Howard Dean thinks we're dumb sweeties

How stupid does Howard Dean think we are? This stupid:

SEELYE: Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic Party, who says he was slow to pick up on charges of sexism because he is not a regular viewer of cable television, is taking up the cause after hearing an outcry from what he described as a cross-section of women, from individual voters to powerful politicians and chief executives.

“The media took a very sexist approach to Senator Clinton’s campaign,” Mr. Dean said in a recent interview.

“It’s pretty appalling,” he said, adding that the issue resonates because Mrs. Clinton “got treated the way a lot of women got treated their whole lives.”

Mr. Dean and others are now calling for a “national discussion” of sexism.

Truly, that’s pathetic. For the past sixteen years, journalists could say any damn thing they pleased about major Democrats—especially Clinton, Gore and Clinton—safe in the knowledge that Dem Party figures would never care enough to complain. Now we learn why this long roll-over occurred: Party leaders like Howard Dean weren’t regular viewers of cable! How were they supposed to know about the vile things being said? None of us are geniuses out here, but that “explanation” is even insulting to us. Dean would have been much better off if he’d simply said nothing.

He’s calling for a discussion now! Just in time for it not to matter!

Convenient timing. After Hillary suspended her campaign, after years of abuse. Thanks for insulting the intelligence of millions of Clinton Democrats, women, and men who love women with a blockheaded, cockapootie, lame to the 10th power, contemptuous excuse. Between the Democratic party and the GOP, voters have a choice between stealthy corruption and in-your-face corruption. What a world!

Just when we need the Democratic party to act like adults, they morph into vindictive teenyboppers spieling CDS fibs and a lust for kewl, cold cha-ching.

And it gets worse. Organizations like NOW that should have been on the front line when the sexist puke first started to hurl at Sen. Hillary Clinton have finally decided to act on the issue. NOW (irony alert!) and Emily's List will launch email campaigns aimed at "cable channels when they see sexism." Plus, NOW, says its president Kim Gandy, will create a "Media Hall of Shame" on the Internet to raise awareness of "sexist language" in the news.

NOW is starting a campaign! Just in time! Seventeen months later! And by the way, could Gandy possibly have less of a clue? Almost surely, Michelle Obama will not “be the recipient of the same kind of attacks that Hillary was”—at least, not from the media players named in this article. (Good!) The fact that Gandy doesn’t understand this fact means that she’s been snoring soundly for the past many years.

Or that she’s playing it dumb.

La-dee-dah! As a lapsed member of NOW--I didn't see the benefit of, you know, actual results--I have to wonder what's in the water that has made women's orgs so complacent, so out of touch with women?

I can appreciate a woman's right to choose as important turf to protect. But you know what grinds women down to dust every working day of the week? Unfair, stagnant wages and loss of benefits, discrimination, and underground sexism in the workplace. Get a clue, people. Get out of your offices and go talk to women on the street, in grocery stores, at doctor offices if they are lucky to have insurance.

And...

If Obama losing in November means Howard Dean and the new--we don't need no steenking working class--coalition pushers will exit the DNC, the incentive to reject the party's Anointed One just multiplied.

Hat tip to Bob Somerby.

POSTSCRIPT: Thanks, Joseph! My eyes were opened wide during this campaign season.

Primary split

On last night's primary results, Riverdaughter speaks for me:

The votes were close in IN and not so close in NC. But we all know why this is. Indiana was an open primary. We don’t yet know how many crossover votes there were to make havoc. Plus, Obama *should* have had a major geographical advantage and Chicago media market spillover. It *should* have been a blow out for him in Indiana as well. It doesn’t look like his urban-youth-DINK-Republican crossover vote was enough though. Most of those Republican votes will not be staying with us for the general, of course. He won urban areas where African-American votes are highest. He did the same in NC where he won the middle of the state where 2/3 of the population lives. And 35% of the state is African-American.

I think what we’re seeing here is a real racial divide. It was engineered, deliberately, by Obama’s campaign in order to separate African Americans from the Clintons. It has worked spectacularly well. Obama consistently wins urban and southern AA voters, by lopsided margins. It didn’t have to be this way. There was no reason for the African-American community to spurn Clinton. But in this America, in 2008, color is everything. It seems like the civil rights movement of the 60’s was just a dream. As long as you are the right color, you’re golden. Color masks a multitude of deficiencies- experience, knowledge base, earned coalitions, even interest. Obama has not reached out to the working class, to women, to the elderly, the loyal base of the Democratic party. But he has managed to exacerbate the fault line in the party when it comes to race. There’s no doubt about that now.

Winning NC does not make me like him more nor do I have an elevated desire to vote for him. Let me dispel the notion that he and his supporters have about me voting for him in the fall: unless Florida and Michigan are seated and have an impact on the nomination, I will not consider the nomination legitimate. That doesn’t mean I’ll vote for John McCain. It just means that I don’t know what I’ll do when I stand in front of that button. And don’t hang this on Hillary. If it comes to that, I’m sure she would do her best to GOTV. It has nothing to do with her. It has to do with how deeply offended I am by how Obama has split my party on racial lines and pitted race against their regular party members, as if there was a real split there to begin with. As if I were the enemy....

Reminiscent of Obama's stereotypically wrong and bitter arrogance, Donna Brazile, divider extraordinaire, said on CNN last night:

BRAZILE: Well, Lou, I have worked on a lot of Democratic campaigns, and I respect Paul.... But, Paul, you're looking at the old coalition. A new Democratic coalition is younger. It is more urban, as well as suburban, and we don't have to just rely on white blue-collar voters and Hispanics. We need to look at the Democratic Party, expand the party, expand the base and not throw out the baby with the bathwater. [Emphasis added.]

Here's a hint: to unify the party, don't insult the "old coalition" that's halfway out the door should the superdelegates choose Obama.

POSTSCRIPT: See also Lambert's NC/IN primary wrap-up and hat tip to TalkLeft's Brazile vs. Begala on CNN: Brazile's Blowout. Maps from CNN.

Stuck on stupid

Why did I do it? Oh, why did I click on the headline in the sidebar at HuffPost that read, Hooked on Hillary? When, wham! Ugh! Eeeeeek! Ooooooh! Nora Ephron's self-indulgent pining appeared before me:

I would like to put myself among the growing chorus of people demanding that Hillary Clinton withdraw from the election. I don't really think it's fair to ask her to withdraw, and I certainly don't believe she's going to; she'll hang in there till the last dog dies, or till she runs out of money, whichever comes first. I'm not asking her to withdraw because I prefer Obama, and I don't think she should withdraw "for the sake of party unity," or whatever current bromide is being flung at her to get her to pull out. I think she should withdraw because I'm losing my mind. [Emphasis added.]

Sweetie, darling, you have already lost your mind.

Nora goes on and on...oh, the dizziness... about how "I used to love [Hillary] and I no longer do, but unlike what usually happens when love dies, I still think about her far too much." The pathos, "the Rorschach process," the obsession, like Meg Ryan in Sleepless in Seattle only without the happy ending.

Why, oh, why did I click on that damn headline?! I blame BDBlue! It's your fault! Damn you! May the plagues of a thou... Nah, just kidding.

Actually, I was reading an excellent article at HuffPost by Wayne Barrett thanks to BDBlue who posted on a hot subject last evening, Gullible Democrats: How the GOP Rigged MI & FL:

For a depressing treatise on how to lose a general election with a 48-state strategy designed by the opposing party, go read Wayne Barrett.

And do read Barrett's deep-into-the-history of the MI and FL primary nightmare, which plunges into the DNC cock-up and Howard Dean's finagling followed by the hazing of the Democrats by the Republicans in Michigan and Florida. We know the GOP does not have the Dems' best interests at heart so WTF were they thinking? One of many Democratic kickers of the self-injurious kind, unforgivable really:

The Democratic national committeeman who introduced the motion on the party's Rules Committee to deprive Florida of all its delegates -- a precursor to the Michigan decision a few months later -- was Ralph Dawson, a New York lawyer who was Howard Dean's Yale roommate and an advisor to Dean's 2004 campaign. Dawson's role was seen as a signal of Dean's appetite for a kick-ass rebuke.

As much as the DNC tries to pretend otherwise, it had choices. In fact, it later showed understandable leniency to three other states who changed their primary dates--New Hampshire, Iowa and South Carolina -- seating all their delegates. The tough love treatment was reserved for Michigan and Florida.

Does anyone recall a presidential election in the past few decades that turned on the Electoral College counts of either New Hampshire, Iowa or South Carolina? Ahem.

The national party had tried -- before New Hampshire's case wound up on its docket -- to leave the impression that zero tolerance was automatic once violations of the schedule occur. Back in June, a DNC spokeswoman, for example, told the Associated Press that neither Dean nor the Rules Committee "has the power to waive the rules for any state," explaining that "these rules can be changed only by the full DNC." Yet a few months later, on the same day that the Rules Committee stripped Michigan of its delegates, it waived the rules for New Hampshire, Iowa, and South Carolina, each of which had also moved up their primaries.

Barrett offers gracious plenty more analysis and facts that could make your hair set afire.

But if you head over to read Barrett's report--and I highly recommend that you do--don't click on "Hooked on Hillary." I played an April Fools' joke on myself. Spare yourself.

UPDATE: I refreshed the Wayne Barrett link to an archived copy of his HuffPo article at Common Dreams.