Should It Have Been Obvious?

In a race with two candidates both making history at once, but coming from different constituencies:

Where...

• Both candidates are superficially qualified for the position.
• The constituencies from which both candidates were drawn have a history of being property, second class citizens and/or consistently marginalized.
• Each candidate belongs to the group that the other constituency sees as the agents of oppression.
• There can only be one winner.

That...

• Partisans for the loser were going to feel that the cards were deliberately stacked against their candidate, or that "people weren't ready" for their candidate to win?
• There were going to be sore losers among the loser's partisans?
• The most strident boosters of either candidate operated from an overblown sense of their candidate's qualifications, and the other candidate's lack thereof, that became functionally indistinguishable from chauvinism?
• Some number of the supporters of each candidates were going to succumb to a clear sense of political entitlement, visible to everyone but themselves?
• Partisans for both candidates were blind to favorable chauvinism, and hypersensitive to the appearance of unfavorable?
• There were going to be ungracious winners among the winner's partisans?
• Partisans for the winner were going to discount factors outside of their candidate that worked in their candidate's favor?

Oh, Is THAT All?

I LOVE how the British can manage to understate anything.

[Coroner Paul] Knapman said: “[Kevin Greening] was found dead having indulged in unorthodox sexual behavior involving restraint equipment and illegal drugs.”

I can pretty much guarantee you, whatever visual that conjures up for you, it doesn’t begin to describe it.

Looks Right to Me...

Senator Barack Obama has been a household name for more than a year. Why does the Blogger spell-checker continue to flag his name (first and last) as misspelled?

I finally went ahead and added them to the dictionary myself, but you'd think that Google would have changed the default spell-checker by now... I mean, "Alabama?" Seriously?

The Hillary Card

So I find this greeting card with a picture of Hillary Clinton on the front of it. She's sitting behind a desk, with flags to either side of her, with a positively sinister smile (Or is it a smirk?) on her face. A placard in front of her reads: "President Hillary Clinton." Inside, the card reads: "See? There are some things scarier than turning a year older. Happy Birthday!" On the back of the card, is a picture of the Capitol building, in Washington D.C., surmounted by a giant birthday cake candle, which tells me that there is a series of politically-themed cards.

So... was this the only card that the store stocked? Or were the Obama and McCain cards long sold out...?

Sex and the Committee

One of the things about living in Washington State, as opposed to Washington, D.C., is that we've reverted back to hearing about the primary campaign as if it were taking place on another planet (not that shipping this entire mess off to Neptune on the next NASA flight would be a bad idea). Catching the punditry that surrounds the election requires either getting up early on Sunday, or watching Fox News (or another cable news outlet), neither of which is really on my agenda these days. The net result of all of this is that most of the complaining that the Clinton crowd has been doing about the media's treatment of her gender has been largely abstract.

But I was reading today's papers online, and this caught my eye.

"One woman, wearing a blue 'Team Hillary' shirt, shoved a man in a suit and tie with a small Obama button on his lapel. 'We just blew the election!' another woman shouted. 'McCain in '08! McCain in '08!', a woman yelled from the back of the room. 'No-bama! No-bama!'"
"Dems seat delegates, but ignite new anger"

It doesn't take a hardcore feminist to get the feeling that someone has a problem with loud-mouthed, "uppity" women - or to get the idea that readers might wind up thinking that the only shouting was coming from female Clinton supporters. The idea that the meeting was such a one-sided affair didn't make any sense to me, even with the understanding of the culture of political entitlement that has grown up around Senator Clinton's candidacy. (Mainly because I find it hard to believe that there isn't a similar, if less vocal, culture around Senator Obama's candidacy.) So I jumped over the he Seattle Times crosstown rival, the Seattle Post Intelligencer, to see if they used the same story, or had a different perspective. It turns out they went with an Associated Press story instead.

"'We just blew the election!' a woman in the audience shouted. The crowd was divided between cheering Obama supporters and booing Clinton supporters."
"Florida, Michigan delegates will get half-votes"

Okay, that's a little better. At least you get the idea that the Obama supporters were something more than passive punching bags.


In addition to a photograph of one "Joh Winkleman of Sunnyside, N.Y.," with his fist in the air, both articles have this in common. You never see references to men shouting or being disruptve - it's either a "woman" or an "audience member." Mr. Winkleman was apparently the only man in attendance with something loud to say - although we aren't told what it was.

I have some difficulty believing that it was that difficult to pick disruptive/angry men out of the crowd. And it's not like this would be the first time that women have had something to say about something (which would somewhat justify the exclusive focus on them). I doubt that anyone in an editorial position (at the New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press, Seattle Post-Intelligencer or the Seattle Times) would concede the presentation of the stories is, if not overtly sexist, easily mistaken for such. On the other hand, yes, I find the stories somewhat sexist - but I'm a guy. Perhaps women would look at these stories and say: "Sexism? Where?"