Hardballz

I've got a new piece up at The Guardian's Comment is free America, "Counting out women," about Chris Matthews' predictably misogynist reaction to the news that the stimulus package contained (past tense*) funding for family planning, and how his misogyny renders him manifestly unfit to do his job:

Yesterday's show was no exception, as Matthews discussed the stimulus package (or, as he calls it here, Obama's "big package") with Robert Wexler, a Democratic congressman from Florida, complaining that the money allocated for family planning is just a bunch of "odds and ends and cats and dogs".

Congressman Wexler why isn't it just, why isn't it just what we thought it was going to be...infrastructure, roads, bridges, stuff that everybody agrees on needs to be fixed and creates real jobs for real people that pay decent salaries. Why don't we spend all the money on that stuff that people can see rather than all these odds and ends and cats and dogs?

According to Matthews, the only thing "real people" can "see" are infrastructure projects and the jobs they create – which, as has been pointed out by Linda Hirshman and discussed by Echidne here, are jobs that will disproportionately benefit men. Funding for family planning (arguably) primarily benefits women, rendering it, in Matthews' estimation, a pointless waste of money.

..."It sounds a little like China," he notes, conflating the Democrats' plan to provide women a breadth of reproductive choices with a state-mandated reproductive limitation which has resulted in the mass murder and abandonment of female infants.

It's like a crêpe of misogyny, double the deliciousness, with a flaky pancake of ignorance wrapped around a gooey inside of unapologetic enmity.

Read the whole thing here.

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* This was written this morning—although I'm pleased, ahem, to report that Matthews has spent this afternoon making the same stupid noises even after the funding has been ripped out.