Thursday, April 24, 2008

I Hate The War

Tonight let's just focus on lies. Lies got the US into an illegal war. Lies continue it. And frauds shouldn't be allowed to get away with their lying.

Which is how we come to the current issue of Ms. magazine (I don't know if it's onsale yet or not, I packed it Sunday, it's the Spring 2008 issue). Ms. magazine has no business publishing the homophobe Donna Brazile. I know, I know, Andrew Sullivan outed her as a lesbian. If she is one, she's a self-loathing one and Ms. doesn't need to send that message to women, it doesn't need to endorse it by printing her bad writing (that is bad on the most basic level: it's not worth reading, it's dull and plodding).

But Ms. lets the homophobe waste an entire page every issue. That may not seem like much but try to find the Iraq War in the current issue. Equally true is Ms. now only publishes four times a year. That's four pages they don't have to spare.

This quarterly issue, Brazile choses to waste her space by lying and Ms.' senior editor is either too uninformed or just doesn't give a damn. Ms. is infamous for publishing articles that feminists disagree with and that has led to lively debates that have defined and shaped the feminist movement. That's not the issue here.

The issue here is no writer published by Ms. should ever be viewed by other feminists as a liar but Donna Brazile manages to pull off that feat. Her article is titled "Black. Woman." Donna wants the world to believe (not know, because she's lying) that she's impartial in the Democratic race and that she's there fighting on 'both' fronts (there are many fronts but Brazile just sees dualisms -- another reason her centrist, non-feminist ass should never have been allowed to stink up Ms. magazine to begin with).

Donna tells you she's no traitor. She's not. On that she's telling the truth. Donna has always sold out to whatever would benefit Donna. This is the trashy woman who ran to the press (souring the press on Dukakis before they completely turned on him) and started insisting that George H. W. Bush was having an affair! Now Michael Dukakis wasn't accused of having an affair. It's not as though Donna could claim that she was attempting to level the coverage and make it equal. It was just more trash from a woman known for so much trash.

She made ridiculous statements about the American people having a right to know whether or not Barbara Bush would be sleeping in the White House with her husband. Yeah, that's feminism, Donna. (NO, it's not.)

So trashy scribbles a lot of nonsense. Trashy wants you to know that that we should all demand that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are treated the way any White, straight, male candidate would be. She then tries to crib from Sojourner Truth (almost word for word) but assumes she can steal a little without crediting. (That Ms. thinks a feminist pioneer like Truth can be ripped off indicates Ms. needs to regroup very quickly.) Donna explains that "we" -- don't you love writers who try to speak for you when they haven't earned the right? -- "must be very careful not to attribute all criticism of either candidate to base motives, or blame the media" blah, blah, blah. We must be careful not to blame the media? Donna's worthless columns always run the page before "No Comment" which is where Ms. has historically taken sexist advertisements to task. Donna's column appears to argue against that; however, suggesting that she is doing that would require believing that any real thought went into her latest scribbles and Donna Brazile exists solely to underscore that thought and writing do not need to have a close, or even working, relationship.

Donna Brazile wants us ("we"?) to know that she is offended by sexist attacks on Hillary. Well that's news. She certainly hasn't spoken out before. In fact, she's more than added to it with her own sexism. As Hillary Is 44 observed, "We assume that Donna is blaming the victim, Hillary, here when she confusingly writes 'no one who provoke this kind of anger in voters deserves to be President'." No, blaming the victim isn't feminism. But Donna's never been a feminist. She's just a bad writer who happens to be a woman and she got lucky that Ms. decided to publish her.

Possibly Michelle Kort (the current senior editor) will read the quote from Donna and say, "I never knew!" She should have. She damn well should have.

Does Kort have no idea of what Brazile's been saying. Is she unaware that Brazile's e-mails slamming Hillary have been printed online?

Does she think that doesn't matter and, as long as Donna scribbled a column, it's worth publishing? Does she have no respect for what Ms. is supposed to stand for, does she have no respect for the readership? It is so insulting that this crap got printed.

Brazile's wasting everyone's time trying to portray Obama's campaign as a feminist break through. Really? A man who votes "present" on abortion issues? A man who lies about it and gets a surrogate who left Chicago's NOW chapter and wasn't even there when the present votes were made to lie and slime Chiacog's NOW chapter? No, that's not feminism. Feminism also isn't putting homophobes (or even one) on stage at a South Carolina campaign event and then bragging that you got what you wanted out of the event (as Obama's campaign did).

Hillary's campaign? The one Brazile's trying to pretend she's happy about in Ms. magazine? Donna Brazile in November of last year reduced Hillary's campaign to her husband and her remarks were no different than Chris Matthews' insulting comments:

"I think it's going to come down to: Do you really want Bill Clinton back in the White House?" said Donna Brazile, who ran Democrat Al Gore's 2000 presidential campaign.

That ran in the Des Moines Register and is now a "page unfound" but you can search what's in bold and you'll find multiple sites and blogs that excerpted it. That's how Donna Brazile reduced Hillary's historic run last November. She then slimed futher with a lie I'm not even going to repeat here. But Kort is the editor and should damn well be aware of what columnists for the magazine are saying to other outlets. When they turn in lies for Ms., she should reject the submission. By not doing so, it's not just Donna Brazile insulting Ms. readers, it's Kort doing that as well.

Now in January, Donna was all over the place falsely suggesting racism (by Bill Clinton, Donna insisted) but where has Donna been anywhere calling out the very real sexism against Hillary? She hasn't. And that was the first clue (long before her unhinged e-mails were published) that Donna Brazile was not only in the tank for Obama (and she is) but that she didn't give a damn about the sexist smears against Hillary.

Kort also should damn well be aware of what ATLJay (MyDD) pointed out recently, Brazile accused Hillary of "not caring about the Democratic Party" in a column for the Wall St. Journal. In her published e-mail, 'feminist' Donna declares, "You cannot blame the media for Clinton being behind or running out of money." Actually you can blame the media. You can and you should. I have no idea what happened before Iowa. But the writers strike and all the attacks meant that Ava and I had to grab 'news' and public affairs programming and the reporters (MSM) were all falling over one another, week after week, to explain that Barack wasn't the front runner before but now he was and they were going to be just as tough on him as they were on Hillary. That still hasn't happened. He can lie and say he was eight-years-old when Weather Underground did their "detestable" actions. Who points out that Weather Underground existed from 1969 to 1976? If Hillary had said that, she would have been villified. As Ava and I noted Sunday, the man's an idiot when it comes to the law (when you don't grasp what "versus" means in a court title, you're a legal idiot) so we'll assume that he really didn't know the difference between "commuted" and "pardoned." But which did the press run with? And without checking it out?

As Ava and I wrote Sunday:

Despite Professor Patti Williams public orgasms over Barack's legal 'knowledge,' we've long noted the man's an idiot who can't even grasp what "verus" in the title of a court case means. We have no idea how he ended up president of the Harvard Law Review (not much of a credit in our eyes) but it was due to something other than a grasp of the law. So we'll assume that he wasn't trying to lie, he just truly doesn't know (idiot) whether Clinton pardoned or commuted the sentences of Linda Evans and Susan Rosenberg. He commuted them. They were not pardoned. We pointed that out Thursday morning. Sadly, it required pointing out again Thursday night. No pardons took place. But if you need a better example of the bias the press has in favor of Obama and against Clinton, you need look no further. Barack declared that Bill Clinton "pardoned or commuted" and the press ran with what? Pardoned. Given the choice to run with either, they went for the one that painted the Clintons badly and excused Barack's friendship with a domestic terrorist.
That tells you a lot. What a journalist actually does -- a real one -- is examine that charge, research it. In doing so, it would have been obvious that the two women had their sentences commuted, not that they were pardoned. But why bother to actually do your job when it's so much easier to repeat a lie -- one that benefits Barack and one that his campaign repeated on Thursday and as late as Friday. Barack's campaign is lying, there was no pardon.
David Corn, who used to pride himself on the facts, had a screaming meltdown when he took part in a media conference with the Clinton campaign. He insisted that "you guys obviously know, we all know, that President Clinton pardoned two Weathermen . . . uh . . . activists, terrorists, whatever you want to call them." No, David, we didn't all know that because it never happened. But when you're spoon-fed by the Obama campaign, when you're willing to publicly disgrace yourself to trade journalism in for campaign booster, you're prone to make mistakes.
Apparently not content to sound stark raving mad in front of his peers, David Corn then took to Mother Jones (aka Consumer Reports for the faux left) to brag, "I asked an obvious one: Did Hillary Clinton believe that it had been appropriate in 2001 for President Bill Clinton to have pardoned two members of the Weather Underground as he left office?" No, David, you didn't ask an obvious question, you embarrassed yourself by flaunting the fact that you've sold yourself out to the Obama campaign and are now letting them do the 'research' for you. It's nothing to take pride in.
It really was amazing to watch so many outlets -- presented with two possibilities of what Bill Clinton had done -- run with the more extreme and do so on the basis of the Obama campaign. Again, there bias was showing and they should all apologize.

Yeah, you can blame the media.

We saw Bill Moyers explore racism over and over. We never saw him explore gender. We did hear him tell Dr. Kathy that he wasn't sure Hillary's 'tears' (there were no tears) were sincere. We caught him replaying Jesse Jackson's smears suggesting Hillary only cried about her appearance (yes, that is the same Jesse Jackson Jr. who had surgery to lose fifty pounds -- vanity, they name is Junior). We saw that didn't make the transcript but it did make the broadcast. And it wasn't questioned on the broadcast, it was presented as 'fact.' (For those wondering, no action or statement by Obama has ever been questioned by Bill Moyers. We caught that show every week during the writers strike.) Even during Women's History Month, Moyers wasn't interested. Blame the media? Yeah and we'll get back to that topic. But let's return to Donna Brazile.

The woman who wrote "Blacks have been deeply wounded by the duplicity of the Clintons" and "It's personal and the Clintons have shown their darker demons" wants to show up in the new issue of Ms. pretending she's thrilled with both Democratic candidates. And Michelle Kort thinks this garbage is worth printing.

Brazile's e-mails do contain a bit of honesty: "And if I counted who has helped me since 2000, it's Republican men and not Democrats." Thereby explaining her partying at Dick Cheney's assistant's private home because what good Democrat doesn't let her hair down around Republicans?

Donna Brazile is a columnist at Ms. magazine and for what reason? Her writing is bad and lifeless. She's a woman who, if she is gay, is in the closet. That might fly at Newsweek, but Ms. has never been a publication that didn't include lesbians. What message is sent when they publish a woman whom many consider to be a closet-case? And are we really supposed to be overjoyed by her (bad) columns telling us about running to the drug store to get Right On! as a child? Isn't the next question whose photos she studied, who she fantasized about? But we can't go there because she's closed that section of her life off. It goes to a lack of authenticy and no columnist for Ms. should ever lack authenticity.

While they provide Donna Brazile's garbage, grasp what they don't provide. Susan J. Douglas is one of the finest media critics around. (Her column runs in In These Times.) Where's Ms. magazine's media critic or are we all supposed to be satisifed that they call out advertisements? Ms. used to call out a lot more. In the current climate and getting close to two decades after Susan Faludi's amazing Backlash was first published, how does Ms. excuse not offering media criticism each issue?

In the current issue, we can read about problems sleeping. Gee, that's helpful. My own biggest problem with sleeping is not having the time and I'd imagine that's true for most women. Ms. globe hops and it's doubtful a woman in India, for example, whoops with joy about the paragraph in an issue. By all means, have an international scope, but cover the home bases. Ms. is a US publication and that's where the bulk of its audience is.

Elaine recently wrote (actually more than once) about how lousy Ms. is today and I (of course) share her opinion. Publishing the homophobe Donna Brazile doesn't make it any better. Wasting a full page it doesn't have to waste doesn't make the magazine any better. Those who have been there for Ms. over and over, year after year, have every right to look in horror at the current version of the magazine. I agree with Elaine that, as it exists today, the only question to be asked is: "Why did we spend so much time and effort saving this magazine?" If this current stage continues much longer, Ms. should close shop. It could have a glorious history as opposed to the tepid present. One thing feminism should never, ever be is boring. Someone send a memo to Kort on that.

But when Donna Brazile can lie in the pages of Ms. magazine, when she can claim she's excited by both Democratic campaigns, and Ms. either doesn't care that she's trying to put one over on readers or they want to take part in that lie, you have the proof you need a culture where the media not only failed but continues to fail.

When the sisterhood's most famous magazine can't even strive for honesty, it's no surprise the country can't get it together to end the illegal war.

It's over, I'm done writing songs about love
There's a war going on
So I'm holding my gun with a strap and a glove
And I'm writing a song about war
And it goes
Na na na na na na na
I hate the war
Na na na na na na na
I hate the war
Na na na na na na na
I hate the war
Oh oh oh oh--
"I Hate The War" (written by Greg Goldberg, on The Ballet's Mattachine!)

Last Thursday, ICCC's number of US troops killed in Iraq since the start of the illegal war was 4037. Tonight? 4050. Up 13 since last week not that the press coverage indicates that. Just Foreign Policy lists 1,201,597 up from 1,199, as the number of Iraqis killed since the start of the Iraq War.

The following community sites have updated since yesterday:

Rebecca's Sex and Politics and Screeds and Attitude;
Cedric's Cedric's Big Mix;
Kat's Kat's Korner;
Mike's Mikey Likes It!;
Wally's The Daily Jot;
Ruth's Ruth's Report;
and Marcia's SICKOFITRADLZ

An e-mail from a visitor asked why Wally and Cedric didn't post yesterday or the day before? Tuesday was the Penn primary and Wally's working on getting out the vote for Hillary (he and Marcia are now doing that together and Marcia writes about that tonight). So that's Tuesday. (They also didn't post, I believe, the night of the Texas primary -- Cedric and Wally were both in Texas getting out the vote. When the results finally come in, it's draining.) As for last night, they actually did do a joint-post. They e-mailed it. It never hit their site so they posted it sometime today. (And shortly after they did, the e-mailed posts hit their sites -- both are still up currently.) The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.











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