I've seen a lot of people linking to this exhaustive recounting of Chris Matthews's unhealthy fixation on Hillary Clinton, which leads off with a great quote from this firedoglake post:
I do not care which person is your candidate. I don't care what you think of Hillary Clinton as a potential president. What is being done in the press is akin to a pack of rabid 7th graders trying to haze the nerdy girl in school simply because they can. It has nothing to do with her qualifications -- it has to do with gender, and these lemming pundits think that it's perfectly acceptable because everyone is doing it, including women like Andrea Mitchell and Anne Kornblut.
The Matthews stuff in particular is pretty damning, but they're right that there's a general antipathy toward both Clintons that really does seem to operate on a junior-high-clique sort of level. It takes some particularly vile turns when directed at Hillary. It's reprehensible, and if this sort of nonsense were to end up costing her the Democratic nomination, that would suck.
But here's the thing: while this junior-high hazing would be a shitty reason to vote against Hillary, it's also a shitty reason to vote for her.
It's really tempting, of course, to vote for her just to stick it to the "cool kids" of the media establishment. It would just about serve them right to have their efforts to smear her backfire and vault her into the presidency.
But there are perfectly sensible reasons to not like her, that have nothing to do with sexism or media chicanery. You can find them extensively documents by people like Matthew Yglesias and the Mark Kleiman and friends. She's got some dodgy views on executive power and whatever we're calling our Middle East misadventures this week. She's not my favorite of the Democratic candidates, that's for sure, though she's worlds better than any of the lunatics and imbeciles the GOP is throwing up.
So it's really kind of a no-win situation. If you vote against her because of the concerted effort to make her look bad on trivial grounds, you're acceding to the influence of people with the ethics and morals of middle-school girls. But if you vote for her just to spite them, you're still giving them undue influence over your decision-making processes.
And, of course, no matter what people end up doing, the end result will be interpreted in a way that confirms the power of said middle-school girls.
And they wonder why people get disgusted with the whole process.
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"though she's worlds better than any of the lunatics and imbeciles the GOP is throwing up."
It strikes me that the term "throwing up" is particularly apt there.
Her views on the military use are less surprising if you remember that she was once a Goldwater Girl from an upper middle class (and very Republican) suburb of Chicago. In some respects, she has more in common with George Romney than Mitt does. Progressive on social issues, but not an isolationist.
What Eric said--that was an apt choice of words.
Why are you so down on her? She's clearly the best Republican candidate in the field!
I was born in '79, so effectively there has been a Bush or a Clinton in the White House my entire life. I cannot vote for another 4 or 8 years of the this.
What Dizzlski said. I mean, I was born 11 years before that, but still.
My real beef with Hillary Clinton is that she came down too hard on CJ.
Some people may hate Hilary, and being a woman may have something to do with it.
I didn't care either way, but recent developments - her tricky attempts to imply that Obama is a muslim and a drug dealer to boot, are just despicable. The fact that Bill Clinton would argue that Obama has not always been against the war, while it was Bill Clinton who was rewriting the history. Add to that "fairy tale", "false hopes", MLK and LBJ remarks, implications about Obama's abortion "present" votes, etc. - this type of "fuzzying of the facts" by manipulating the press and public opinion against their opponent that turns me way off Clinton.
I think the proper analogy would be that so many people root against a boxer who fights dirty.
The thing that bothers me about the whole mess is that people "expect" me to support Hillary because I'm a woman. It turns out that I vote on issues, not gender or race.
Bunch of twits.
(FWIW, Paul Krugman had an interesting comment on the economic policies the candidates are spouting off about right now. In a nutshell, Edwards did it first and more progressively.)
Reporters and commentators from the traditional news media are deathly afraid of looking like liberals. Hating Hillary Clinton demonstrates that they are not liberals. Idiots, yes. But I repeat myself.