Time magazine published a mindbogglingly insane joke of an article titled “Hillary Clinton’s Emailgate Is an Attack on Women.”
Written by Robin Lakoff, “a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Language and Woman’s Place,” the piece is an embarrassment to logic, reality, and the people it claims to represent, women. It truly belongs in the satire newspaper The Onion because it reads like a conservative wrote it to mock liberal feminazis with the most ridiculous charges and claims they could think of.
Prepare to be astonished that Lakoff is given a public platform for her writings instead of being committed to an insane asylum for her delusional paranoia. Here is the article in full with my reactions in between.
I am mad. I am mad because I am scared. And if you are a woman, you should be, too. Emailgate is a bitch hunt, but the target is not Hillary Clinton. It’s us.
I’m mad and scared, too – by this article! This signals that ANY conceivable legitimate criticism of Hillary if she becomes president will be called misogynistic and an attack on all women, just like any criticism of Obama is called racist.
The only reason the whole email flap has legs is because the candidate is female. Can you imagine this happening to a man? Clinton is guilty of SWF (Speaking While Female), and emailgate is just a reminder to us all that she has no business doing what she’s doing and must be punished, for the sake of all decent women everywhere. There is so much of that going around.
Are you kidding me?? Yes, I can imagine this happening to a man, because it has. To several men who have done far less than Hillary but actually suffered consequences for it! If anything, this shows that women get a pass while men don’t.
It is true “she has no business doing what she’s doing and must be punished” simply for her actions, it has nothing to do with her gender.
“There is so much of that going around,” makes it sound personal for Lakoff. Something tells me she has gotten push back for her crazy ranting but attributes it to men not liking that she’s “Speaking While Female” instead of recognizing it for what it truly is, appeals to reason.
The people are demanding Clinton act like moral exemplars, thundering from the pulpit like Jonathan Edwards or Cotton Mather. But Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, Chris Christie, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh and their many conservative friends are not remotely Clinton’s moral superiors. They are simply bullies, using gender discrimination to give a veneer of plausibility to their accusations.
I assume Lakoff is referring to these men’s moral failings in marriage and treatment of women – plenty of which Hillary is guilty of, too – except that is not the issue here. We’re talking about the (mis)handling of classified emails. A crime.
FBI Chief James Comey has shown himself to be another bully of the same kind. He has repeatedly talked down to Clinton, admonishing her as a bad parent would a 5-year-old. He has accused her of “poor judgment” and called her use of a private email server “extremely careless.” If Comey’s a Boy Scout, here’s one old lady who will never let him help her across the street.
What Lakoff called “talking down to” was actually Comey bending over backwards to defend his decision in July not to recommend charges. Apparently Lakoff wanted him to praise and completely exonerate Hillary, but the evidence was too overwhelming, he had to acknowledge it in some way. Still he was helping Hillary by treating her with kid gloves and offering a tiny verbal slap on the wrist.
If the candidate were male, there would be no scolding and no “scandal.” Those very ideas would be absurd. Men have a nearly absolute right to freedom of speech. In theory, so do women, but that, as the creationists like to say, is only a theory.
As I said before, if she were a man, she would be punished like other men who have done less.
Mishandling of classified emails is now a freedom of speech issue? What planet are we on right now?
Clinton’s use of a personal server has not been found to be a crime. Then how is it that so many have found the charge so easy to make, and make stick? How has her use of the server made plausible all the claims that she is “deceptive” and “untrustworthy”?
It hasn’t been found to be a crime because the FBI did not recommend charges, so it couldn’t be tried as a crime. The charge IS easy to make and many “reasonable” prosecutors would have taken the case and now that the investigation has been reopened they may finally have the chance to.
Hillary saying, “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified material,” while the FBI found “110 e-mails in 52 e-mail chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received” is just ONE example showing she is “deceptive” and “untrustworthy.”
It’s not about emails; it’s about public communication by a woman in general. Of course, in the year 2016, no one (probably not even The Donald) could make this argument explicitly. After all, he and his fellow Republicans are not waging a war on women. How do we know that? They have said so. And they’re men, so they must be telling the truth.
(How to tell the genders apart: men are truthful; women are liars. Now you know.)
Wow, she’s right, no Republican man has ever been smeared as a liar! No man in either party, in fact! This is an entirely new phenomenon in politics in the year 2016, Hillary is the first candidate ever to be accused of lying and it is solely because she is a woman!
But here’s Hillary Rodham Clinton, the very public stand-in for all bossy, uppity and ambitious women. Here are her emails. And since it’s a woman, doing what decent women should never do—engaging in high-level public communication—well, there must be something wrong with that, even if we can’t quite find that something. We will invoke the terminology of criminal law to account for our feelings. She’s getting away with treason! Put her in jail! We can’t quite put our fingers on it, but the words sure do make a lot of people feel better, so they must be right.
Hillary was not “engaging in high-level public communication” – the entire point was that it was a PRIVATE server sharing high-level CLASSIFIED communication, i.e. the opposite of public.
And is this woman really poo-pooing the invocation of actual law? Yeah, those women-haters are always trying to justify attacks on Hillary with their pesky facts. Why can’t they be more like Lakoff and ignore criminal law terminology and instead go on baseless, delusional rants?
Clinton has repeatedly apologized, but apparently not enough for her accusers. In fact, her apologies were her only mistake. By apologizing she acknowledged guilt. But that’s what women are supposed to do (because women are always guilty of something). Several members of her own staff sent emails grumbling that she was a recalcitrant apologizer. But her instinct was right: apologizing has only made her weaker. Her opponent never apologizes, not really. So accusations slide off his back like water off a duck’s.
She was acknowledging guilt because she was GUILTY. And yet her apology was only for using a secret private email server, not for mishandling classified information, and she continues to lie about what the FBI director said.
Imagine the emails the Trump campaign must be exchanging … Now those would be legitimately interesting!
Ah, yes, but because he’s a man, no one would ever hack into Trump’s emails. Oh, wait, but John Podesta’s emails were hacked … hmmm, this whole man-woman double standard thing is hard!
As this article makes clear, we are all moving permanently into Crazy Town, where Hillary walks on water and anyone who says the emperor has no clothes is beaten with the misogyny stick, if Hillary becomes president. She must be stopped.
What did you think of this article? Does Robin Lakoff have a point that an attack on Hillary is an attack on all women? Tell us in the comments below!
