With polls tightening in the campaign’s last days, Democrats are getting desperate. Knowing that they cannot make a single plausible positive argument for Hillary “there is no classified e-mail” Clinton, their message remains relentlessly negative.
The problem is that smears against Donald Trump’s character aren’t sticking (especially as Mr. Trump campaigns substantially on the issues) while public opinion of Mrs. Clinton’s character suffers sustained and well-earned erosion.
Polls now show the race a dead heat, though with roughly a quarter of the country’s votes having already been cast it remains to be seen whether the FBI bombshell came too late to salvage Trump’s electoral aspirations.
The polls reflect, in Mrs. Clinton’s favor, a continued belief that Mr. Trump does not have the skill set or temperament to be president and, in Mr. Trump’s favor, a new low in the perception of Hillary Clinton’s (lack of) honesty and trustworthiness.
So what are panicky Democrats to do when, as one commentator put it, “crazy makes a comeback on corrupt”? They can’t win on the issues. They can’t win on character. They can’t win on “understands the problems of people like me” (even against a gold-plated-penthouse-living billionaire).
What’s left is the rancid sludge at the bottom of the Progressive barrel: the “-ist” attack.
With Barack Obama, the critics were racist.
With Hillary, they’re sexist.
Enter the latest if not the best reason to be very cautious about sending your children to college: Robin Lakoff, Professor Emerita of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, still living off her laurels as the author of some mindless hooey that masquerades as wisdom on the left, in this case a mid-1970s book entitled “Language and Woman’s Place.”
From the abstract:
Lakoff argues that “Woman’s language” has as foundation the attitude that women are marginal to the serious concerns of life, which are pre-empted by men. The marginality and powerlessness of women is reflected in both the ways women are expected to speak, and the ways in which women are spoken of. In appropriate women’s speech, strong expression of feeling is avoided, expression of uncertainty is favored, and means of expression in regard to subject-matter deemed “trivial” to the “real” world are elaborated.”
Given the perpetual-victim mentality of Lakoff and her ilk, it’s not surprising to read her latest missive, in which she argues that “Hillary Clinton’s Emailgate Is an Attack on Women.”
That’s right: The investigation into, and public outcry about, Hillary Clinton’s criminally negligent use of a private email server and its transparent purpose to shield the public from knowledge about the interaction between her role as secretary of state and the fundraising efforts of the Clinton Slush Fund Foundation are only occurring because… wait for it… she has girl parts.
As Lakoff puts it, “Emailgate is a bitch hunt, but the target is not Hillary Clinton. It’s us.” She decries the male critics of Hillary without mentioning the enjoyably fierce attacks on Clinton by many women, including plenty of non-Republicans (see here, here, here, and here.)
In short, per Lakoff, Hillary Clinton is “the very public stand-in for all bossy, uppity and ambitious women,” and those nasty, evil men are intent on putting her in her place.
Lakoff isn’t alone, even if she is the most ridiculous:
CNN’s Don Lemon reacted to FBI Director James Comey’s July press conference on Hillary’s uncharged violations of law by saying “When you’re the first woman with a real shot at winning the White House, you know at least one thing is for sure: the men at the top are going to have a lot to say about you.”
Don, I don’t know when the last time is that you lived with a woman, but whenever that was, how far did you get when you “had a lot to say” about her? Or have you tried that at work? No, I didn’t think so.
And of course you remember former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright who remarked that there is a “special place in hell” for women who don’t (blindly) support other women.
Hillary Clinton has repeatedly exclaimed that if her opponents are going to charge her with “trying to play the woman card… then deal me in!” Cue the cheers from the few dozen feminists bused in to her event or the several hundred college students happy to do anything other than sit in Econ 101 for an hour.
Mercifully, she mostly gave up on that line of argument for a while but she’s back to it this week: While campaigning in Florida, Hillary announced, “For my entire life, I’ve been a woman. And when I think about what we now know about Donald Trump and what he’s been doing for 30 years, he sure has spent a lot of time demeaning, degrading, insulting and assaulting women.”
First of all, Hillary, thanks for clearing up any issues about potential transgenderism. Second, and at the risk of repeating hundreds of others who recognize the obvious, don’t you remember who your husband is, and are you sure you want to go down this road?
Hillary maintains a low-double-digit lead among women, not much greater a gender gap than Barack Obama garnered over Mitt Romney; it is a shockingly weak performance for the first female major-party candidate up against a guy who was recorded saying he’d grab women inappropriately just because he could.
The arguments from Lakoff and friends are intended both to boost that divide as well as to encourage turnout among the many hesitant-for-Hillary women who realize that this scenario has never happened in a courtroom:
Judge: In the case of the people versus Jane Doe on the charge of violation of multiple federal laws regarding the handling of classified material, the prosecution has rested. Defense team, you may present your case.
Attorney: If it please the court, the defense would like to admit as Defense Exhibit 1, an MRI of the defendant’s ovaries.
It is Lakoff and Clinton who underestimate womankind and who think that the musty mantra of a sisterhood-of-women standing against oppressive Y-chromosomed knuckle-draggers matches the everyday reality of modern female life.
