Free Republic
Browse · Search
General/Chat
Topics · Post Article

Skip to comments.

Gloria Steinem Blames El Rushbo for Feminism's Failure
Rush Limbaugh.com ^ | October 23, 2015 | Rush Limbaugh

Posted on 10/23/2015 12:59:00 PM PDT by Kaslin

RUSH: Okay, folks, change of direction. Time to go back to the Grooveyard of Forgotten Favorites. Dadelut dadelut dadelut dadelut. I haven't done one of these in a while, but we're gonna do it now. We have a feminist update with the Forester Sisters on the theme song. Vocal portrayal...

(playing of update theme)

RUSH: Actual footage from a pro-choice rally back in the mid-1990s. We're fierce, we're feminists, and we're in your face. It's a pro-choice rally. The Forester Sisters there with the vocal portrayal of just one of many feminist update themes. We had You Don't Own Me, by Lesley Gore. We had Born a Woman, by Sandy Posey. Find Born a Woman. That would be great. Find Born a Woman, by Sandy Posey. I know we've got it in the Prophet System because I downloaded it. Just give me a quick flash when you have found Born a Woman, by Sandy Posey.

This is one of the first tunes I ever played as a struggling young disc jockey star of the future back in 1966. When I was 15 I got my first chance, it was called running the board, at a local radio station in Cape Girardeau. I'm vamping here. Have you found Born a Woman, by Sandy Posey? It's not in your Prophet System? You're kidding. Well, it has to be in your Prophet System 'cause if it's in mine, I got it from yours. Oh, what a bummer. I know it's there; we've used it. We have played it. It was one of a rotating series of feminist themes. Well, anyway, we will continue our exhaustive search. It's in the Grooveyard of Forgotten Favorites. That's why we call it that.

So here I am today, I get up at the usual time, and I go through the usual morning preparation. I leave the house, head on in here to work, sit down, get a cup of coffee, cigar, everything ready to go, and I fire up the computer. The last time I looked at the computer was probably 1:30 in the morning. So I've done a lot of show prep up 'til then. I fire it up. One of the first things I went to today was the Drudge page, and I see a headline that Gloria Steinem is blaming me. "Steinem Blames Limbaugh for Ruining the Word 'Feminism.'" I stared at that, and I stared at that. I didn't click on it yet. I stared at it. And finally I said, "Yes!" Then I clicked on the link, and it's to CBS This Morning.

Apparently Gloria Steinem, former Playboy playmate -- you wonder why they stopped publishing the magazine pictures? Gloria Steinem was on CBS This Morning promoting -- I guess she's got a new book out on feminism. And during the Q&A with Norah O'Donnell, Norah O'Donnell said, "You know, there's still some real issues at stake, Ms. Steinem. I want to start with this. Meryl Streep, who stars in the movie Suffragette as Emmeline Pankhurst, she says, Meryl Streep says that she doesn't even consider herself a feminist. She says she considers herself a humanist. Why is it the feminist label, do you think, still has that negative stigma to it?"

Gloria Steinem Blames Rush Limbaugh for Ruining ‘Feminism’

STEINEM: The word "feminism" has been turned into a bad word by Rush Limbaugh who talks about feminazis every day, and so -- but if people just go to the dictionary and discover that it means a person, male or female, who believes in the full equality of women and men, then they do subscribe to it and it is a majority now, which it didn't used to be.

RUSH: Right. So, once again, your host, the harmless, lovable, little fuzzball, Rush Limbaugh, now blamed for destroying a word, ruining a word, ruining the definition of a word, feminism. But her definition is not even close to the way the feminazis use the entire feminist movement. It was based in leftist ideology. It was based on men are predators and men are evil and men are men. It was designed to create a war between and against men and women. All I did was expose it. That word "feminazi," they never gotten over because that word actually better explained what they were all about. It rang so true. And we've found the tune, folks. Here we go, Sandy Posey, daughter of Jim Posey. This is one of our very first feminist themes, and this irritated 'em like you can't believe.

(playing of song)

RUSH: That's "hurt," not "heard."

(Continued playing of song)

RUSH: Sandy Posey, 1968, 7, 6, something like that.

(continued playing of song)

RUSH: No, it's a real song.

(continued playing of song)

RUSH: No price too great to pay. Sandy Posey. It's in 1966. That was one of the early songs in the feminist update rotation.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: The modern era, the modern incarnation of feminism can be traced back to the late 1960s and really began to intensify in the early seventies, the modern incarnation. A number of different eras of feminism, like the suffrage era. But this era that started in the late sixties and early seventies was one rooted in total anger and remains rooted in total anger. And it was anger primarily at certain other women. Feminism, supposedly Gloria Steinem says, equality for all. Ask Paula Jones about that. Ask any of the women abused by Bill Clinton, where was the NOW gang?

The NOW gang, they're supposedly protecting women against rape and male abuse and behavior like this, and here you have one of the serial female abusers in Bill Clinton, and the NOW gang, the NAGs, my affectionate name for the National Association of Gals, everywhere they could, every chance they had, defended Bill Clinton. If you happened to be a conservative woman, you were not, for all intents and purposes, of any interest to the National Organization for Women. They were a strictly left-wing bunch.

In 1980, I wrote a local newspaper column in Sacramento, California. One day I had writer's block. This is a weekly column and I had writers block. I just couldn't get started on a piece. So I started jotting down one-sentence thoughts and philosophy. And when I got to 30 of them I said, you know what, I'm pretty close to a column here. So I kept going 'til I got 750 words, which is about 35 truths, and that's how the 35 Undeniable Truths of Life were born. And number 24 established me as one of America's scholarly thinkers at the moment it was first heard.

"Feminism was established, in part, to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream."

That was so right on and so true that the reaction to it from the feminists was volcanic. They dropped and lost any sense of humor. They were nothing but a bunch of libs is all it was. It's another manufactured special interest group of liberalism designed to distract people into thinking it was about equality and civil rights for a maligned victim group, women, when in fact all it was was one of the many constituents of the Democrat Party, one of the many disparate groups of the leftist coalition that makes up the Democrat Party.

And they all pushed the same thing: Expansive government, the loss of individual liberty and freedom via the expansive of government, use of government to enforce behavior on people, in this case the feminists thought needed to be punished, which happened to be men. And conservative women. So that's how it all began, and that's why Gloria Steinem says I have destroyed the word "feminism."


TOPICS: History; Society
KEYWORDS: democratswaronwomen; feminazi; feminaziism; feminazis; feminazism; feminism; feminists; feminzis; femocrats; gloriasteinem; hypocrites; madeleinealbright; margaretsanger; marxism; rush; rushlimbaugh; sexists; therealwaronwomen; usefulidiots; waronsarahpalin; waronwomenmeme
Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-2021-4041-60 next last
To: Kaslin

Ah, The Victory Lap.

How sweet it is!


21 posted on 10/23/2015 1:14:29 PM PDT by FourPeas ("Maladjusted and wigging out is no way to go through life, son." -hg)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Fido969

Gloria Steinem, who produced Ms. Magazine, and ran it into the ground, supported only by her rich boyfriend plowing his own money into the thing.

What a joke this hag is.


I’d bet the boyfriend never got any “return” on his money, either.


22 posted on 10/23/2015 1:14:29 PM PDT by laplata ( Liberals/Progressives have diseased minds.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 4 | View Replies]

To: Kaslin
Hoew many feminists does it take to change a light bulb?
THAT'S NOT FUNNY!!
No, really, how many feminists does ot take to change a light bulb?
Four. One to change the bulb,
one to write a book on the exploitation of the light socket,
one to secretly wish she WAS the light socket,
and one to secretly wish she was the light bulb.
23 posted on 10/23/2015 1:14:37 PM PDT by Impala64ssa (You call me an islamophobe like it's a bad thing.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Graybeard58

“Ms. Steinem was quite the looker, back in the day.”

You can’t hide an ugly soul at any age.


24 posted on 10/23/2015 1:16:01 PM PDT by Autonomous User (During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 18 | View Replies]

To: Kaslin

Feminists, like all liberals want up every day angry and looking for something to be offended about. It must me such a miserable life, which explains why they almost always look years older then they are.


25 posted on 10/23/2015 1:18:54 PM PDT by matt04
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Kaslin
Without reading the article, I often wonder what makes some women so angry at men. They completely ignore how my generation adored them and gave them equal opportunity, as they disparaged housewives.

This b*tch is still complaining? What makes liberals so mean and dissatisfied with life that they continually have to spew their hatred? If Stienhumphead had any integrity, she would have long ago aimed her animus at the atrocities that occur every day in the muslim world.

No, they still want to complain about white men. Oh right, the Republicans have a "war against women". Pfft. I and my wife hate feminists! She is proud to be a woman and proud that I am a man. We live on equal terms as a team. I have and always will see her as my equal, if not more. Most couples of the Boomer generation believe the same. Frig off, Stainburger.

26 posted on 10/23/2015 1:21:14 PM PDT by A Navy Vet (An Oath is Forever)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Trapped Behind Enemy Lines

Yep, another badge of honor for Rush.


27 posted on 10/23/2015 1:24:08 PM PDT by Parley Baer
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 2 | View Replies]

To: Impala64ssa
Damn straight. But IMO, if they never showed their true colors before, it's like Rush said, they really gave the game away when they ignored the women that Bill Clinton abused and harrassed. These same women want men fired from their jobs for touching a woman's arm, but they ignore Islamic child rape and FGM. They are all for things like the woman who groped some male country singer at one of his shows, but get pizzed if they wear a shirt that has their tatas hanging out and then blame the guy because he has to make a concerted effort to look them in the eye. Heck, I'm a woman, and not a lezzie, and if a woman wears a shirt that has all her assetts hanging out, I find it distracting, because normal people don't expect to see other people in normal everyday settings having their boobs hanging out for all the world to see. When men do it, it's called flashing and it's a crime (unless they're sodomites, then it's called "pride", ugh).
28 posted on 10/23/2015 1:24:58 PM PDT by mrsmel (I won't be reconstructed and I do not give a damn.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 17 | View Replies]

To: Kaslin

The rudeness, the loudness, the overall idiocy and smallness of the feminist movement is a turn off for normal men and women. Ms. Steinem’s cause has ruined many a life.


29 posted on 10/23/2015 1:27:09 PM PDT by yoe (Few things are more worthless than an unloaded shot gun)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Impala64ssa

How many lesbians does it take to change a light bulb?

At least three.

One to change the bulb, and the rest to murmur among themselves how “it’s so much better than a man.”


30 posted on 10/23/2015 1:29:11 PM PDT by Disambiguator (Cis-American)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 23 | View Replies]

To: mrsmel
I hear you loud and clear. When it comes to CONSENTING ADULTS and sexuality, I could care less who sleeps with who, but there is a time and place for those things.
31 posted on 10/23/2015 1:30:47 PM PDT by Impala64ssa (You call me an islamophobe like it's a bad thing.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 28 | View Replies]

To: Impala64ssa

I could care less about the consenting adults if they’d been telling the truth when thy said “get government out of our bedrooms” when what they really wanted was “force everyone to celebrate and support us”, but I’ll admit that if I was Queen Of The World, sodomy would still be illegal.


32 posted on 10/23/2015 1:33:47 PM PDT by mrsmel (I won't be reconstructed and I do not give a damn.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 31 | View Replies]

To: Kaslin

She was a columnist for New York magazine and a founder of Ms. magazine (slut magazine). In 1969, she published an article, “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation,” which brought her to national fame as a feminist leader.

In 2005, Steinem, Jane Fonda, and Robin Morgan co-founded the Women’s Media Center, an organization that works “to make women visible and powerful in the media.”

Steinem currently travels internationally as an organizer and lecturer and is a media spokeswoman on issues of equality. She is also working on a book about her work as a feminist organizer, to be titled Road to the Heart: America As if Everyone Mattered.

******

Steinem interpreted her mother’s inability to hold on to a job as evidence of general hostility towards working women. She also interpreted the general apathy of doctors towards her mother as emerging from a similar anti-woman animus. Years later, Steinem described her mother’s experiences as having been pivotal to her understanding of social injustices. These perspectives convinced Steinem that women lacked social and political equality.

Her paternal grandmother, Pauline Perlmutter Steinem, was chairwoman of the educational committee of the National Woman Suffrage Association, a delegate to the 1908 International Council of Women.

In the late 1950s, Steinem spent two years in India as a Chester Bowles Asian Fellow.[22] After returning to the U.S., she served as director of the Independent Research Service, an organization funded in secret by a donor that turned out to be the CIA.

Steinem was employed as a Playboy Bunny at the New York Playboy Club. The article, published in 1963 as “A Bunny’s Tale”, featured a photo of Steinem in Bunny uniform and detailed how women were treated at those clubs. Steinem has maintained that she is proud of the work she did publicizing the exploitative working conditions of the bunnies and especially the sexual demands made of them, which skirted the edge of the law. However, for a brief period after the article was published, Steinem was unable to land other assignments; in her words, this was “because I had now become a Bunny – and it didn’t matter why.” Steinem eventually landed a job at Felker’s newly founded New York magazine in 1968.

In 1969, she covered an abortion speak-out for New York Magazine, which was held in a church basement in Greenwich, New York. Steinem had had an abortion herself in London at the age of 22. She felt what she called a “big click” at the speak-out, and later said she didn’t “begin my life as an active feminist” until that day. As she recalled, “It [abortion] is supposed to make us a bad person. But I must say, I never felt that. I used to sit and try and figure out how old the child would be, trying to make myself feel guilty. But I never could! I think the person who said: ‘Honey, if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament’ was right. Speaking for myself, I knew it was the first time I had taken responsibility for my own life. I wasn’t going to let things happen to me. I was going to direct my life, and therefore it felt positive. But still, I didn’t tell anyone. Because I knew that out there it wasn’t [positive].” She also said, “In later years, if I’m remembered at all it will be for inventing a phrase like ‘reproductive freedom’ ... as a phrase it includes the freedom to have children or not to. So it makes it possible for us to make a coalition.

In 1959, Steinem led a group of activists in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to organise the Independent Service for Information on the Vienna festival, to advocate for American participation in the World Youth Festival, a Soviet-sponsored youth event.

In 1968, Steinem signed the “War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.

On July 10, 1971, Steinem was one of over 300 women who founded the National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC), including such notables as Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan, Shirley Chisholm, and Myrlie Evers-Williams.

During the Clarence Thomas sexual harassment scandal in 1991, Steinem voiced strong support for Anita Hill and suggested that one day Hill herself would sit on the Supreme Court.

In the run-up to the 2004 election, Steinem voiced fierce criticism of the Bush administration, asserting, “There has never been an administration that has been more hostile to women’s equality, to reproductive freedom as a fundamental human right, and has acted on that hostility,” adding, “If he is elected in 2004, abortion will be criminalized in this country.” At a Planned Parenthood event in Boston, Steinem declared Bush “a danger to health and safety,” citing his antagonism to the Clean Water Act, reproductive freedom, sex education, and AIDS relief.

Steinem was an active participant in the 2008 presidential campaign, and praised both the Democratic front-runners, commenting,

Both Senators Clinton and Obama are civil rights advocates, feminists, environmentalists, and critics of the war in Iraq ... Both have resisted pandering to the right, something that sets them apart from any Republican candidate, including John McCain. Both have Washington and foreign policy experience; George W. Bush did not when he first ran for president.

Nevertheless, Steinem endorsed Senator Hillary Clinton, citing her broader experience, and saying that the nation was in such bad shape it might require two terms of Clinton and two of Obama to fix it.

Following McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate, Steinem penned an op-ed in which she labeled Palin an “unqualified woman” who “opposes everything most other women want and need,” described her nomination speech as “divisive and deceptive”, called for a more inclusive Republican Party, and concluded that Palin resembled “Phyllis Schlafly, only younger.”

On September 3, 2000, at age 66, Steinem married David Bale, father of actor Christian Bale. The wedding was performed at the home of her friend Wilma Mankiller, the first female Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation.[91] Steinem and Bale were married for only three years before he died of brain lymphoma on December 30, 2003, at age 62.

Previously, she had had a four-year relationship with the publisher Mortimer Zuckerman.


33 posted on 10/23/2015 1:35:03 PM PDT by kcvl
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Impala64ssa

I meant “couldn’t care less”. I can’t believe I did that.


34 posted on 10/23/2015 1:36:15 PM PDT by mrsmel (I won't be reconstructed and I do not give a damn.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 31 | View Replies]

To: Kaslin

By GLORIA STEINEMSEPT. 25, 2010

If all the sexual allegations now swirling around the White House turn out to be true, President Clinton may be a candidate for sex addiction therapy. But feminists will still have been right to resist pressure by the right wing and the news media to call for his resignation or impeachment. The pressure came from another case of the double standard.

there was and is a difference between the accusations against Mr. Clinton and those against Bob Packwood and Clarence Thomas. Commentators might stop puzzling over the president’s favorable poll ratings, especially among women, if they understood the common-sense guideline to sexual behavior that came out of the women’s movement 30 years ago: no means no; yes means yes.

It’s the basis of sexual harassment law. It also explains why the news media’s obsession with sex qua sex is offensive to some, titillating to many and beside the point to almost everybody. Like most feminists, most Americans become concerned about sexual behavior when someone’s will has been violated; that is, when “no” hasn’t been accepted as an answer.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/26/opinion/eq-steinem.html?_r=0


35 posted on 10/23/2015 1:37:35 PM PDT by kcvl
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Kaslin
Not sure if it was the day Limbaugh made the statement that feminism existed so that ugly women could get dates but I do remember the first show of his that I listened to in which he thoroughly ridiculed feminists, said how they're ruining society for male & female relationships and a whole lot more.

IIRC, that was back in 1992 and it was after I'd seen him on the Phil Donohue show (anyone remember that?!) I was laid up recovering from back surgery when I saw Rush on Donohue's show and found myself nodding in agreement and laughing at Rush's statements and Donohue's reactions.

Limbaugh hooked me that day. I don't get to listen in very much anymore (kind of hard to when you work in downtown Chicago and AM radio signals don't penetrate the concrete and steel canyons very well.)

36 posted on 10/23/2015 1:37:50 PM PDT by usconservative (When The Ballot Box No Longer Counts, The Ammunition Box Does. (What's In Your Ammo Box?))
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Opinionated Blowhard

37 posted on 10/23/2015 1:39:43 PM PDT by usconservative (When The Ballot Box No Longer Counts, The Ammunition Box Does. (What's In Your Ammo Box?))
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 6 | View Replies]

To: Kaslin

Feminist and Democratic strategist Susan Estrich wrote, “Lewinsky at least appears to have flirted her way to a job at Revlon and, when that disappeared, a $2 million modeling offer and the status of the most-sought after woman in the world. Not bad, some might say, for someone who can’t type.”

NOW’s president, Patricia Ireland, did issue a statement saying, “We want to state clearly our belief that it would be a misuse of power for any public official to have a sexual relationship with an employee or intern.” But that was after broad criticism of the group’s initial silence on the matter. Gloria Steinem wrote an op-ed in the New York Times that awkwardly tried to thread the needle, saying, “The power imbalance between them increased the index of suspicion, but there is no evidence to suggest that Ms. Lewinsky’s will was violated; quite the contrary.”

If Kathleen Willey, who had accused Clinton of sexual assault, was telling the truth about his behavior towards her, Steinem wrote, “[Willey] pushed him away, she said, and it never happened again. In other words, President Clinton took ‘no’ for an answer.” That is a depressingly low bar for a man who both holds disproportionate power and who was supposed to be on feminists’ sides.

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/monica-lewinsky-betrayal

Of Bill Clinton, she writes, “Any ‘abuse’ came in the aftermath, when I was made a scapegoat to protect his powerful position.”

At the time, White House staffers were anonymously among the chief Lewinsky slut-shamers.


38 posted on 10/23/2015 1:42:14 PM PDT by kcvl
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Kaslin
Gloria Steinem Blames El Rushbo for Feminism's Failure

Since when has Feminism failed?

Women are running/ruining all American culture.

39 posted on 10/23/2015 1:45:23 PM PDT by donna (Dr. Ben Carson is a Seventh Day Adventist, not a Christian!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Kaslin

President Clinton’s sordid entanglements with Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, and now Monica Lewinsky have drawn barely a squeak of protest from the powerful writers, lawyers, activists, politicians, and academics who call themselves feminists. As they struggle with fresh allegations from Kathleen Willey, the author reveals some ugly truths about the women’s movement and the commander in chief.

by Marjorie Williams,

The man in question has been sued for sexual harassment over an episode that allegedly included dropping his trousers to waggle his erect penis at a woman who held a $6.35-an-hour clerical job in the state government over which he presided. Another woman has charged that when she asked him for a job he invited her into his private office, fondled her breasts, and placed her hand on his crotch. A third woman confided to friends that when she was a 21-year-old intern she began an affair with the man—much older, married, and the head of the organization whose lowliest employee she was. Actually, it was less an affair than a service contract, in which she allegedly dashed into his office, when summoned, to perform oral sex on him. After their liaison was revealed, he denied everything, leaving her to be portrayed as a tramp and a liar. Or, in his own words, “that woman.”

Let us not even mention the former lover who was steered to a state job; or the law-enforcement officers who say the man used them to solicit sexual partners for him; or his routine use of staff members, lawyers, and private investigators to tar the reputation of any woman who tries to call him to account for his actions.

With very few exceptions, feminists were either silent or dismissive this time. “If anything, it sounds like she put the moves on him,” said Susan Faludi, author of Backlash. Betty Friedan weighed in, but only to huff her outrage that Clinton’s “enemies are attempting to bring him down through allegations about some dalliance with an intern…. Whether it’s a fantasy, a set-up or true, I simply don’t care.”

It was not until former White House volunteer Kathleen Willey appeared on 60 Minutes in mid-March to make public the allegation she had formerly made in a deposition—that Clinton had manhandled her during a private meeting in which she sought a paying job—that some feminists began to make reluctant noises of dismay. The National Organization for Women (NOW), which until then had found itself “unable to comment responsibly,” averred that “Kathleen Willey’s sworn testimony moves the question from whether the president is a ‘womanizer’ to whether he is a sexual predator.”

But NOW’s change of heart was by no means typical of feminist activists. Many others hung tough. Anita Perez Ferguson, president of the National Women’s Political Caucus—the premier group promoting female participation in American politics—described Willey’s charges as “quantity rather than quality, in terms of my feelings.” She continued, “There’s no question that it’s disturbing…. But to come to any judgment now is definitely not something that I think is timely.”

See no evil … “It will be a great pity if the Democratic Party is damaged by this,” the feminist writer Anne Roiphe told me. “That’s been my response from the very beginning—I just wanted to close my eyes, and wished it would go away.”

Hear no evil … “We do not know what happened in the Lewinsky case,” said Kathy Rodgers, executive director of the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund. “The only thing that is clear is that the facts are not clear.”

Speak no evil … “We’re trying to think of the bigger picture, think about what’s best for women,” said Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation.

Feminists are quick to say that any charges of hypocrisy lodged against them are the work of the anti-Clinton right. “It’s a twofer for them,” says Smeal. “If they can get the president, great. And if they can get feminism, even greater.”

While most of the Washington-based women’s organizations that lobby and promote women’s participation in electoral politics maintain a veneer of bipartisanship, a web of relationships links them to the Clinton administration. White House Communications director Ann Lewis, who has been one of Clinton’s fiercest defenders on television, was once the chair of the Democratic Task Force of the National Women’s Political Caucus. Anita Perez Ferguson, who is now president of the caucus, formerly worked in the Clinton administration, as a White House liaison for the Transportation Department, and at the Democratic National Committee.

And then there’s friendship: Hillary Rodham Clinton’s friendships, in particular, may have neutralized some of the women who might otherwise be criticizing Clinton. When I called Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky, who chairs the (theoretically bipartisan) Women’s Campaign Fund, her assistant cheerfully told me, “I know that Marjorie has not made any comments about recent”—here he stopped and groped for a word—”events? Just because she is friends with Hillary.” When women activists were charging up the hill to oppose the nominations of Thomas and other conservative Reagan-Bush appointees, one of their comrades-in-arms was Melanne Verveer, then the chief lobbyist for the liberal organization People for the American Way, now the First Lady’s chief of staff.

It was the most embarrassing thing I had read in a long time. But then I opened the next week’s New Yorker, which contained a swooning “Fax from Washington” written by Tina Brown herself, describing the February 5 White House dinner for British prime minister Tony Blair. The subtext was that the Clinton scandal had marvelously improved the president’s aura: it made him seem so … hot. “Now see your President, tall and absurdly debonair, as he dances with a radiant blonde, his wife…. Amid the clichés about his charm, his glamour is undersung…. Forget the dog-in-the-manger, down-in-the-mouth neo-puritanism of the op-ed tumbrel drivers, and see him instead as his guests do: a man in a dinner jacket with more heat than any star in the room.”

http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/1998/05/williams199805


40 posted on 10/23/2015 1:50:00 PM PDT by kcvl
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]


Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-2021-4041-60 next last

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Free Republic
Browse · Search
General/Chat
Topics · Post Article

FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson