An Open Letter In Support of Amanda

[UPDATE: Shakespeare's Sister lead Melissa just announced that she's resigning from her position at the Edwards campaign as well.  Sad to see that, too.]

I know that I have had many differences with Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon….mostly on her incomprehension of liberal versus radical Left policies and her quite passionate advocacy towards feminism and women’s rights. (Her approach I’ve argued…not her base politics.)

There comes a tiime, though, where you have to suspend the pettiness and join in social solidarity in defense of a fellow or sista progressive who is under the barrel of a gun….and this is definitely the case with Amanda and the ensuing battle called "Bloggergate".

To reset; Amanda —  along with Melissa Ewen, the lead voice of Shakespeare’s Sister —  was approached by the John Edwards for President campaign to run their website and basically run interference with the A-list liberal bloggers.  Naturally, both accepted the offers, since it would give them major credibility and engage the progressive netroots with the larger political climate.

Not everyone was so happy, though — some from the further Left such as Dennis Perrin  of Red State Son decried the deal as a sellout of progressive principles; quoting some of Edwards’ latest statements implying that he would have no problems with bombing Iran or continuing the war in Iraq.  But that was mere politeness compared to the howls coming from the Right…and especially the Catholic wing of the Christian FRight led mostly by Michelle Malkin and William Donohue, chief spokesman for the Cathollic League for Civil Rights.

The latter two (especially Donohue, using his media cred on MSNBC and FOX News) then launched a bitter and brutal campaign against Edwards, mostly rehashing some past quotes from Amanda’s blog implying "bigotry" against Catholicism and the Roman Catholic Church, to taint Amanda and Shakes’ Sis as "dangerous anti-Catholic bigots" and called for the Edwards campaign to immediately remove these evil feminist radicals from their campaign.  There were also noises coming from the more traditional "centrist" media as well, with Fightin’ Joe Lieberman leading the verse that Edwards was pandering to the "far Left" by hiring such dangerous women on his payroll, and that he was risking alienating those key Catholic "swing voters" unless he relented and removed them quick.

For a while, it seemed to succeed; Salon.com on last Thursday released a story claiming that Edwards had indeed fired the two women (followed up by another story the next day saying that they had been rehired)….but this set off a firestorm in the progressive blogosphere in defense of Amanda and Shakes’ Sis as martyrs of freedom of speech and decrying Edwards as a craven chicken allowing a right-wing extremist to dictate his campaign strategy. 

On Friday, Edwards himself released a brief but terse statement at his campaign site basically admonishing the two women for stirring up controversy and asking them to cool it down…but allowing them to stay on. Seperate statements by both of the women apologizing for their ways were also released simultaneously.  

That sorta ended the controversy….actually, it didn’t, since Donohue announced that he would turn up the heat on Edwards and the two women for their "bigotry"….and some others (like Brownfemipower over at Women of Color Blog) openly asked if the actions of Amanda and Melissa amounted to back door censorship for past actions.

Finally, on Monday, Amanda announced at her blog (Pandagon) that she had resigned from the Edwards campaign, citing the wish to not inflame the campaign with excess baggage and the affect of squelching her own freedom of speech in responding in kind to the lynching antics of Donohue and his allies. The original note was released at Pandagon, but wasn’t accessible due to an Denial of Service (DoS) attack launched by Donohue’s allies to silence and shut down her blog. (It is currently open for the moment. Fortunately, Steve Gilliard of The News Blog reprinted Amanda’s statement at his blog, it can be found here.)

In addition to all that, Amanda found herself buried in an avalanche of hate email launched by Donohue’s followers…and most of it was pretty ugly and even explicit in its loathing and hatred for her stances. A couple of examples, as posted by Amanda recently to her blog:

[from "R.R." in Tallahassee, FL]
Amanda,
after reading your vile screed against Catholics and the Holy Spirit, I just had to see what you looked like. (I envisioned you eyebrow-less, with no visible pupils, and a blank, dead stare.) I see I was correct about the blank, dead stare, but other than that you’re not too bad. I then thought maybe you were mad at God (and by proxy Catholics) for making you ugly, but now I’m figuring you’re just mad at him for making you a woman.

 [from Vivian Thomas]
Catholics are concerned about killing unborn children, you stupid bitch. Chop away if it suits you, but we don’t have to accept that as moral. That’s why it’s called a religion. Look into it

 But those are virtual love letters compared to the more…..shall we say, expressive and explicit greetings thrown at Amanda from what appears to be sexually frustrated Christian men…or MRA wannabes. ByrdBrain would probably blow his wad be mighty impressed at the following screeds:

[from Andy Diggers of Dallas]
Problem with women like you, you just need a good fucking from a real man! Living in Texas myself, I know you haven’t found that real Texan yet. But once your liberal pro feminist ass gets a real good fucking, you might see the light. Until then, enjoy your battery operated toys b/c most real men wouldn’t want to give you the fucking you deserve b/c the shit that would come out of you ears.

I guess someone forgot to tell that asshat that Amanda is already hetero. 

 [from Paul Bernard of Scottsdale, AZ]
i like the way you trash talk i don’t particularly want to have sex with you but i would like a blow job.

Oh, but I thought that she was one of ‘dem radicallesbians that don’t do men, huh???

And then there is this typical wishful wingnutty greeting from someone named Bud Phelps (no relation to the "Reverend" gay baiter Fred Phelps, no doubt):

It’s just too bad your mother didn’t abort you. You are nothing more than a filthy mouth slut. I bet a couple of years in Iraq being raped and beaten daily would help you appreciate America a little. Need a plane ticket ?

Oh, goody, goody….does dewd know that most of the raping and beating in Iraq is being done by…you know..FREAKIN’ AMERICANS?!?!?!? And how about a Christian who is supposedly "pro-life" and "anti-abortion" openly wishing that Amanda was…well, aborted??  I guess that some fetuses are more sacred than others.

But the grandaddy of all roundhouse insults — at least the ones Amanda chose to print — comes from a fella named Romanco de Lorne who is so passionate about defending his church from "bigotry" that he resorts to all caps:

YOU RACIST WHORE. FAT UGLY BITCH. SUCK MY LONG COCK ASSHOLE I HOPE YOU KIDS NEVER LIVE AND YOUR PARENTS DIE A TRAGIC DEATH YOU ASSHOLE BITCH!
I HOPE YOUR WOMB IS BARREN AND YOUR CAREER PLUMMETS TO HELL YOU BITCH

Yup….nothing like  good, solid Christian men defending their religion, isn’t it??

Amanda herself hits the nail square on the head when she riffs:

Reminder: Donohue was claiming to be so hurt by my “bigotry”. Yet, for some reason, his supporters write me and they are more interested in telling me that my womanhood is repulsive to them. Interesting—almost as if his claims to speak for Catholicism were in fact dog whistles to scare people about women’s equality.

As I told some close friends in the days that Donohue was on the news, spraying code words about “get the feminists” (which explains why he roped Shakespeare’s Sister into this, even though she really had nothing to do with any of this—except she’s pro-equality, which is what is really what offends Donohue and all the people who gave that anti-Semite airtime), a good half of my hate mail could be summed up, “You have a pottymouth, you stupid cunt.” 

[...]

Right wingers right now are pretending like sexism has nothing to do with me, which is an argument that works if you think a) men get emails about how they need to suck a dick on a regular basis and b) that there’s nothing whatsoever sexist about allowing men to curse but hitting the fainting couch if a woman does.

Oh, but Amanda…try being a gay man, or someone who fits the type….I’m sure that they’d get the same treatment.

Time to wake up and smell reality—real bigots follow the siren call of the fascist right wing. Why would they even bother with liberals and all our equality and human rights and other tedious ideas?

[....]

But I shan’t belabor the point. I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of the hate mail the Bill Donohue’s “Christian” campaign against me has inspired. This is all stuff from days ago—I’ve gotten more than 100 since. Hell, from the looks of my email from last night, I’ve had more than 100 in the past 12 hours from self-proclaimed Christians who want me to know that I have hurt their feelings and this has nothing, nothing whatsoever to do with their own misogyny and tendency to witch hunt.

In short, this is nothing more than the classic "slut-baiting" that happens to any woman who dares to challenge the wacky Christian FRight’s principles on sexuality or women’s position in society.  This could have been launched just as strongly and just as easily against Nina Hartley or Joycelyn Elders, or Dr. Susan Block or Dr. Carol Queen or Dr. Gloria Brame, or Renegade Evolution or the Queer Bitch or Brownfemipower or Blackamazon, or Vicky Vette or Bridgett Lee, or Kira Reed or Shauna O’Brien, or Annie Sprinkle or Susie Bright, or even Lani Guenier or Hillary Clinton…it’s just that Amanda Marcotte and Melissa Ewen happen to be strong women and feminists who dare to be open about calling the fascists out on their bullshit…and happen to get way too close to real politifal power for the wingnutter’s comfort.

This is what you get, Clones, when you don’t defend to the death the basic principle of "My body, my choice, my damn business and nobody else’s"…and that other principle "Keep your Jesus off my penis (or clit) and your morals off my balls (and wombs)". An injury to one is still, in the long run, an injury to all.

Well done, Amanda….go get that mountain of human crap, and don’t ever let him up when you get his ass. The can of Whupass is at your full disposal if you need it.

Like I said….sometimes you put principle ahead of personal differences.  I’m backing Amanda on this one.  How about thou7??

\

Presente, Miss Molly…And Goddess Bless

Very sad to see her pass on….but her sprirt and her humor — and her ability for instanteous smackdown of evildoers, will survive beyond her.  Hopefully, she’ll get to lay some smack down on "Shrub" (her gloss for Dubya) on his way down.

The story of the passing of Molly Ivins from the Associated Press today:

 

       

Molly Ivins dies of cancer at 62

By KELLEY SHANNON
Associated Press Writer

 

   

AP Photo/HENNY RAY ABRAMS

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AP_Tacoda_AMS_DDC_addPair(“SECTION”, “NATIONAL”) AP_Tacoda_AMS_DDC(“http://te.ap.org/tte/blank.gif”, “1.0″)

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Best-selling author and columnist Molly Ivins, the sharp-witted liberal who skewered the political establishment and referred to President Bush as "Shrub," died Wednesday after a long battle with breast cancer. She was 62.

Ivins died at her home while in hospice care, said David Pasztor, managing editor of the Texas Observer, where Ivins was co-editor.

Ivins made a living poking fun at politicians, whether they were in her home state of Texas or the White House. She revealed in early 2006 that she was being treated for breast cancer for the third time.

More than 400 newspapers subscribed to her nationally syndicated column, which combined strong liberal views and populist humor. Ivins’ illness did not seem to hurt her ability to deliver biting one-liners.

"I’m sorry to say (cancer) can kill you, but it doesn’t make you a better person," she said in an interview with the San Antonio Express-News in September, the same month cancer claimed her friend former Gov. Ann Richards.

To Ivins, "liberal" wasn’t an insult term. "Even I felt sorry for Richard Nixon when he left; there’s nothing you can do about being born liberal – fish gotta swim and hearts gotta bleed," she wrote in a column included in her 1998 collection, "You Got to Dance With Them What Brung You."

In a column in mid-January, Ivins urged readers to stand up against Bush’s plan to send more troops to Iraq.

"We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war," Ivins wrote in the Jan. 11 column. "We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, ‘Stop it, now!’"

Ivins’ best-selling books included those she co-authored with Lou Dubose about Bush. One was titled "Shrub: The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush" and another was "BUSHWHACKED: Life in George W. Bush’s America."

Ivins’ jolting satire was directed at people in positions of power.

"The trouble with blaming powerless people is that although it’s not nearly as scary as blaming the powerful, it does miss the point," she wrote in a 1997 column. "Poor people do not shut down factories … Poor people didn’t decide to use ‘contract employees’ because they cost less and don’t get any benefits."

In an Austin speech last year, former President Clinton described Ivins as someone who was "good when she praised me and who was painfully good when she criticized me."

Ivins loved to write about politics and called the Texas Legislature the best free entertainment in Austin.

"Naturally, when it comes to voting, we in Texas are accustomed to discerning that fine hair’s-breadth worth of difference that makes one hopeless dipstick slightly less awful than the other. But it does raise the question: Why bother?" she wrote in a 2002 column about a California political race.

Born Mary Tyler Ivins in California, she grew up in Houston. She graduated from Smith College in 1966 and attended Columbia University’s journalism school. She also studied for a year at the Institute of Political Sciences in Paris.

Her first newspaper job was in the complaint department of the Houston Chronicle. She worked her way up at the Chronicle, then went on to the Minneapolis Tribune, becoming the first woman police reporter in the city.

Ivins counted as her highest honors the Minneapolis police force’s decision to name its mascot pig after her and her getting banned from the campus of Texas A&M University, according to a biography on the Creators Syndicate Web site.

In the late 1960s, according to the syndicate, she was assigned to a beat called "Movements for Social Change" and wrote about "angry blacks, radical students, uppity women and a motley assortment of other misfits and troublemakers."

Ivins later became co-editor of The Texas Observer, a liberal Austin-based biweekly publication of politics and literature.

She joined The New York Times in 1976, working first as a political reporter in New York and later as Rocky Mountain bureau chief.

But Ivins’ use of salty language and her habit of going barefoot in the office were too much for the Times, said longtime friend Ben Sargent, editorial cartoonist with the Austin American-Statesman.

"She was just like a force of nature," Sargent said. "She was just always on and sharp and witty and funny and was one of a kind."

Ivins returned to Texas as a columnist for the Dallas Times-Herald in 1982, and after it closed she spent nine years with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. In 2001, she went independent and wrote her column for Creators Syndicate.

"She was magical in her writing," said Mike Blackman, a former Star-Telegram executive editor who hired Ivins in 1992. "She could turn a phrase in such a way that a pretty hard-hitting point didn’t hurt so bad."

In 1995, conservative humorist Florence King accused Ivins in "American Enterprise" magazine of plagiarism for failing to properly credit King for several passages in a 1988 article in "Mother Jones." Ivins apologized, saying the omissions were unintentional and pointing out that she credited King elsewhere in the piece.

She was initially diagnosed with breast cancer in 1999, and she had a recurrence in 2003. Her latest diagnosis came around Thanksgiving 2005.

—

Associated Press writers April Castro in Austin and Matt Curry in Dallas contributed to this report.

© 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Learn more about our Privacy Policy.

Although I ultimately became much more radical in my political philosophy than Miss Molly would become, she was one of my first influences in politics as not only a female journalist and a principled liberal/progressive who was unashamed and unafraid to defend and bear that label, but as one of the best political satirist and humorists alive on the face of the earth. From her days at the Texas Observer to her regular columns over at The Progressive magazine, to her regular syndicated columns, she always seemed to combine the perfect mix of passion, anger, humor, and smack….and always in defense of common working people against the inanety of corporate and political powermongers.

Not to mention the fact that Miss Molly was as proud a Texan as ever…even if she ripped their politicians new orfices every day.  I’m sure that even at her deathbed she probably was giving a one-finger salute at Dubya with one hand…and the "Hook ‘em Horns" salute with the other. Even a Louisianian like me had to respect her loyalty.

There were few like her, and in this age of herd journalism, I fear that there will be fewer to carry on her legacy (well, there’s always Keith Olbermann..if he wasn’t a Cali-bred). 

Step right in through the gates, Miss Molly…you’ve done well. 

 Update:  Here’s one of the best examples — relevant to the theme of this blog — where Miss Molly showed her expertise at laying some serious smack on the stupidity of some legislators….this time, on the subject of the inane laws against the possession and sale of…sex toys.  (Warning…definitely NOT safe for work or for children.)

 The Dildo Diaries (a short documentary about Texas’ anti-sex toy laws featuring Molly Ivins, courtesy YouTube)

 

Only exception to that excellent smackdown for me: it ain’t just Texas, Miz Molly, that’s full of "dipshits" who put more emphasis on regulating women’s wombs and clits than the regulating the environment or the budget; take a trip further east to Louisiana or Mississippi or Alabama or Georgia with a Pocket Rocket and see how the authorities will respond.  They don’t call this (red) neck of the woods "the Bible (Chastity) Belt" for nothing, you know.

Only Linda Ellerbee represents badasssss Texas feminist journalism as well as Molly Ivins did….Please, Goddess, try not to take Linda away before her time.

On Boobs, A Boob, A Really Bad Burqa Joke, and Liberal Cultural Imperialism (Part One)

First off, my apologies for not blogging for a while…work and other stuff, you know.  I’m currently enjoying a week of paid vacation, so I’ll just take advantage of it for playing catch-up. 

Now, I’m wondering myself why it took me this long to add my penny’s worth to all the fireworks and water works going on over former President Bubba Clinton’s recent soiree with the Liberal Blogospheric A-Team, and the ensuing Cat 3 hurricane in Left Blogomania…but since everyone else in this freakin’ nation has had a say or fifty about it, then why not moi???

To give a abridged version of the whole story:

Bubba invites several of the lib blogosphere’s heavy hitters to his office in Harlem for a informal luncheon, basically to soften them up for Hilliary’s 2008 Presidential campaign, I’d guess.

One of the invitees happens to be a quite striking young woman named Jessica Valenti, who writes the Feministing blog.  And I do mean quite striking, too….though that should have nothing to do with her competence as a writer, now should it, gang??

Anyways, part of the soiree includes the obligatory portrait, where Ex-Prez Bubba looks all Presidential and all the participants put on their best grins for the camera…so that they can say to their blogging friends that they got up close with “The Big Dog”. 

Jessica just so happens to place herself right in front of Bubba.  Wearing a very casual and dressy and quite appropriate (for a lunch meeting with the former President) form-fitting blouse. 

The results are shown here (*from Jessica’s Flickr gallery):

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view), Jessica (as do almost all women) happens to have…..well, what we in the human race call “breasts” ….and quite decent ones, too.  And the particular blouse she wore (although not in any way revealing, since no cleavage was shown), did manage to emphasize that segment of her anatomy more than the usual. (No big deal here, either, since she wasn’t there to flash or put out, just to represent her share of the blogosphere.)

Just as unfortunately, as you can plainly see, Jessica happens to be a brunette and decent looking. Combined with the setting, the form-fitting dress, and the subject of the honor, you’d think that it wouldn’t take long for some of our wingnutty whackjobss to put 2 and 2 together and utter those two words of doom: 

Monica.  Lewinsky.

And sure enough, here comes libertarian conservative “feminist” Ann Althouse, who has a real beef with Bubba for obvious reasons (like, she hates his policies and his ways with women).  First she comes out and attacks the whole shindig as mere pandering to a failed president (unlike the current President-Select, whom she thinks is just jolly-fine because he’s a grown-up, mature conservative family man…..his alleged drinking, cussing, and fussing to the contrary). 

And then, when some visitors to the blog decide to point out Jessica and the resembulance to Monica, she comes back for a much more detailed and vicious personal attack on Jessica (or at least, her boobs), claiming her to be nothing more than a Monica wannabe, a publicity whore, and a brainless slut who’s bringing feminism down to the “raunch” level. She even attempts to bring in the Feministing logo (a series of matching “mud flaps” featuring a sihoulette of a scantily-clad woman) as proof of Jessica’s (and in Althouse’s view, most liberal feminists’) lack of seriousness.

Needless to say, the feminist and progressive A-list blogosphere went up in righteous anger and rose up in almost unison to defend Jessica (and, it’s nice to say, Jessica herself smacked Althouse down pretty good herself); and rightfully so, in my word.  I mean, it’s not as if she went in there with full cleavage and short skirt and snapped her thong…she was there on serious business. Perhaps Althouse was just jealous that someone at least prettier than her (and obviously smarter, too) got to get close to the President she hated)…or maybe it’s just that old right-wing hatred of Clinton for coopting their agenda so well. 

But that debate of all-hawk and no-spit over the importance of Jessica’s boobs was a mere cover for another, far more substansial debate that was raised later on: the lack of invites to bloggers of color.  This was especially important regarding Clinton because (1) he was considered to be America’s “first (unofficial) Black President (amazing what playing the sax on Arsenio Hall’s show and playing alongside Grambling State University’s “World Famous” marching band will do for a President’s image….it might even cover up his actual record towards Black people, like his support of racist crime bills, executions and welfare “reform”); and because of the Harlem venue.

(To be fair, one popular A-list liberal Black blogger, Steve Gilliard of THE NEWS BLOG, posted that he would have declined on personal philosophy if any invites were given to him to meet and greet Bubba…but he did admit that he wasn’t invited, either.)

While it was mostly the outsider, more radical Black blogging community (including Brownfempower, Kevin Andre Elliott, Bint Alshamsa, and especially Blackamazon, who laid a particularly lethal strike on the pretentions of White liberals here), the fun actually started when Liza Sabater of culturekitchen used her blog to bring out the lily-white nature of the lunch klatch in Black Harlem and how it represented how privileged White liberals seem to take people of color for granted and use them as recyclable refuse to raise their personal ratings.

Unfortunately, the way in which Liza expressed her rage brought out the dander of some of the liberals in response; including a particularly nasty ad hominen rebuttal by someone named TRex (nee’ David Ferguson) using the Firedoglake blog (owners Christy Smith and Jane Hamsher happened to be two of the invitees at the Clinton lunch). Apparantly, TRex used his creds as a White gay man to tell off Liza and other supposed Black know-nothings on their notions of representation in the liberal blogosphere; and even got off some personal jabs at Lisa’s writing style:

“So, Liza, dear, before you go assailing your betters and making Jane stand in for every blond white woman who ever pissed you off, maybe you should head back to eighth grade English and, you know, learn to spell and to write in a linear fashion.” 

[That was the original quote.....since then, T-Rex has gone and edited it to remove the more offensive remarks....barely.] 

Uh, huh. Very nice of him to lecture a Black woman on her “inferior” writing style.  I’ll bet he says this for all the uppity nigg….errrrrrrr….Black women writers, too.

[And visions of all the crap that Nubian has had to endure comes to mind, too.]

Of course, this has a real history to it….because Liza had earlier whacked FDL for allowing a portrait of Fightin’ Joe (for the GOP) Lieberman altered in blackface (as a part of their hatefest against him for his Republican policies…..as if Black people were too stupid otherwise to oppose him on his merits). [Note: the original pic from FDL (and originally posted at Hamsher's Huffington Post blog, have long since been deleted from both the FDL and Huff Post servers; but Slate.com's John Dickerson did manage to cache that image for an article critical of that effort.

Now all that would have passed and gone and had been forgotten as the usual election year inaniety. It would have, too...except that here, from out of the dugout in porn liberal feminist left field, came Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon to pour some high-octane rocket fuel to the debate ....in her attempt to defend Jessica from the evil bad fundamentalist woman-hating neocons.  In her attempt to score some humor and some smack points against Althouse and her boob obsessions, Amanda decided to import the time-honored image of a Muslim woman dressed in a burqa as the symbol of what she thought Althouse and her haters thought Jessica should have been wearing.  To that effort, she enlisted the help of a regular Pandagonite, Auguste, to do some Photoshop magic reconstruction to the original Clinton blogger soiree, the result shown here being attached to a biting rant Amanda posted to her blog:

[Click to see the full image]

That may have silenced the Althouse crowd…but it created a literal firestorm of rage from both radical Arab and Muslim women bloggers and WOC bloggers, who saw not a lighthearted joke, but a gratituous insult and an appropriation and mocking of another culture’s (and another race’s) most precious religious symbol…not to mention the blinding of Clinton’s own role in the destruction of Muslims and Arabs (who in the Middle East mostly consist of people of color) as a means to score brownie points against other White elitist women. 

[A similar discussion had emerged earlier when the Tennessee Guerilla Women, a liberal feminist blogger collective, decided to launch a campaign for reproductive rights in the US  using the burqa as a collective symbol of women's oppression (Operation Red Burqa)....and got strongly rebuked by Black and Brown feminists for abusing and appropriating that Muslim symbol in that way.  (This essay by none other than Bitch | Lab (who is not a WOC, but radical enough to support their struggles) exemplifies the latter position quite well. The latter came as a response to one of my earlier essays from my former blog defending TGW's position.)] 

But back to the here and now….things quickly degenerated into a nasty Pier 6 brawl (wrasslin’ term) when some of Amanda’s defenders in the liberal (and feminist) blogosphere started biting back that the complaints of the WOCs were being “selfish” and amounted to “black nationalism” in their attempts to shame White feminists into submission to “racist tactics”. Two particularly acidic responses came from Lindsey at Majikthisse and a young man named Alon Levy, who even went as far as to break out the old “Islamofascist” card in saying that critics of Amanda were simply soft on the innate evil of Islam amongst women, if not active agents of “Islamofascism”.  There was even a nice rant posted to Alas, a Blog by a “Greenconscionse” which attempted to recruit people into the War on Muslims using radfem rhetoric (an excerpt follows):

We should do more than criticize, we should support this war, expand it into Iran and Saudi Arabia, blow up the patriarchy everywhere possible. Support the immigration of women to the US from any Moslem country without husbands or fathers, forbid the oppression of women by Muslims in this country. Call it slavery and act against it wherever we can. The boys shouted us down in 1972 and they will do it again except for the decent men – shout back. Better yet turn your back on them and reach out to your sisters in Afghanistan and if it ever gets safer to your sisters in Iraq.

[emphasis added]

Meanwhile, in the midst of all this, Amanda decided to make an effort to crawfish her way out of the controversy with an attempted explanation and apology for the burqaized Jessica image; unfortunately, some of the WOCs decided not to quite buy into it, because it didn’t (to them) address the fundamental issue of how liberal White feminists appropriated wrongly the image of a POC for their own selfish motives without even addressing their interests. This set off some of Amanda’s supporters even more, who publically implied that she should have never apologized in the first place and that the critics were just evil reverse racists who were simply attempting to call themselves off as saviors of the entire third world though the usual Mau-Mauing and guilt tripping.

And so, the matter stands up to date…with bruised feelings everywhere.

What’s my personal take on all this??  That’s for Part Deux, soon to follow.  Stay close….

BTW….Go check out Bitch | Lab; she has a whole collection of discussion threads on the entire controversy…far too many to link here…but this post and discussion will do as a start.

On Boobs, A Boob, A Really Bad Burqa Joke, and Liberal Cultural Imperialism (Part One)

First off, my apologies for not blogging for a while…work and other stuff, you know.  I’m currently enjoying a week of paid vacation, so I’ll just take advantage of it for playing catch-up. 

Now, I’m wondering myself why it took me this long to add my penny’s worth to all the fireworks and water works going on over former President Bubba Clinton’s recent soiree with the Liberal Blogospheric A-Team, and the ensuing Cat 3 hurricane in Left Blogomania…but since everyone else in this freakin’ nation has had a say or fifty about it, then why not moi???

To give a abridged version of the whole story:

Bubba invites several of the lib blogosphere’s heavy hitters to his office in Harlem for a informal luncheon, basically to soften them up for Hilliary’s 2008 Presidential campaign, I’d guess.

One of the invitees happens to be a quite striking young woman named Jessica Valenti, who writes the Feministing blog.  And I do mean quite striking, too….though that should have nothing to do with her competence as a writer, now should it, gang??

Anyways, part of the soiree includes the obligatory portrait, where Ex-Prez Bubba looks all Presidential and all the participants put on their best grins for the camera…so that they can say to their blogging friends that they got up close with “The Big Dog”. 

Jessica just so happens to place herself right in front of Bubba.  Wearing a very casual and dressy and quite appropriate (for a lunch meeting with the former President) form-fitting blouse. 

The results are shown here (*from Jessica’s Flickr gallery):

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view), Jessica (as do almost all women) happens to have…..well, what we in the human race call “breasts” ….and quite decent ones, too.  And the particular blouse she wore (although not in any way revealing, since no cleavage was shown), did manage to emphasize that segment of her anatomy more than the usual. (No big deal here, either, since she wasn’t there to flash or put out, just to represent her share of the blogosphere.)

Just as unfortunately, as you can plainly see, Jessica happens to be a brunette and decent looking. Combined with the setting, the form-fitting dress, and the subject of the honor, you’d think that it wouldn’t take long for some of our wingnutty whackjobss to put 2 and 2 together and utter those two words of doom: 

Monica.  Lewinsky.

And sure enough, here comes libertarian conservative “feminist” Ann Althouse, who has a real beef with Bubba for obvious reasons (like, she hates his policies and his ways with women).  First she comes out and attacks the whole shindig as mere pandering to a failed president (unlike the current President-Select, whom she thinks is just jolly-fine because he’s a grown-up, mature conservative family man…..his alleged drinking, cussing, and fussing to the contrary). 

And then, when some visitors to the blog decide to point out Jessica and the resembulance to Monica, she comes back for a much more detailed and vicious personal attack on Jessica (or at least, her boobs), claiming her to be nothing more than a Monica wannabe, a publicity whore, and a brainless slut who’s bringing feminism down to the “raunch” level. She even attempts to bring in the Feministing logo (a series of matching “mud flaps” featuring a sihoulette of a scantily-clad woman) as proof of Jessica’s (and in Althouse’s view, most liberal feminists’) lack of seriousness.

Needless to say, the feminist and progressive A-list blogosphere went up in righteous anger and rose up in almost unison to defend Jessica (and, it’s nice to say, Jessica herself smacked Althouse down pretty good herself); and rightfully so, in my word.  I mean, it’s not as if she went in there with full cleavage and short skirt and snapped her thong…she was there on serious business. Perhaps Althouse was just jealous that someone at least prettier than her (and obviously smarter, too) got to get close to the President she hated)…or maybe it’s just that old right-wing hatred of Clinton for coopting their agenda so well. 

But that debate of all-hawk and no-spit over the importance of Jessica’s boobs was a mere cover for another, far more substansial debate that was raised later on: the lack of invites to bloggers of color.  This was especially important regarding Clinton because (1) he was considered to be America’s “first (unofficial) Black President (amazing what playing the sax on Arsenio Hall’s show and playing alongside Grambling State University’s “World Famous” marching band will do for a President’s image….it might even cover up his actual record towards Black people, like his support of racist crime bills, executions and welfare “reform”); and because of the Harlem venue.

(To be fair, one popular A-list liberal Black blogger, Steve Gilliard of THE NEWS BLOG, posted that he would have declined on personal philosophy if any invites were given to him to meet and greet Bubba…but he did admit that he wasn’t invited, either.)

While it was mostly the outsider, more radical Black blogging community (including Brownfempower, Kevin Andre Elliott, Bint Alshamsa, and especially Blackamazon, who laid a particularly lethal strike on the pretentions of White liberals here), the fun actually started when Liza Sabater of culturekitchen used her blog to bring out the lily-white nature of the lunch klatch in Black Harlem and how it represented how privileged White liberals seem to take people of color for granted and use them as recyclable refuse to raise their personal ratings.

Unfortunately, the way in which Liza expressed her rage brought out the dander of some of the liberals in response; including a particularly nasty ad hominen rebuttal by someone named TRex (nee’ David Ferguson) using the Firedoglake blog (owners Christy Smith and Jane Hamsher happened to be two of the invitees at the Clinton lunch). Apparantly, TRex used his creds as a White gay man to tell off Liza and other supposed Black know-nothings on their notions of representation in the liberal blogosphere; and even got off some personal jabs at Lisa’s writing style:

“So, Liza, dear, before you go assailing your betters and making Jane stand in for every blond white woman who ever pissed you off, maybe you should head back to eighth grade English and, you know, learn to spell and to write in a linear fashion.” 

[That was the original quote.....since then, T-Rex has gone and edited it to remove the more offensive remarks....barely.] 

Uh, huh. Very nice of him to lecture a Black woman on her “inferior” writing style.  I’ll bet he says this for all the uppity nigg….errrrrrrr….Black women writers, too.

[And visions of all the crap that Nubian has had to endure comes to mind, too.]

Of course, this has a real history to it….because Liza had earlier whacked FDL for allowing a portrait of Fightin’ Joe (for the GOP) Lieberman altered in blackface (as a part of their hatefest against him for his Republican policies…..as if Black people were too stupid otherwise to oppose him on his merits). [Note: the original pic from FDL (and originally posted at Hamsher's Huffington Post blog, have long since been deleted from both the FDL and Huff Post servers; but Slate.com's John Dickerson did manage to cache that image for an article critical of that effort.

Now all that would have passed and gone and had been forgotten as the usual election year inaniety. It would have, too...except that here, from out of the dugout in porn liberal feminist left field, came Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon to pour some high-octane rocket fuel to the debate ....in her attempt to defend Jessica from the evil bad fundamentalist woman-hating neocons.  In her attempt to score some humor and some smack points against Althouse and her boob obsessions, Amanda decided to import the time-honored image of a Muslim woman dressed in a burqa as the symbol of what she thought Althouse and her haters thought Jessica should have been wearing.  To that effort, she enlisted the help of a regular Pandagonite, Auguste, to do some Photoshop magic reconstruction to the original Clinton blogger soiree, the result shown here being attached to a biting rant Amanda posted to her blog:

[Click to see the full image]

That may have silenced the Althouse crowd…but it created a literal firestorm of rage from both radical Arab and Muslim women bloggers and WOC bloggers, who saw not a lighthearted joke, but a gratituous insult and an appropriation and mocking of another culture’s (and another race’s) most precious religious symbol…not to mention the blinding of Clinton’s own role in the destruction of Muslims and Arabs (who in the Middle East mostly consist of people of color) as a means to score brownie points against other White elitist women. 

[A similar discussion had emerged earlier when the Tennessee Guerilla Women, a liberal feminist blogger collective, decided to launch a campaign for reproductive rights in the US  using the burqa as a collective symbol of women's oppression (Operation Red Burqa)....and got strongly rebuked by Black and Brown feminists for abusing and appropriating that Muslim symbol in that way.  (This essay by none other than Bitch | Lab (who is not a WOC, but radical enough to support their struggles) exemplifies the latter position quite well. The latter came as a response to one of my earlier essays from my former blog defending TGW's position.)] 

But back to the here and now….things quickly degenerated into a nasty Pier 6 brawl (wrasslin’ term) when some of Amanda’s defenders in the liberal (and feminist) blogosphere started biting back that the complaints of the WOCs were being “selfish” and amounted to “black nationalism” in their attempts to shame White feminists into submission to “racist tactics”. Two particularly acidic responses came from Lindsey at Majikthisse and a young man named Alon Levy, who even went as far as to break out the old “Islamofascist” card in saying that critics of Amanda were simply soft on the innate evil of Islam amongst women, if not active agents of “Islamofascism”.  There was even a nice rant posted to Alas, a Blog by a “Greenconscionse” which attempted to recruit people into the War on Muslims using radfem rhetoric (an excerpt follows):

We should do more than criticize, we should support this war, expand it into Iran and Saudi Arabia, blow up the patriarchy everywhere possible. Support the immigration of women to the US from any Moslem country without husbands or fathers, forbid the oppression of women by Muslims in this country. Call it slavery and act against it wherever we can. The boys shouted us down in 1972 and they will do it again except for the decent men – shout back. Better yet turn your back on them and reach out to your sisters in Afghanistan and if it ever gets safer to your sisters in Iraq.

[emphasis added]

Meanwhile, in the midst of all this, Amanda decided to make an effort to crawfish her way out of the controversy with an attempted explanation and apology for the burqaized Jessica image; unfortunately, some of the WOCs decided not to quite buy into it, because it didn’t (to them) address the fundamental issue of how liberal White feminists appropriated wrongly the image of a POC for their own selfish motives without even addressing their interests. This set off some of Amanda’s supporters even more, who publically implied that she should have never apologized in the first place and that the critics were just evil reverse racists who were simply attempting to call themselves off as saviors of the entire third world though the usual Mau-Mauing and guilt tripping.

And so, the matter stands up to date…with bruised feelings everywhere.

What’s my personal take on all this??  That’s for Part Deux, soon to follow.  Stay close….

BTW….Go check out Bitch | Lab; she has a whole collection of discussion threads on the entire controversy…far too many to link here…but this post and discussion will do as a start.

The Flight of the Fairy Blogmother: The Washington Post, Maryscott O’Connor, And The “Angry Left”

It’s been a real interesting time looking in at all the foofoo going on over Friday’s Washington Post lead article featuring My Left Wing’s chief founder/Fairy BlogMILF…errrrrrr, Blogmother…Maryscott O’Connor as the prototype of today’s “Angry Left”. Never mind all the mudslinging over the accompanying pic of Miz MSOC scrawling over her PC in her PJ’s and a wine bottle loaded with Diet Coke, plotting what obscenity she will use to match the latest obscenity of the Bush Crime Family and their enablers on the Democratic side; all over the portside anchor of Blogoliciousville there has been charges and countercharges of Maryscott either being the most brilliant and passionate liberal writers in this century or merely a publicity whore who used appearences on John Gibson’s FOX News gabfest shows and the WaPo article to undermine the supposedly more sensible and even tempered critiques of a kinder, quieter liberalism.

(Personally, I lean towards the former…but then again, I happen to have a soft spot for intellegent, pretty women who aren’t afraid to drop a few f-bombs and kick a lot of asses in defense of truth, justice, and the progressive American Way. And you know my fondness for sexy Irish women, too.)

Anyways, Maryscott has just tonight posted at MLW a resoundingly beautiful rebuttal to all the criticism and the praise for her fame; here’s a small sample of what she wrote (with additional emphasis bolded by me):

Everything else, from quotes to descriptions, was factually correct. What Finkel didn’t quite capture was some of the context, and I’m fine with that. My son isn’t scared of me; in fact, we usually recite the Howard Beale speech together. His backing away was more about the presence of a stranger and his unwillingness to be my trained monkey than about being “startled” or afraid. Of course, Finkel couldn’t know that, and I am not upset about it. It bothers me somewhat that some people think I’m a bad mother — but among the hate emails I’ve received, many express the sentiment that I’m sending my child to hell for being a liberal and instilling him with liberal values, so I guess an accurate context of our Howard Beale routine wouldn’t exactly mitigate my image in the eyes of that type of audience, anyway…I am a smoker. I quit every few months, with varied lengths of success. I do not enjoy smoking, I do not like cigarettes and I consider my continued failure to quit and stay quit one of the biggest problems in my life. I do NOT need anyone to tell me how harmful it is, how unattractive or how much longer I will live if I quit now.

I do not drink. I do, however, have a number of silly affectations, one of which is drinking Diet Coke in a wine glass. I drink non-alcoholic beer, and there is .05% alcohol in it — I am aware of this and I choose to drink non-alcoholic beer AND non-alcoholic wine anyway. IF some people consider this inappropriate choice for a recovered alcoholic, it is their right to believe so. It is also their right to mention it. Once having received my validation of their opinion and heard my decision to disagree, it is then incumbent on them to shut the fuck up about it. The same should be assumed about the smoking thing.

I do not consider, nor have I ever promoted myself as the Spokesperson for the Angry Left. The fact that I have been designated or implied as such by two members of the corporate media is beyond my control; I deny such a claim, I repeat that I speak only for myself, and that is the best I can do. To those who would advise me that I should eschew the media altogether, I can only reply that it is an absurd suggestion. I blog because I want to be heard; when offered the opportunity to be heard by increasingly large numbers, I accept it. If anyone is offended by the very idea of my speaking my opinions into a larger megaphone than theirs, they are free to say so, but it is not for them to tell me what I may and may not do. To suggest, as someone actually did, that I ought to have asked permission of the left blogosphere to go on television and be profiled in a newspaper as a liberal blogger, is the height of surreal arrogance.

I chose to allow a reporter into my home to observe and listen to me, and to report what he heard and saw in a major newspaper. I was under no illusion that I might be portrayed flatteringly or maliciously. I believed he would report the truth, and that, he did. Whether anyone feels it was flattering or malicious is irrelevant; we see what we choose to see, more often than not, and objectivity is an illusive and often impossible goal. Every word of the story was factual and true and real. If that offends people, so be it. If it encourages people, so be it.

Now, personally, I do think that the WaPo did manage to graft what could have been a decent piece on progressive blogging into a basic hit piece villifying the “Angry Left” blogosphere as beyond the pale…but that is merely par for the course for them and their basic Center-Right politics. But I do kinda wish that they would spend some time with a few of the countervailing blogs on the starboard side….you know, blogs like RedState.org, FrontPage.com, Human Events, Mistress Malkin, and a few other of the “conservative blogs” and compare their anger to that of MSOC. Or, if they really want to take a chance, pay a visit to a site like Free Republic or Conservative Underground or even Little Green Footballs…compared to them, Maryscott’s a freakin’ Zen master of restraint.

Oh, but I forgot…that wouldn’t be so fair to the Right blogosphere, since the Post has already pissed them off too much by firing that blogger plagarist Ben Domenech who was actually on the WaPo payroll as a blogger after the not-angry consevatives complained about the “liberal” bias of the Post….right after they ran that editorial dismissing Dubya’s admission of involvement in the CIA Plame leaks as
just fine with them.

Gee…perhaps that might have more than a little bit to do with all the “anger” of the Left….well, that, and the looting, and the spying, and fiscal mismanagement, and the war, and the torture, and the racist greedheads exploiting poor people for profit, and the abandonment of and basic values….nah, the Left’s just being hysterical, that’s all.

All this is is just another suck up to power and privilege…the Right has all of it, and the Left has none. Guess who’s going to get the short end of the scapegoat stick, as always???

Brava one more time, Maryscott, for poking them with the stick of truth. A few more principled liberals like her, and I might have still remained a Democrat. Might.

And BTW…I was only kidding about the MILF thing.

More of the fallout on MSOC and her WaPo article can be found at these fine places:

Shakespere’s Sister
Pandagon
The News Blog

Update: Get a load of Jesus’ General’s nice smackdown of the WaPo; it is an instant classic.