I am a devotée of the online news mag, BillMoyers.com. One of my favorite regular contributors is Todd Gitlin.
I just read Gitlin’s deeply interesting and intelligent analysis of “What’s Behind the Hillary Hatred Syndrome?” Source: What’s Behind the Hillary Hatred Syndrome? – BillMoyers.com (There’s a link below, under the photograph, to the Neal Gabler article Gitlin refers to: “How the Media Manufactured Hatred of Hillary Clinton”.)
An excerpt, but you’ll want to read the entire piece. If you hate Hillary, consider it a probing therapy session. If you love her, consider it a probing therapy session.
I think it took a man to state it openly, clearly: misogyny is the cause of Hillary hatred. (I bolded the last paragraph of this excerpt because it rocked me.)
Because Hillary Clinton is no longer a former secretary of state. She is a former secretary of state running for president. Americans have gotten used to female secretaries of state. To use the metaphor du jour, the glass ceiling that used to hang over the State Department was smashed to smithereens. But a secretary of state is not a president.
A Democrat running for president is going to be smeared by the Republicans. This goes without saying. But a Democratic woman running for president gets extra layers of smear, though the smear required new material to work with. Clinton could still be viewed favorably when she ran for the presidential nomination in 2007-08 — consistent, overall, with how she was viewed during the more than two decades between 1992 and 2014. Benghazi and emails were not yet in the picture. Now, should Clinton get to the White House, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) will be ready: He’s sharpening his pencils and knives, planning “years” of hearings on Clinton depredations.
Meanwhile Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is vowing to block any Clinton nominee to the Supreme Court (perhaps hoping that a Republican appointee will be the last standing?) and at the FBI, Comey cryptically announced the reopening of the agency’s investigation into – yes, Clinton’s emails — just in time to revive Republican hopes and send the stock market into a swoon over the prospect of a President Trump. Keep in mind that Justice Department guidelines caution against such election-eve releases. “Law enforcement officers and prosecutors may never select the timing of investigative steps or criminal charges for the purpose of affecting any election,” the attorney general cautioned in a 2012 memo.
So much for the traditional political niceties. I suppose it’s remotely possible that a male potential president would be treated this way — but none has been. Ever.