It's interesting watching the Amanda Marcotte-Duke lacrosse team flap unfold.
First there's the complete denial of the Pandagonistas. If you read their comments, there's absolutely no reason anyone would question the Edwards campaign's decision to hire Amanda "to provide content" and babysit the website.
Will: This shows just how much batshit conservatives have bought into the idea that they can define what liberals (and most of American, for that matter) believe. I guarantee that if you looked outside of the uber-conservative small circle that Malkin hangs out in, most people would agree with Amanda at least 80% of the time. [80%? Is there some scientific study he can cite for that figure?]
Roxanne: Of course it makes sense for Bush loyalists to divert attention away from the actual issues. It also makes sense for Obama loyalists to slag anything remotely having to do with Edwards. [Which issues are those? That people from North Carolina, Edwards' home state, are a bunch of bigots who love the idea of black women being raped?]
MikeEss: Dude, is it too much to expect some sense of proportion here? Do you have quotes from Amanda promoting child molestation? Or advocating an overthrow of our government by a military coup? Or promoting a suicide cult? I’ve read Amanda since Mouse Words and that ain’t her bag, and you know it…
So Amanda has an opinion on the Duke case that some people disagree with. Huh? That makes her so toxic she can’t be employed? [Oh, she can be employed. But if she works for a political campaign and says her views mirror the candidate's, then it's reasonable to assume he agrees with her outrageous opinions about the Duke lacrosse case.]
geoduck2: I find their "arguments" and "logic" to be rather bizarre. I’m guessing jealousy is the motivating factor. [Oh, wow. You found us out. You must be really clever!]
As silly as the support system at Pandagon is, we finally get around to the real reason so many conservatives have a problem with a presidential candidate hiring a hack to run his blog: it must be because she's a woman!
Like a scene from the director's cut of some lost George Romero zombie flick, the anti-feminists stumble forward in this dawn of the dead pre-political season, lurching incompetently and semi-blindly for victims, and reminding Americans that an endemic hatred of powerful women lies just below the surface when the full moon blooms. Only a head shot will kill them.
The bitter harvest of the incompetent Duke lacrosse sexual assault prosecution - tied so closely as it was to national fault lines of race, gender and wealth - is sucked into the thresher of public opinion, tossing out the seeds of enduring misogynist lore. Women lie about rape. They use it was a weapon against men.
I've always believed that one of the worst legacies of the disastrous Tawana Brawley episode in New York was the cover it provided for gender discrimination. Race got the headlines, as it did in Duke; but the collapse of a prominent rape case, its notorious revelation as a hoax, throws up a screen to the endemic violence against women, regardless of race of social status.
Thus, when noted blogger feminist Amanda Marcotte was dinged for her admittedly knee-jerk reaction to reports about the Duke case, the online gotcha moment in the last day or so (she was hired by the Edwards campaign to lead its blogging efforts, and so became an instant target) immediately led within nanoseconds to hate speech on the right-wing RedState blog...
You see, the real problem is that conservatives don't want to accept that white men rape black women all the time. Even if this particular woman was lying, we shouldn't stop accusing the Duke players of rape because, after all, they are white men and wealthy, therefore, they are automatically guilty.
The fact that so many of Amanda's defenders (read through the comments of the linked post) can't even admit that Amanda still clings to the rape/sexual assault defense even after the entire case has collapsed under the weight of its own falseness speaks to their own delusions. Conservatives pointing out that Amanda is viscious, unnecessarily nasty (see this post for the latest example), and deceitful is just a sign that they "hate women," especially women in power. Yet other defenders point out that the blogmistress isn't a big deal and there's no power in it. Will they please make up their minds?
The irony to me is that I've read for several months now all the lambasting she's done to people she opposes, be they Christians, pro-lifers, conservatives, married people or others. She railed against Jeff Goldstein of Protein Wisdom and the cast and crew of Pandagon continue to childishly misspell or use asterisks for various letters in his name so it won't come up on a pingback. It seems to me that she shouldn't complain that she's being called out now.
|