Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Poor Katha Pollitt continues her downward slide -- now she's going to the mats for Hillary Clinton, forsooth.

Katha's thinking seems to be that feminist solidarity requires that she leap to any woman's defense who is being criticized for doing things that a man could do with impunity:

...[A] man with the same positions would be less bad, because he couldn't use feminism (or female stereotypes of caring and nurturing) to disguise them. But since anyone with a realistic hope of becoming President will necessarily have made all sorts of unsavory bargains with the status quo, this amounts to saying we'll never have a woman in the White House. We'll continue on as now: "expecting more" of women and tacitly expecting less of men.

What do I know, being a guy and all, but may I observe that this seems a rather narrow kind of feminism -- a feminism which begins and ends with the idea that a woman should be just as much of an asshole as a man. I suppose it's a little like Zionism that way. Was it Ben-Gurion who said that the goal of a Jewish state is that everybody there should be a Jew, even the pickpockets and whores? Katha's feminism seems to insist that women, too, should have a fair chance to be mass murderers. And if anybody says they shouldn't -- well, that's just blatant male chauvinism.

The last time we took up the sad case of Katha Pollitt here, she was arguing, it seems to me, out of the other side of her mouth --

Katha ties herself in knots trying to argue that single-issue reproductive-rights advocates should not be supporting candidates based on their reproductive-rights record. Rather, they should support Democrats no matter what.

In other words, single-issue reproductive-rights people should swallow their objections to some Opus Dei loon if he happens to be, in some vague or even hypothetical way, more "progressive" than the other loon. But apparently single-issue female-nationalist feminists like Katha must do the reverse, and swallow the bloodthirsty, reactionary, heartless corporate flunkyism of a Hillary Clinton because she's a woman.

I think the contradiction is more apparent than real, though. Because the practical bottom line in both cases is that you have to line up behind, you guessed it, the Democrat.

Drawing the same conclusion from contradictory premises is, of course, something that hardened Democrats get very good at.