Not necessarily in a good way. Laura Kipinis says that Hillary Clinton is a kind of test of the temperature of a man. There is probably some truth in that. As Josh Marshall point out-some people in the public eye, certainly some politicians just do that to people. They effect all of us viscerally-for good or for ill.
"I wanted to flag your attention to this piece we published today by Laura Kipnis on Hillary Clinton and the men who hate her. It might not be exactly what you'd expect from the title. It's a fascinating piece and I highly recommend it. One point of interest of mine is this issue of hating more generally and how it applies to iconic figures in our political culture. I've twice come close to writing a book - got an agent engaged, started doing research and more - and then pulled back. The first time was in the late 90s and the subject was Clinton-hating."
"That seems like sort of a distant idea now - even most of Bill's enemies have either warmed to him or simply don't care that much anymore. But in the 90s it was a thing and more. I wasn't interested in writing a defense, though I had pretty strong ideas along those lines. I was interested in the nature of the obsession and particularly how different people had such wildly different reactions to the man. He was sort of like a human PH test that could tell you a lot about a person immediately just by the nature of their reaction to him. Indeed, he was - both as an actual person and in the penumbra of personalty and image that surrounded him - a fascinating tool to unravel the cultural history of the time in which he achieved greatest prominence and which he also helped define.
Bush certainly had some of the same polarizing, group-identifying nature to his political celebrity - plain spoken straight-shooter or unself-reflective dullard. And Sarah Palin did to a wild degree. Her star has obviously faded over recent years but you could understand a lot about the world of the early years of Obama's presidency by looking at this woman and seeing what elements about her struck such deep resonance and identification with some and made others think she was a clown and a fool.
Hillary is no Bill. In good ways and bad ways. But she definitely has a lot of that PH test quality. It's not just that people have strong opinions, love her or hate her. It's that like these others, people love or hate her so often for the same reasons. So with that, our essay today on (Hillary) Clinton-hating."
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/who-do-you-hate
Of course, you could throw Reagan into that list of 'human PH tests.' In reading Kipnis' piece it brought back lots of memories-many of them bad; the days of fevered Clinton baiting-both of her and her husband.
UPDATE: I forgot to mention the obvious-Obama is another such PH test. He surely has as many haters as Bill and Hillary.
She says that what a man thinks of Hillary says a lot about a man.
"My point is that you can tell a lot about a man by what he thinks about Hillary, maybe even everything. She’s not just another presidential candidate, she’s a sophisticated diagnostic instrument for calibrating male anxiety, which is running high. Understandably, given that the whole male-female, who-runs-the-world question is pretty much up for grabs."
"As our tour guides into these subterranean psychical thickets, I’ve enlisted a selection of Hillary’s right-wing biographers to lead the way, or more specifically, a selection of authors obsessed enough to write entire books about a woman they detest while still being lucid enough to find a commercial publisher. Unfortunately this excluded self-published works likeHillary Clinton Nude: Naked Ambition, Hillary Clinton And America's Demise by Sheldon Filger, but even the painfully repetitious title screamed for the interventions of a professional editor, and life is short. I also declined to read any books that came with voodoo dolls; sadly this ruled out The Hillary Clinton Voodoo Kit: Stick It to Her, Before She Sticks It to You! by Turk Regan, but as fuming tirades were in no short supply, I felt that I could afford to be choosy."
"I wanted to flag your attention to this piece we published today by Laura Kipnis on Hillary Clinton and the men who hate her. It might not be exactly what you'd expect from the title. It's a fascinating piece and I highly recommend it. One point of interest of mine is this issue of hating more generally and how it applies to iconic figures in our political culture. I've twice come close to writing a book - got an agent engaged, started doing research and more - and then pulled back. The first time was in the late 90s and the subject was Clinton-hating."
"That seems like sort of a distant idea now - even most of Bill's enemies have either warmed to him or simply don't care that much anymore. But in the 90s it was a thing and more. I wasn't interested in writing a defense, though I had pretty strong ideas along those lines. I was interested in the nature of the obsession and particularly how different people had such wildly different reactions to the man. He was sort of like a human PH test that could tell you a lot about a person immediately just by the nature of their reaction to him. Indeed, he was - both as an actual person and in the penumbra of personalty and image that surrounded him - a fascinating tool to unravel the cultural history of the time in which he achieved greatest prominence and which he also helped define.
Bush certainly had some of the same polarizing, group-identifying nature to his political celebrity - plain spoken straight-shooter or unself-reflective dullard. And Sarah Palin did to a wild degree. Her star has obviously faded over recent years but you could understand a lot about the world of the early years of Obama's presidency by looking at this woman and seeing what elements about her struck such deep resonance and identification with some and made others think she was a clown and a fool.
Hillary is no Bill. In good ways and bad ways. But she definitely has a lot of that PH test quality. It's not just that people have strong opinions, love her or hate her. It's that like these others, people love or hate her so often for the same reasons. So with that, our essay today on (Hillary) Clinton-hating."
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/who-do-you-hate
Of course, you could throw Reagan into that list of 'human PH tests.' In reading Kipnis' piece it brought back lots of memories-many of them bad; the days of fevered Clinton baiting-both of her and her husband.
UPDATE: I forgot to mention the obvious-Obama is another such PH test. He surely has as many haters as Bill and Hillary.
She says that what a man thinks of Hillary says a lot about a man.
"My point is that you can tell a lot about a man by what he thinks about Hillary, maybe even everything. She’s not just another presidential candidate, she’s a sophisticated diagnostic instrument for calibrating male anxiety, which is running high. Understandably, given that the whole male-female, who-runs-the-world question is pretty much up for grabs."
"As our tour guides into these subterranean psychical thickets, I’ve enlisted a selection of Hillary’s right-wing biographers to lead the way, or more specifically, a selection of authors obsessed enough to write entire books about a woman they detest while still being lucid enough to find a commercial publisher. Unfortunately this excluded self-published works likeHillary Clinton Nude: Naked Ambition, Hillary Clinton And America's Demise by Sheldon Filger, but even the painfully repetitious title screamed for the interventions of a professional editor, and life is short. I also declined to read any books that came with voodoo dolls; sadly this ruled out The Hillary Clinton Voodoo Kit: Stick It to Her, Before She Sticks It to You! by Turk Regan, but as fuming tirades were in no short supply, I felt that I could afford to be choosy."
"Biographies, even bad ones, are the record of a relationship: temporary marriages, so to speak. More than a few self-reflective biographers have admitted as much. And for whatever reasons, Hillary seems to attract a certain type of husband: guys with a lot of psychological baggage, emotional intensity, and messy inner lives."
"Let’s begin with Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., author of Madame Hillary: The Dark Road to the White House, since if Hillary’s biographer-foes sound like embittered ex-husbands, in Tyrrell, founder and editor-in-chief of the far-right American Spectator, we’re fortunate to have a biographer who’s occasionally mused in print about his actual ex-wife. So who gets it worse—Hillary or the ex? Actually it’s a toss-up. Who would have predicted: coincidentally it turns out that Madame Tyrrell and Madame Hillary share an uncanny number of similar traits. Hillary’s a self-righteous, self-regarding narcissist, “a case study in what psychiatrists call ‘the controlling personality,” and assumes the world will share her conviction that she’s always blameless. Compare with Tyrrell on the soon-to-be-ex, from his political memoir The Conservative Crack-Up: “She resorted to tennis, then religion, and then psychotherapy. Finally she tried divorce—all common American coping mechanisms for navigating middle age.” When Tyrrell worries that suburban women will secretly identify with Hillary’s independence and break from their husbands’ politics in the privacy of the voting booth, clearly suburban women’s late-breaking independence is territory he has cause to know and fear."
"Hillary’s disposition is dark, sour, and conspiratorial; she has a paranoid mind, a combative style, is thin-skinned, and “prone to angry outbursts.” Whereas the ex-Mrs. T., we learn, was afflicted with “random wrath”; and as divorce negotiations were in their final stages, threatened to make the proceedings as public and lurid as possible. Hillary has “a prehensile nature,” which makes it sound like she hangs from branches by her feet. (Tyrrell has always fancied himself a latter day Mencken, flashing his big vocabulary around like a thick roll of banknotes.) And while he nowhere actually says that his ex-wife hung from branches by her feet, the reference to protracted divorce negotiations probably indicates that “grasping”—the definition of prehensile (I had to look it up)—is a characterization he wouldn’t argue with. When Tyrrell writes of Bill and Hillary that there was an emotional side to the arrangement, with each fulfilling the other’s idiosyncratic needs, as we see, he’s been there himself."
"Threatening ex-wives, property settlements, bad breath—not exactly lighthearted stuff. Tyrrell at least tries to be amusing about it, in the sense that love transformed into hatred can be amusing, in a bilious, horribly painful sort of way. Not so with Edward Klein, author of the bestselling The Truth About Hillary, and a tragically humorless type. When Klein rants, “As always with Hillary, it was all about her,” note the rancid flavor of marital over-familiarity—he’s really just had it with her. He’s practically venomous. Though he’s also so suspicious of her sexual proclivities that unintentional humor abounds: he’s like an angry Inspector Clouseau with gaydar. The inconvenient fact that there’s no particular evidence Hillary bends that way dissuades him not."
"Hillary’s physicality really does loom large for her biographers. Tyrrell too spends many passages mocking her youthful hairdos, down to the thick eyebrows which once “would have collected coal dust in a Welsh mining village.” In other words, she’s an overly hairy woman, in addition to everything else. Hairdo, eyebrows—thankfully we’re not privy to data on the condition of her bikini line. Tyrrell sounds like an aspirant for the Vidal Sassoon endowed chair on the Clinton-hating Right when he concludes that Hillary’s “search for the perfect hairstyle has finally been resolved into a neatly elegant businesswoman’s coiffure” and that she “seems to have turned her hair into a major strength.” He also concedes that Hillary “flirts well” and has evolved into “a handsome woman.” Klein gets in a few digs on this point himself, as you’d expect, benevolently mentioning that Hillary’s the kind of homely woman whose looks have improved with age, then trotting out another anonymous medical expert to testify that she’s been “Botoxed to the hilt.”
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/ts/men-who-hate-hillary-clinton
I mean a lot of this reminds me of the dark side of a Hillary run-we have to hear from her haters again-not that this means that she shoulnd't run-to the contrary, we can't let them win.
If Kipinis thinks that what a man thinks of Hillary says a lot about him, maybe even everything, then let's hope she has something nice to say about me as I don't think there is anyone who's been a bigger more long-suffering fan of her's than yours truly. I loved her from the first time the country met her. While Dan Quayle nation took her to task for being a real life Murphy Brown-remember how much she was villifed for saying that she's not Tammy Wynette, standing by her man?
While even Clinton supporters wanted her to walk back or at least 'explain' these comments, I never saw the need-I do think that 'if you're explaining, then you're losing' and really I admired her spunk.
Through all the years of attacks on her and her husband I supported them both never wavering-because I simply refused to let Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh win.
That 2008 campaign was tough as I really wanted her to win-that's a fact even if I have gone on to be the world's biggest 'Obamabot' pace Firedoglake Nation. That campaign was brutal. Unlike many Hillary supporters, I didn't have any problem making the switch to President Obama-for me it's never about a single issue or issues or about a single candidate or a few candidates-it's promoting the interests of the Democratic party. I make no apologies-we have a very determined enemy and time fighting ourselves is always time egregiously misspent.
As Josh Marshall points out most of the original Clinton haters have since at worst gotten bored and long since moved on-while so many have since become big fans of his. All it took for them to embrace a Democratic President is for him to finish his term so that he can be used to favorably compare to the current Democratic President.
My worry going into 2016-presuming a Hillary run-is that if anything one of the biggest group of enduring Clinton haters are on the Left-over at FDL Nation, et. al. I do often hear liberals worry that she will move sharply Right. I just think that this misses the point that Clinton was defined by his time as well-recall, that he came in after the Dems had been creamed 3 straight times in the 80s failing to get even 10 states once. They had lost 5 of the last 6 elections-it took Watergate to get Carter elected and he won by inches even after Ford pardoned Nixon-with them losing the last 4 of those defeats with under 10 states, twice getting only 1 state.
Bill came in under the assumption that the Dems needed to be a little more conservative to win the White House. Listen, I didn't like welfare reform either, but he did revitalize the party-after the futility of the previous 20 years the Dems would win the electoral college 5 of 6 times and the Presidency 4 of 6, wining with over 340 electoral votes 4 times.
During the 2012 term he did contradict the GOP claim that Obama had gone wrong on welfare reform and undone his achievement-even using the word somewhat advisedly.
What's interesting is that while the writer is correct that the men who hate Hillary are schizophrenic as there always sounds lke some love or at least fascination with her. What should be remembered is that some are having to remember they hate her-or forget they love her-as during her time as Secretary of State, the Right largely seemed to speak well of her-in 2011 a poll showed that a majority of Republicans now had a positive view of not just her husband but her as well.
She was often used like Bill was-I heard Republicans say that 'Hillary can't tell Obama what she really thinks of him and his foreign policy but it's a good thing she's there anyway'-Hillary loving only returned to Hillary hating with Benghazi.
I sure hope she runs and that she wins. I'd reccommend this book for those looking to get into the 2016 spirit.
http://www.amazon.com/Hard-Choices-Hillary-Rodham-Clinton-ebook/dp/B00C69EP1S/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1418068725&sr=1-1&keywords=hillary+clinton
P.S. I know that if she wins-and hopefully wins again in 2020-I will have to spend 8 years fighting back against attacks on her gender just as I spent the previous 8 defending our current President against attacks on his race.
As I said above, I had no trouble switching from Hillary to Obama but the one thing that bothered me were the nasty gender attacks that some of his supporters hit her with. I agree that when her and her husband suggested the nation 'wasn't ready' for a Black President it was very wrong but what about all those Obama supporters who were going around claiming that women may not have the necessary character traits to be President?
Is there a sense in which sexist attacks are a little more fair game than racist attacks in our current American politics?
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