is MONUMENTALLY stupid to think the people who care about this are just going to say "No problem" when the damage is NOW DONE.

The time to notice any of this was 8 months ago.  The UK's New Statesman is merely so late to notice that one wonders if they weren't aware AND complicit.  Not that they would be as a UK paper, but the point I make is the same.

IT DOES NO F-ING GOOD TO BE TALKING ABOUT THIS NOW.

NONE AT ALL!!!!!!

The Democratic Party did not do anything, the Obama blogs cheered, and Obama himself used it as an issue (can you imagine if Clinton said "someone who was attacked too much -- presumably because he was black -- is in no position to unite the country --"??)

.... and so the Obama blogs and the Democratic Party must be punished, not rewarded at the polls in November.

Many liberals are now pointing to them to excuse their bigotry, but they should remember their history.  Sexist women have always played a significant (though not the major) role in oppressing women.  There have always been the Phyllis Schlaflys and Marabelle Morgans, going back to suffrage days and beyond.

It seems there are roughly about the same number of misogynist women as men; perhaps it's always been so.  In Quinnipiac's swing state polls this week, men and women were about equally likely to say they were somewhat or very likely to be uncomfortable supporting a woman President.  (And in all states, these numbers were much larger than for discomfort with black candidates.)

Misogynist women have always been around, however few, yet disproportionately visible, and should therefore lend zero to the new sexism.

Schlafly was, and is, of course, conservative.  Morgan was more dangerous in many ways, a younger, more hip, apolitical trendsetter.  The inevitable next step, once feminism went boringly mainstream, was for outrageous and trendy, liberal and anti-intellectual women like Randi Rhodes to assume Schlafly's mantle.

Obama supporters are lifting these women as figureheads for political goals, and the media are making them stars since it's great TV yet "safe" to have a woman say things men can't.

Perhaps it will take Europe's intellectual liberals to embarrass our liberals out of this disease.

This notion that the media is just pro black is absurd and insulting.

"Hillary Clinton smashed the myth of innate female moral superiority in the worst possible way--by demonstrating female moral inferiority. We didn't really need her racial innuendos and free-floating bellicosity to establish that women aren't wimps. As a generation of young feminists realizes, the values once thought to be uniquely and genetically female--such as compassion and an aversion to violence--can be found in either sex, and sometimes it's a man who best upholds them."

Here's the ABC news story

What has John Mccain said about it?

That you say so suggests that you still don't get what sexism is and how it has been used against Clinton and thus all women in this campaign.  Also, we have discussed many examples of sexist behavior by Obama here, and I personally am done being distracted by those who ask us to keep doing that work for them.  Search the archives here or google.

I don't know what the solution is. I do know that this is a game of inches. For every flaw or sexist statement from Obama, perceived or otherwise, I know John Mccain would be ten million times worse. We can't cut off our nose to spite our face here. Yes, our country has a deeply ingrained sexist streak. Yes, the English language is full of loaded language that gets bandied about without a second thought to its origin or its meaning. These are issues that we must continue to fight and continue to challenge.

Plenty of people are willing to heap praise on Clinton for all that she's accomplished in the face of incredible odds. I certainly would never try to diminish her stature as a role model and a shining example. We should all continue to do this, for the good of the fight.