April 29, 2008
Smiles and Slurs (Ryan J. Davis)
Disturbingly, most of my gay friends seem fine with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's (D-N.Y.) campaign using racism to win votes. What will they think now that she's stood next to North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley (D) while he used a gay slur, basically calling Obama a "pansy"?
Now, I know from spending many recesses in middle school being called a pansy that it's just a subtle way of saying “faggot.” Clinton stood by while Easley made that comment, smiling away. Speaking to a prominent gay journalist friend of mine this morning, he expressed his frustration with her campaign. "Hillary doesn't care about the gays. It's that simple. We're a political tool, like everything else in that family's orbit."
Clinton owes the gay community, which she has shamefully used as an ATM during her campaign, an apology for gay-baiting. We're waiting, Hillary.
Permalink TrackBack
Email This Post
Share this post
What's This 13 Comments
»
The Hill welcomes comment from anyone and will almost always post it whether it is favorable or critical, as long as it is substantive and advances debate.
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
Wow, since I've never spent a single recess in middle school in this country I never realized this meaning of "pansy". How about if the gay community just reciprocates and starts calling Hillary "pantsy" for her favorite style of clothes?
Comment by Igor R. — April 29, 2008 @ 4:22 pm
That's a real stretch.
Comment by Robert Rosencrans — April 29, 2008 @ 5:04 pm
Ryan, what did you want Hillary to say to Easley? "Wait a minute, Obama is not a fagot, Barney Frank is a faggot, and John Edwards just looks like a faggot?" So what if Hillary does not care about gays? She probably cares about gays as much as FDR or JFK cared. If we could win war on terror, recover our economy, stop illegal immigration and obtain energy independence without a gay-friendly President, I could not care less. Just relax your muscles and enjoy this exciting primary fight.
Comment by Misha F — April 29, 2008 @ 8:46 pm
He just joined Hillary's bandwagon. Imagine what the gays in North Carolina think. The DNC has had it with Hillary and I would not be surprised if they have already written her off, they just want the voters to hurry up an do it. I get the feeling we are going to see a lot more trash on Hillary. Obama has the backing of some pretty powerful supers that just haven't come out yet. But the word is they will soon.
Comment by Yvonne — April 30, 2008 @ 9:03 am
And "gays" don't use their sexual orientation as a political tool? Come on… Everybody in the current political arena is it it for themselves. To think anything else is stupidity…
Comment by Rich — April 30, 2008 @ 9:23 am
pansy is a slur?
Yvonne…I also keep hearing that Obama may have at least 40-50 more supers in the bag.
Look to see how Clinton conducts herself in the next few days, that will be a telling sign
Comment by Theard — April 30, 2008 @ 11:02 am
ok Ryan- this is pushing it. he said Clinton makes rocky balboa look like a pansy. it had nothing to do with obama at all. and this is disputable terminology. not an out and out gay slur- i mean really hes a fictional character, why are you hung up on this one? I think supporting and standing up for the gay community is important. this is not that.
Comment by Ian — April 30, 2008 @ 11:33 am
That’s a real stretch.
by Robert Rosencrans
the comment or the pantsuit?
Comment by james d granata — April 30, 2008 @ 3:33 pm
james, let's leave this topic behind.
Comment by Igor R. — April 30, 2008 @ 4:52 pm
Igor, my sentiments exactly.
Comment by james d granata — April 30, 2008 @ 6:38 pm
Yup, there is much bigger fish to fry:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article3850185.ece#cid=OTC-RSS&attr=797093
Comment by Igor R. — April 30, 2008 @ 8:48 pm
There's bigger fish to fry:
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D90C82S80&show_article=1&catnum=0
Comment by Igor R. — April 30, 2008 @ 9:42 pm
Voters need to see this in conjunction with the Pansy issue:
Flatbed Hillary
By Quin Hillyer
Published 5/1/2008 12:08:24 AM
One of the more bizarre developments of this campaign season has been to see Hillary Clinton, of all people, turned into an electoral favorite of blue-collar white voters. The reality is that very few people in politics have more contempt for white workers than does this product of Park Ridge, Wellesley, the Senate Watergate Committee, and the super powered Rose Law Firm.
This is the woman who, according to three, independent, respected, credible witnesses, at least one of them a strong Clinton supporter, responded to Southern whites workers voting Republican in 1994 by telling her husband: "Screw 'em. You don't owe them a thing, Bill. They're doing nothing for you; you don't have to do anything for them."
This is the woman who last year insulted the whole state of Mississippi in an interview with Iowa's famous columnist David Yepsen, noting the lack of elected women in both states: "How can Iowa be ranked with Mississippi?" she asked. "That's not what I see. That's not the quality. That's not the communitarianism, that's not the openness I see in Iowa."
This is the woman whose mentor and philosophical guiding light, Saul Alinsky, wrote that the white working classes were always "[s]eeking some meaning in life, [so] they turn to an extreme chauvinism and become defenders of the 'American' faith. Now they even develop rationalizations for a life of futility and frustration."
This is the woman who tried to foist a massively bureaucratic health care plan onto the American people in 1993 and 1994, but when told that her plan would be devastating to the small mom-and-pop shops that provide most jobs in America, dismissed those concerns with these words: "I can't be responsible for every undercapitalized entrepreneur in America."
(This was the same government-knows-best health plan of which Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan said that "anyone who thinks [it] can work in the real world as presently written isn't living in it.")
IN TERMS OF POLICIES, her actions and positions have been directly opposed to the interests of blue-collar workers who pay taxes. Take welfare reform, for instance. Perhaps the single most successful programmatic reform in the past 30 years, it saved taxpayers tens of billions of dollars, gave people incentives to find jobs, and quite arguably played a big role in a decade of improving statistics in areas ranging from drops in crime to drops in the teen birth rate and the divorce rate. (The old welfare system encouraged divorce by making it in many cases more lucrative to be a single mom.)
Yet her husband Bill not only vetoed welfare reform twice, but did so in accord with Hillary's fierce advice against reform. (He signed it at the third opportunity only to take the issue off the table in his 1996 re-election campaign.)
This is also the woman who has spent an entire career supporting legal positions (and judges) that are contrary to the deeply held views of most white workers. Strong support for racial preferences? Check. Support for partial birth abortion? Check. Judges who rule against basic Christmas displays in the public square? Check. Letting the government take working class homes in order to use the land for big corporate developments? Yes again.
Her Whitewater-related shenanigans left taxpayers on the hook for tens of millions of dollars, while old folks expecting retirement housing were left high and dry. Her treatment of White House career employees was notoriously nasty. Her profiteering in the cattle-futures market, and her money-grubbing in cases too numerous to mention, gave evidence of a sense of public entitlement completely at odds with the values and the daily concerns of laborers. And her opposition even to the middle-class-heavy Bush tax cuts of 2001, if it had carried the day, would have cost most workers well over $10,000 in the seven years since.
Yet now Hillary Clinton is depending on white, working-class voters to power her attempted primary-season comeback. They ought to remember that she and her husband Bill once fancied themselves such racial conciliators that Bill welcomed the sobriquet of being "the first black president." Yet in this campaign season we have seen just how quickly the Clintons have fanned racial animus in an attempt to cause a white backlash against Barack Obama.
Lesson: The Clintons are for the Clintons, and only for the Clintons. They will abandon any voter group the moment such abandonment can gain them an advantage. The Hillary Clinton who is suddenly the champion of white laborers today can just as easily be saying "screw 'em" again tomorrow.
Their votes for her are votes against their own interests and values.
Comment by Docb — May 1, 2008 @ 12:52 pm