Comments on: Wed., 11:30 p.m.

By: laocoon

laocoon — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 18:43:15 +0000

B
Here’s a link:

to a blog by several women of various political stripe who carry on an online discussion about campaign matters. One entry that interested me a good bit was about the unfavorable stereotypes in literature of strong women going back to Chaucer. Think Hillary as Lady Macbeth.

For another blog with a decidedly feminist view that is a good bit more meaty, IMHO, try Firedoglake at:

http://firedoglake.com/

My take on the NYT piece was far different than yours. First, it doesn’t matter to me one way or another whether the connection between McCain and Ms. Iseman was romantic/sexual. The point was that he is a man who has staked his career (since the Keating 5 savings and loan scandal) on being impervious to the lobbyist money and influence pervasive in Washington, but that seems to be a mere facade. He’s got lobbyist crawling all over his campaign, including his campaign manager. He’s got lobbyists peddling their influence by cellphone only a few feet away from him on the so-called “Straight Talk Express”. He was so close to one (yes, female) lobbyist that he sent letters to the FCC that elicited the response that the efforts of the “sqeaky clean” McCain were inappropriate.

In his attempt to make the story be about how liberal and unfair the story and the NYT is, he did something he rather famously does: make blanket and indignant denials that seem on closer inspection to be not so “truthy”. About the inappropriate letter, he claims he spoke to no one, but his own depositions under oath dispute the denial, as does the industrialist for whom he was carrying water.

Next, why was it OK to sexualize the Clinton administration and not a Republican candidate? Payback’s a bitch.

Finally, as I tried to explain in my post, the NYT story isn’t about sex or lobbyists or anything else on the surface. It was a warning. A fish wrapped in newspaper, using the Godfather movie metaphor. The warning was clear to me: toady up to your Wall Street masters or your campaign sleeps with the fishes (it’s dead).

By: laocoon

laocoon — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 17:56:59 +0000

Holy Shit! I am disappointed re the NYT. They to a degree represent sort of an approximation to European thinking across the Atlantic to me and many others. What utter bullshit! As you know, this piece of news is as interesting as “a bicycle crashed in China” to us over here. So who cares?? What has that got to do with his ability to lead the country? I would have thought that the NYT of all people know that. I still remember a memorable meeting of EU- and Lithuanian parliamentarians in Vilnius, Lithuania (I had to look the place up on a map before I went there myself, rest assured, this was before Lithuania joined the EU) the very day Bill Clinton had to testify to the Grand Jury re Lewinsky. That took place and was broadcasted by CNN during our lunch break. Before the said break, EU parliamentarians and the Lithuanians weren’t exactly chummy. There were many conflicts and the atmosphere was fairly tense. During the lunch break, many of us, including yours truly, sneaked up to our hotel rooms to watch this medieval-style trial on CNN. When people returned to the meeting in the afternoon, the atmosphere had changed – we Europeans felt like one happy family of sane people, by comparison. Everybody was in shock, Western Europeans and Lithuanians alike. Having seen this primitive exhibition of a hypocritical puritan spirit, they all of a sudden felt that whatever differences they had, they were minor compared to the huge differnece every one of us felt compared to the US watching CNN’s airing of Bill Clinton’s interrogation by the Grand Jury. We all felt a lot saner than we had.in a long time. This is what this NYT “revelation” reminds me of. Who the fuck cares who he eyed or slept with???? I’d have lots of questions to address to McCain, but his fucking credentials are irrelevant to me. And I am a lifelong dyed-in-the-wool feminist. So whatever this is about, real (!) feminism has got nothing to do with it. Brigitte

By: mcarp

mcarp — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 11:53:46 +0000

I haven’t seen it mentioned anywhwre, but one of Vicki Iseman’s clients was/is Bearing Point, the company that ‘consulted’ on how to carpetbag post-Saddam Iraq.