Food for thought 

by Camille Paglia

"Hillary’s anti-male subtext, to which so many women voters are plainly drawn, flared into view last week when she crowed to CNN’s Jake Tapper about her proven skills in sex war: “I have a lot of experience dealing with men who sometimes get off the reservation in the way they behave and how they speak….I’m not going to deal with their temper tantrums or their bullying or their efforts to try to provoke me.” The prestige media tried to suppress Hillary’s gaffes here (which breezily insulted both men and Native Americans) by simply not reporting them. Her campaign deflected initial criticism, but she made no personal response until the issue kept escalating. Five days later, she sat down with MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell and incredibly claimed that she had been referring to Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Rep. Rick Lazio and Vladimir Putin—none of whom have had perceptible “temper tantrums” about her.

Conservative radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh, analyzing Hillary’s remarks as most mainstream journalists refused to do, interpreted them as a cloaked reference to her embattled life with her philandering husband. However, I assumed from the start that “temper tantrums” (a term applied to small children) was another of Hillary’s odd childhood flashbacks and that it described her ranting father’s abusive behavior toward his wife and family (detailed in Carl Bernstein’s 2007 biography, A Woman in Charge). It was her stoical mother who trained Hillary in the art of contemptuous endurance of men’s squalling infantilism. Women are noble, superior creatures; men are yapping dogs.

And as for “off the reservation”, wow—I guess Hillary should take a gander at John Ford’s classic Western, Fort Apache (1948), where John Wayne tangles with Henry Fonda as a U.S. Cavalry martinet vengefully pursuing the Native American “savages,” led by the famous Chiricahua Apache chief Cochise, who refuse to stay on the reservation decreed for them by the government during Westward expansion. The bloody Apache wars in Arizona were one of the darkest chapters in American history. But there you have Hillary’s gender theory in a nutshell: men are bums and bullies who belong in internment camps under female lock and key.

A side note in the Andrea Mitchell interview was the inadvertent revelation about Hillary’s health. She was wearing a conveniently high mandarin collar, but check out the moment when she mentions Vladimir Putin: one can clearly see an unmistakable lump bulging from the left side of her neck. Whether it is a goiter or some other growth should surely be of legitimate public concern in a presidential candidate. But as a friend tartly wrote to me this week, “Of course not one reporter out of the thousand working reporters in America

The Nice thing about having a Democrat in the White House is that there is never any bad news...

...and all is quickly forgotten.

The horrible truth is that the feminist establishment in the U.S., led by Gloria Steinem, did in fact apply a double standard to Bill Clinton’s behavior because he was a Democrat. The Democratic president and administration supported abortion rights, and therefore it didn’t matter what his personal behavior was.
But we’re living in a different time right now, and young women have absolutely no memory of Bill Clinton. It’s like ancient history for them; there’s no reservoir of accumulated good will. And the actual facts of the matter are that Bill Clinton was a serial abuser of working-class women–he had exploited that power differential even in Arkansas.  And then in the case of Monica Lewinsky–I mean, the failure on the part of Gloria Steinem and company to protect her was an absolute disgrace in feminist history! What bigger power differential could there be than between the president of the United States and this poor innocent girl? Not only an intern but clearly a girl who had a kind of pleading, open look to her–somebody who was looking for a father figure.