I left the best comment, by far, on this site.... I do like the one about Monsanto, though
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Political Punch
Power, pop, and probings from ABC News Senior National Correspondent Jake Tapper
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Is Obama Using Sexist Language?
February 16, 2008 11:30 AM
Earlier this month, speaking at Tulane University, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, said this about the attacks coming his way from Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY:
"You challenge the status quo and suddenly the claws come out," Obama said.
The CLAWS come out? Really?
Then yesterday Obama told reporters who had asked about Clinton's latest attack ad, "I understand that Senator Clinton, periodically when she's feeling down, launches attacks as a way of trying to boost her appeal."
That prompted some female TV reporters to question the language he was using.
According to this unofficial transcript, over at MSNBC, Andrea Mitchell and Norah O'Donnell seemed to suggest Obama may have been -- if not playing the gender card, then using language women voters might find offensive.
Language such as "when she's feeling down" "periodically" she "launches attacks."
Nora O'Donnell: "He said, 'I understand when she's down, that she makes these kinds of attacks.' It's getting a little personal."
Andrea Mitchell: "It's getting a little personal and, very frankly, you know how deeply we interpreted every comment to look for some sort of racial motivation before South Carolina. A lot of people said it was there. But, you know, when you start describing a female candidate as being 'down' and 'striking back,' I don't know, that's a little edgy, don't you think?"
Nora O'Donnell: "Yeah. And I think there's gonna be a lot more comments about that."*
Pro-Clinton blogger Taylor Marsh writes that words like this, in her view, indicate "a way of thinking about women. A way of demeaning women in power; even saying we're not up to the job. Seriously, Senator Hillary Clinton is a woman running for president. Not some emotional menopausal diva popping pills because she's depressed she broke a nail."
"Claws"…"feeling down"...I find it hard to envision Obama using the same language if he were facing, say, former Sen. John Edwards, D-NC.
But what do you think?
-- jpt
*(Note: that is not an official MSNBC transcript)
February 16, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (27)
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When I googled the word combination "she periodically" I got 18,800 hits. When I googled the word combination "he periodically" I got 45,300 hits. It's clear that people think men's periods have a much bigger effect on their behavior than women's. We must stop this attack on men via angry and irrational posts on websites. Let this noble counter-offensive begin with me.
Posted by: Matt Love | Feb 16, 2008 12:11:19 PM
This is the whole reason people aren't flocking to Hillary. I can't imagine I'm the only one who detested the constant PC language analysis that came on during the 90s, with political pundits rehashing every phrase for controversy.
Posted by: Irishspacemonk | Feb 16, 2008 12:10:24 PM
I think you should get back in the kitchen and leave the thinking to someone else, you hallucinatory idiot. Jesus
Posted by: g | Feb 16, 2008 12:09:21 PM
Obama's speech is obviously a calculated and derogatory attack on the "crazy woman" candidate. It's nice that someone in the news media has the guts to report it. The media went crazy with Bill Clinton in South Carolina but no one mentions the dismissive sexism of Obama. Thanks for having the courage to stand up and call him on it.
Posted by: Go Clinton | Feb 16, 2008 12:09:20 PM
Cat scratch: I agree with mary. Stop taking up so much space on this site with your nonsense.
GET A LIFE!!!!!!!!
AND i'M NOT EVEN FOR HILLARY OR OBAMA.
BUT IF I HAD TO CHOOSE BETWEEN THE TWOIT WOULD BE HILLARY...ESPECIALL
I AGREE WITH MARY, SOUNDS LIKE JEALOUSY ON YOUR PART. CLAW!CLAW! CLAW!
Mary if you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen. Sorry, guess my claws came out.
Love,
Cat Scratch
Posted by: Cat Scratch | Feb 16, 2008 12:06:14 PM My God in Heaven! Exactly how far will we reach to find something in the spoken word? It is so often embarrassing to be a U.S. citizen, for the nonsense that spews from the public and the media.
Does the reference to "periodically" really reference a menstrual cycle (to a menopausal person)? Is "feeling down" really restricted to the female of the species?
Regarding "claws," would it have been beter for Senator Obama to have used the phrase "fangs and claws bared?"
Folks, how about we all focus on what is truly important? How about fighting off the Bush/Cheney-
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we've much bigger fish to fry than whether Senator Obama's comments can be picked apart to find something inflammatory.
As Michael Douglas said to the Press Corps in "The American President," "Let's keep our eye on the ball!"
Posted by: Mylon Stark | Feb 16, 2008 12:05:36 PM
I love how the lower Clinton drops in her polls, the more her Hilbots and paid internet minions come out in full force to try and smear Obama. Pity no one actually takes them and their ludicrous claims seriously. Laughable.
When they pull out the 'sexist' card and regular folk have to struggle to even figure out where the sexism in the remark is, you know Clinton's getting desperate!
>>This is about gay sex acts and drug use he had with Obama in 1999
I heard Obama killed 10 people with an axe and then clubbed baby seals with their bones!
The Clinton machine is getting more and more desperate and despicable every day, isn't it?
Posted by: jim | Feb 16, 2008 12:05:20 PM
Cat Scratch: Sounds like you may be a weeeeeeee bit jealous of Hillary Clinton.
Boy, where did all this anger come from.
YOu need to get out of the house and stop palying with you menagerie of cats.
Posted by: mary | Feb 16, 2008 12:04:07 PM
I like that Mary yep he sure does seem to like being high if we are to believe Larry and his you tube video
Posted by: SJ | Feb 16, 2008 12:02:48 PM
I'm male and had no idea 'being down' was somehow a reference to anything female. In a political context, I assumed it was a reference to campaign developments, and think its a bit of a stretch to see that as something menapausal.
The 'claws' comment certainly can be seen as sexist. But there again, it also denotes cats, as in the fat cats who would resist any outside forces bringing change. And most of the fat cats are tom cats, aren't they?
Anyway, seeing how these comments were made earlier in February, and in the time since Obama has been able to do pretty well with female voters, I'm guessing not too many were offended.
Posted by: Paul | Feb 16, 2008 12:01:47 PM Mr Sinclair is now saying that he has contacted internationally renowned Polygraph Examiner, Jack Trimarco, to administer a test. This is getting more and more interesting every minute.
This is about gay sex acts and drug use he had with Obama in 1999
Posted by: holly booboo | Feb 16, 2008 12:00:59 PM
Obama, please come clean on your drug use. Were you doing crack cocaine as early as 1999. Because if so, then we can excuse you for your sexist remarks, seeing that you may not be in your right state of mind!!!!!!
Posted by: mary | Feb 16, 2008 12:00:05 PM
"An Open Letter To Hillary Clinton From A Wellesley College Alumna", by Linn Cohen-Cole
------------
Dear Hillary,
By polling logic, I should be your supporter - Democrat, older woman, white, liberal. I was even in a dorm with you in college. I have pulled for you for years. But something this past summer fundamentally changed my responsibility to my children and grandchildren. In the time I have left in my life to protect them and others, I need to speak out.
I saw a News Hour piece on Maharastra, India, about farmers committing suicide. Monsanto, a US agricultural giant, hired Bollywood actors for ads telling illiterate farmers they could get rich (by their standards) from big yields with Monsanto's Bt (genetically engineered) cotton seeds. The expensive
seeds needed expensive fertilizer and pesticides (Monsanto, again) and irrigation. There is no irrigation there. Crops failed. Farmers had larger debt than they'd ever experienced.
And farmers couldn't collect seeds from their own fields to try again (true since time immemorial). Monsanto "patents" their DNA-altered seeds as "intellectual property." They have a $10 million budget and a staff of 75 devoted solely to prosecuting farmers.
www.grist.org/
Since the late 1990s (as industrial agriculture took hold in India?), 166,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide and 8 million have left the land, and it has increased since 2002 to an average of 1 every 20 minutes (P.Sainath, The Hindu). The reasons for suicides are always complex and Monsanto is not the only giant agribusiness now in India, but it is one of the largest, and the main one in Maharastra where the suicides are especially high. Farmers in Europe, Asia, Africa, Indonesia, South America, Central America and here, have all protested Monsanto and genetic engineering.
What does this have to do with you?
You have connections to Monsanto through the Rose Law Firm where you worked and through Bill who hired Monsanto people for central food-related roles. Your Orwellian-named "Rural Americans for Hillary" was planned with Troutman Sanders, Monsanto's lobbyists.Genetic engineering and industrialized food and animal production all come together at the Rose Law Firm, which represents the world's largest GE corporation (Monsanto), GE's most controversial project (DP&L's - now Monsanto's - terminator genes), the world's largest meat producer (Tyson), the world's largest retailer and a dominant food retailer (Walmart).
Hilary, you didn't just work there, you made friends. That shows in the flow of favors then and since. You were invited onto Walmart's board, you were helped by a Tyson executive to make commodity trades (3 days before Bill became governor), netting you $100,000, Jackson Stephens strongly backed Bill for Governor, and then for President (donating $100,000).
Food and friends, in Clinton terms:
Bill's appointed friend Mike Espy, Secretary of Agriculture, who immediately significantly weakened federal chicken waste and contamination standards, opening the door to major expansion of Tyson's chicken factory farms. Espy resigned, indicted for accepting bribes, illegal contributions, money laundering, illegal dispersal of USDA subsidies .... Tyson Foods was the largest corporate offender.
But what Bill did for Monsanto "genetic engineering" goes beyond inadequate concepts of giving corporate friends influence: He unleashed genetic engineering into the world. And then he helped close off people's escape from it.
Genetic engineering is many orders of magnitude different from "normal" (even polluting) business in its potential
biologic ramifications. The warning myth of Pandora'a Box - letting irretrievable things rush out into nature - has become real. The narrowing change to the world from nuclear fission and fusion is the
closest parallel.
What did Bill do?
1. Bill's put Monsanto people in at the FDA, as US Agricultural Trade Representatives, on International Biotechnology Consultive Forums, and
more ... (http://www.commondr
2. Bill's FDA gave Monsanto permission to market rBGH (a GE bovine growth hormone), the first genetically engineered product let loose on us (or did tomatoes with fish DNA get there first?).
3. Despite reports of bovine illness and death, Bill's FDA did not recall it or put warnings on it. Even "a very angry, very vocal nationwide consumer base" had no impact. "
4. Bill's FDA wouldn't even label rBGH as "present" in milk.
5. When dairy farmers tried to label their own milk rBGH-free so the public could choose, Bill's USDA threatened all dairies that their products could be confiscated from stores. Michael Taylor, USFDA Deputy Commissioner, was formerly Monsanto's counsel.
6. How were consumers to protect their family, given Bill's FDA enforced public blindness, except to buy only organic? But Bill's FDA tried to close off that last escape, proposing to include in "organic" standards, "the dirty three" a : genetic engineering of plants and animals, use of irradiation in food processing and use of municipal sewage sludge as a fertilizer. The FDA backed down. Had this gone through, Monsanto could have finally labeled rBGH milk ... as "organic." And animal waste from factory farms, a pollution nightmare for Tyson and others, could have been sold as fertilizer.
Here, Bill ignored pleas for labeling. Abroad, Bill ignored intense international objections over the same issue - unlabeled US food exports - badly straining trading relations. Monsanto's "good ole boy," he betrayed American families at the deepest levels conceivable - their family's health and
their democratic right to know. He betrayed our rural life and American family farmers - backing corporation deceit and control, over honesty and clean farming.
But, Hillary, it is one thing to not label a regular ole food product to sell it, and quite another to sell a suspected-dangerous food product (rBGH), but Bill's administration didn't label (or stop) a well-known, terrifying threat - Mad Cow Disease.
Bill's FDA's August, 1997 regulation permitted "known TSE-positive [Transmissible spongiform encephalopathy] material to be used in pet food, pig, chicken and fish feed," only requiring the label to read "Do not feed to cattle and other ruminants" in the US.
Bill let TSE into our entire food chain. And who owned the feed and slaughter and genetic engineering corporations which benefitted?
Please, tell me, Hillary, what he could possibly have gotten in friendship or favors, that could ever justify his exposing millions of people to this?
With genetic engineering itself, Bill did something to the whole world, which tried to object. Words are inadequate to express how astoundingly immoral, beyond human bounds and conceit and power, that was.
Your claim to care about food safety is terrifying double-speak given what Bill did and who you take donations from. Your idea of a Department of Food Safety would centralize control of food - in whose corporate connected hands? You talk tough about labeling food - ah, but "foreign" food - a sleight of hand tricking a public desperate for safe US food. You talk about food safety but Bill degraded food in every imaginable
way and prevented minimally sane labeling.
I am a person before I am a woman. Your gender means nothing. It is a media distraction. Your policies on health and food and women and children, are meaningless in the face of connections that have threatened those groups profoundly, connections you have never denounced.
Monsanto uses child labor in India, primarily very young girls, exposing them to a lethal pesticide 13-14 hours a day, for pennies in pay. But you take
donations from their lobbyists. You say you care about black people but as the poorest people in this country, they are least able to buy organic and are forced to eat the contaminated foods Bill let into our food system. The National Black Farmers Association has a boycott out
on all Monsanto products.
Do you eat organic?
So, who are you with, hapless black consumers and black farmers, or Monsanto? Mothers left to give their children rBGH milk, or Monsanto? Women
exposed to 7 times greater risk of breast cancer, or Monsanto? Desperate farmers in India and young children forced into child labor in cottonseed factories there, or Monsanto? Animals suffering from lives in filthy cages and disgusting feedlots, shot up with steroids and hormones and antibiotics, or Monsanto? Our children who eat candy
with high fructose Bt corn syrup associated with kidney and liver toxicity, or Monsanto?
Edwards was right about your corporate
connections. I just didn't understand until I saw that PBS show and read about Monsanto, how personally affected my children and grandchildren, and all people around the world, have been.
I will not vote for you. I will vote for someone who will commit themselves to work on behalf of small farmers and real food and decent treatment of animals and to end this industrialized agricultural nightmare that is taking us off a cliff.
Linn Cohen-Cole
Atlanta
Posted by: Cat Scratch | Feb 16, 2008 11:56:51 AM
Gee, next time Obama gets a little down, Hillary should ask him to get a little "High"!!!!!
Posted by: mary | Feb 16, 2008 11:56:48 AM
>>When she is feeling down in the polls!
I can't believe you are saying that Hillary is a pole dancer and that all women should wrap themselves around poles to be gaped at by sexist men. I think it is obvious that you are using sexist code language here.
Posted by: jim | Feb 16, 2008 11:56:20 AM
I see the closer we get to voting, the media tries to influence our vote with these pathetic stunts. Disgusting.
Posted by: cba | Feb 16, 2008 11:54:25 AM
Clinton campaign staffers regularly inundate these MSM blogs -- it is hilarious. They've given up on the "liberal" blogosphere already since Clinton is almost universally reviled in progressive circles. So now they just focus on older, low-information voters who tend to stick to the mainstream media.
Posted by: jim | Feb 16, 2008 11:50:31 AM
Haha I even used the word 'period' in my post, by accident. This is why the word 'reporter' is an anachronism: you people are in the business of creating the news these days.
Posted by: Brad K. | Feb 16, 2008 11:49:59 AM
Yes, you're right. Obama's "code words" are certainly the equivalent of Bill Clinton's invocation of Jesse Jackson, out of the blue, to help explain why Hillary was beaten soundly in South Carolina. Oh wait, I just said "blue," which could be a coded reference to Lewinsky, which means I'm engaging in cheap shots. And I just wrote "beaten," which could be a coded reference to domestic violence, which usually involves men beating women, so I guess I'm now an advocate for domestic violence.
Seriously, this is the epitome of scraping the bottom of the barrel. Jake, you're better than this.
Posted by: Ross | Feb 16, 2008 11:49:49 AM
When she is feeling down in the polls!
come on now.
Posted by: Dem | Feb 16, 2008 11:48:44 AM
This is a shameful post. He was clearly referencing the period leading up to South Carolina when she first went on the attack.
Posted by: Brad K. | Feb 16, 2008 11:48:06 AM
We all know he is trying to insinuate that when Hillary is having a PMS moment she attacks with his play on words. When anyone else say anything about Obama its always oh that is a racial attack, they are taking swipes at him again, some one is playing the race card. Am sick of it the daily nonsense with this guy and his supporters, but as always anything he says there is not hidden intent at all.
Posted by: SJ | Feb 16, 2008 11:46:19 AM
I'm just so happy this article isn't Hosanna-ing and genuflecting when Obama speaks. It's refreshing. As for sexism in his speech, of course it's there. But, and this is how Clinton's campaign differs from Obama's, we don't play the victim when it happens. We can take it. We expect to be treated unfairly and still win. Senator Clinton has to be ten times smarter and experienced then any of the other candidates to get where she is. Any dirt they pull out of her closet isn't hers. It's her husbands. Can you even imagine this election being about Obama's wife and her past indiscretions? Or calling her a pimp for trotting her kids out on the campaign trail? Life isn't fair. But it's a playing field Senator Clinton knows and excels in, without the whining.
Posted by: Kris | Feb 16, 2008 11:43:19 AM
This is laughable. You can't ever use the word "periodically" when talking about a woman? Yeah, we all know that "periodically" and phrases like "feeling down" and "the claws come out" are all code words. My god. This is getting blown out of proportion..
I've seen some pretty desperate attempts by the media to drum up controversy out of nothing, but this is the most ridiculous instance of it I have ever seen.
Don't you have actual news to report?
Posted by: jim | Feb 16, 2008 11:38:58 AM
sounds like "code words" to me
Posted by: flyover | Feb 16, 2008 11:32:51 AM
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3 comments:
And I suppose that the Republican embrace of Barack is just our hallucination as well. Bill Bennett, Ari Fleischer and H.W. Bush's chief speech writer are calling Barack "Reaganesque" what is that a "buzz" word for....Oh, I know REPUBLICAN!
Gosh I just guess that might be why the republicans are crossingover in the primaries to vote for Barack. Could it be because they are afraid of Hillary and know they can "Swift Boat" Barack?
And I suppose that the Republican embrace of Barack is just our hallucination as well. Bill Bennett, Ari Fleischer and H.W. Bush's chief speech writer are calling Barack "Reaganesque" what is that a "buzz" word for....Oh, I know REPUBLICAN!
Gosh I just guess that might be why the republicans are crossingover in the primaries to vote for Barack. Could it be because they are afraid of Hillary and know they can "Swift Boat" Barack?
Hey Anonymous Dude,
Thanks for showing up and posting a comment on my blog, I appreciate that. I hadn't heard that Barach was Reaganesque, but I've certainly heard him compared to Kennedy, that most Reagan-like of presidents. And Goldwater Girl Hillary grew up to be a right fine Republican as well... America, what a country, where you have more Republicans to chose from than you could ever hope for.
I'm looking forward to readying your impassioned comments about Coke vs. Pepsi, and don't forget - at all times, keep your eye on the spectacle.
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