Clowntime Is Ongoing

Ann Althouse, right on schedule, has dug herself deeper with respect to her puerile crusade in a post accusing people of “poor reading skills,” the fabled lack of a sense of humor invoked by anti-feminists everywhere, and–this is classic–“political hackitude,” without responding to a single substantive critique. When it comes to the points that 1)several participants at the event have contradicted her ludicrous assumption that the picture was arranged so that Valenti could show off her breasts to Bill Clinton, 2)only a creepy misogynist would call a picture of a woman in a T-Shirt “breast blogging,” 3)that it’s perfectly rational to privilege policy outcomes over personal behavior, 4)that people making (generally unsupported or exaggerated) assertions about Clinton’s treatment of women are opportunitsts who couldn’t care less about the same behavior when it comes from their political allies, 5)that it’s risible for someone who would use sniggering about a young woman’s body to drive up her hit count and so utterly in the tank for the egregiously anti-feminist Bush administration that she would write a clown-show op-ed that because of her position might lead people to quite mistakenly believe that she had some evidence for her claim that Sam Alito was a moderate (and by the way, did Clinton ever belong to a group trying to keep women out of Yale Law School?) to challenge anyone’s feminist credentials, needless to say she’s got nothing. And yet, I think that this is the most instructive part of her response: “Moreover, they’ve got some scary blindness about the way to help poor Hillary Clinton, who was the whole reason they were wrangled into Bill’s presence in the first place.”

Talk about projection! See, here’s the thing: I, and most of the people outraged by this, are not diehard political operatives who see everything into the lens of partisan politics. When I see a colleague attacked in the most vicious, mean-spirited terms by a major blogger, I really couldn’t care less about whether exposing this mendacity is good or bad for Hillary or the Democratic Party or whatever. To see feminism invoked as a Potemkin facade for someone engaging in absolutely reprehensible personal attacks against a (serious) feminist blogger is worthy of contempt, and I wouldn’t give a second thought to how it would affect Hillary’s Senate campaign. Only an alleged “feminist” who’s willing to have–nay, actually support–Roe v. Wade being overturned to help prop up the most reactionary administration in decades could think in such debased terms.