Shut Up, Maureen Dowd

Part wev in an Ongoing Series by Tart and me, named elegantly and succinctly by Tart, about the World's Most Obnoxious Feminist Concern Troll^TM.

Wow. MoDo needs some spectaular amounts of Shutting Up for this one, which is mind-blowingly appalling even for the World's Most Obnoxious Feminist Concern Troll^TM:

Yet, in the end, [Clinton] had to fend off calamity by playing the female victim, both of Obama and of the press.

...At her victory party, Hillary was like the heroine of a Lifetime movie, a woman in peril who manages to triumph.

There's really not enough Shutting Up in the world to deal with that sputtered puddle of bile.

I could rant for a nonillion years on the patent lunacy of the assertion that Hillary Clinton has deliberately played the female victim, but instead I'll just note that it was not Hillary who called herself a She Devil and broadcast pictures of herself bearing horns, and it was not Hillary who published pictures of herself cast as a feminazi monster, and it was not Hillary who circulated an unflattering image of herself as purported evidence she isn't up to the rigors of the presidency, and it was not Hillary who designed a nutcracker in her own image, and it was not Hillary who diminished her own experience as attending tea parties, and it was not Hillary who, after a moment of candidly expressed emotion, turned it into a national story using dog-whistles once removed from "hysterical," and, well, you get my point.

Nonetheless, MoDo's thesis, as you'll surely recall, is that Hillary made herself a victim of the press, playing the damsel in distress, despite, I guess, what MoDo would argue is the totally fair, unbiased, and not remotely misogynistic treatment of Hillary. But, with neither an ounce of self-awareness nor a trace of irony, this is how her piece actually begins:

When I walked into the office Monday, people were clustering around a computer to watch what they thought they would never see: Hillary Clinton with the unmistakable look of tears in her eyes.

A woman gazing at the screen was grimacing, saying it was bad. Three guys watched it over and over, drawn to the "humanized" Hillary. One reporter who covers security issues cringed. "We are at war," he said. "Is this how she'll talk to Kim Jong-il?"

Another reporter joked: "That crying really seemed genuine. I'll bet she spent hours thinking about it beforehand." He added dryly: "Crying doesn't usually work in campaigns. Only in relationships."

Nope, no sexism there among the witty banter of the measured, objective professionals at the Gray Lady. I'm sure that they think "crying works in relationships" for teh dudez, too, presume men to be incapable of regulating emotions while meeting with world leaders, and fail to regard as "human" all male candidates until they express an emotion that is then immediately deemed laughably inappropriate.

And perpetuating the demonstrably false narrative that Hillary was choked up by the prospect of losing, when she was, in fact, speaking quite personally, revealingly, and, duh, emotionally about her candidacy, MoDo sniffs:

[I]t was grimly typical of her that what finally made her break down was the prospect of losing.

As Spencer Tracy said to Katharine Hepburn in "Adam's Rib," "Here we go again, the old juice. Guaranteed heart melter. A few female tears, stronger than any acid."

More irony: Hillary was also speaking with rueful disdain about those who treat politics as a game. I can only imagine her regret at those who treat it like a romantic comedy, where the object is not even winning, but forcibly conforming candidates to the part of the boy or the girl, only to use the stereotypes of the genre to demean them.

If they're the girl, that is.