Hillary Clinton Attacked by Man From Mars

[kskiska]

By Tina Brown

Maybe it's a secret fantasy of girl-on-girl action that makes Ed Klein obsess about Sen. Hillary Clinton's supposed lesbian ethos in his new book "The Truth About Hillary." It's hard to know what else he has to draw on. Yelling "lesbian" at powerful heterosexual women has always been the pathetic projection of the menaced male, but it's especially baffling in Klein's case. As the former editor of the New York Times Magazine, with some bestsellers behind him, Klein used to be a workmanlike scribe with glamour aspirations when he was flat-footing around in the Jackie O crypto-sphere. He's not the usual sniper in the Republican stage army, which is perhaps why such paid-up members as the New York Post's John Podhoretz have elected to play smart and trash the book, too. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that misogyny is a sure boomerang.

In New York, "The Truth About Hillary" is having the unintended result of inspiring female solidarity. At a fancy all-girls lunch party on Fifth Avenue on Tuesday for, in Kleinspeak, the Powerful Network of Women who control the dinner access in Manhattan, "Ed Slime" was a withering topic of conversation, which seems to have been good news for his Amazon listing.

Every time Klein describes anyone female in Hillary Clinton's circle, you hear the clump clump clump of stereotype-lesbian footwear. Melanne Verveer, her White House East Wing chief of staff, is "dark haired and mannish-looking." Susan Thomases has "frizzy salt-and-pepper hair, frumpy clothes, down-at-the-heel shoes and an expletive-laden vocabulary." Evelyn Lieberman, the White House deputy chief of staff, is "short, a little overweight with grayish hair," while the orientation of the Hillary-driven picks for Cabinet appointments, Donna Shalala and Janet Reno, "are shrouded in deep ambiguity" (not).

Wellesley in the late '60s, instead of being the uptight, white-gloves institution that other alumnae remember, is depicted as some kind of Sapphic coven of radical feminists, with the buzz cut of Hillary's friend Nancy Wanderer, who did come out two decades after Wellesley, as Exhibit A. Hillary's gag -- at the 25th-anniversary Wellesley class reunion she hostessed at the White House -- that maybe she, too, should get a crop like Nancy's is laid on by Klein as a hint of wishful thinking, instead of what the remark obviously was: a clear tease off the media's obsession with her hair.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/22/AR2005062202301.html?nav=hcmodule

[BrklynLiberal]

1. The new scare tactic...imply that any woman of power is a lesbian...

Fundie wisdom: Any woman who would not submit to her man 100% MUST be gay. :puke: :puke: :puke: :puke: :puke:

[rodeodance]

6. it is an old tactic--it works-so they keep using it!!!!!!

[Octafish]

2. Tina misses the point.

It's not about misogyny.

It's not even about Hillary being a "power woman."

It's about a media bought and paid for by the Reich.

The Washington Post calls Conyers a kook.

The New York Times magazine was run by a right-wing nutjob.

Three years from now, whoever the DEM candidate is, will get roasted by their peers.

[beyurslf]

3. What scares me is how many young women I know who DO think Hillary is

a power hungry woman who would eat children to get what she wants. They don't stand in solidarity. They do let men talk about women with that language. Frightening, really.

[rodeodance]

4. I think Rove was involved doing this in TX--? to Ann Richards? anyone

recall this?

[BikePunk]

7. Yup. Rove and Bush implied it in the race for Governor

and it got the best gov. in texas in the last ...? forever-time that it had and possibly would ever have.

[rodeodance]

5. she did a good textual analysis of the book.