Friday, March 6, 2020

America Isn't Sexist—Female Democratic Candidates Are Just Awful People

 Image result for pictures of elizabeth warren and hillary
Article by Stephen Kruiser in "PJMedia":

Elizabeth Warren’s exit from the 2020 Democratic clown car was seemingly only moments old before a torrent of hot takes about her failure began lighting up the internet. This was to be expected, of course, as the rules of identity politics clearly state that any Democrat who properly fills any of the diversity checklist boxes cannot possibly be held responsible for his or her own failure in an election.

After voters gave Fauxcahontas plenty of writing on the wigwam wall to read Tuesday night, I lamented in Wednesday’s briefing that we were soon going to be forced to endure some high octane excuse-making:

The litany of excuses for Warren’s failure will be tedious, of course. We will be lectured for weeks, if not months, that America still isn’t ready for a woman president, blah, blah, blah. Warren is so prone to lying that she may even come up with a few that Hillary Clinton never thought of.

Like Hillary, Warren has so many flaws to cover for that the Dem media has to work overtime screaming “MISOGYNY!” and getting really creative with the retroactive makeover.

The Warren excuse parade with a bit of delicious irony, as Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi blamed and “element of misogyny” on the fact that we won’t have a woman president after this next election.

Again, that’s Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, the most powerful elected Democrat in the Land. Two heartbeats away from the presidency, and all that. When Barack Obama was president, she was the second most powerful Democrat. She’s a woman who’s been at the top of the American political food chain for a long time.

But misogyny, or something.

My favorite of all the ridiculous attempts to explain away Warren’s failure was this piece in The Atlantic titled “America Punished Elizabeth Warren for Her Competence.”

We’re supposed to treat female candidates as equals with males but if one should come up short we infantilize her and say that she was “punished.” Such is the ceaselessly wearisome nature of identity politics.

This post-mortem discusses the fact that so many find Warren off-putting, then spins wildly out of control attempting to explain it:

The campaigns of those who deviate from the traditional model of the American president—the campaign of anyone who is not white and Christian and male—will always carry more than their share of weight. But Warren had something about her, apparently: something that galled the pundits and the public in a way that led to assessments of her not just as “strident” and “shrill,” but also as “condescending.” The matter is not merely that the candidate is unlikable, these deployments of  condescending imply. The matter is instead that her unlikability has a specific source, beyond bias and internalized misogyny. Warren knows a lot, and has accomplished a lot, and is extremely competent,  condescending acknowledges, before twisting the knife: It is precisely because of those achievements that she represents a threat.  Condescending attempts to rationalize an irrational prejudice. It suggests the lurchings of a zero-sum world—a physics in which the achievements of one person are insulting to everyone else.  When I hear her talk, I want to slap her, even when I agree with her.

So...a woman who has accomplished a lot can’t have personality flaws, is that the message here?

That’s the thing, Elizabeth Warren is grating, and not because men are threatened by successful women. She’s just got a crappy personality.

She obviously shares many personality flaws with Hillary Clinton, chief among them that overwhelming phoniness that she oozes when trying to act like she’s just one of the regular folk. I’ll be thanking God every morning for a few weeks that I won’t be subjected to any more videos of Elizabeth Warren redefining awkward while attempting to bond with the commoners.

I’m almost beginning to feel that there is a conspiracy afoot here. Democrats need to have a deck of victim cards ready to play at all times. If they keep running thoroughly unlikable women like Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren who are destined to fail because they are generally awful people, they can keep sexism and misogyny front and center, even though it’s all b.s.

The reality -- especially in this modern media era -- is that a little personality goes a long way for a presidential candidate. Warren is the kind of candidate who doesn’t do well under a brighter spotlight. Let us remember that she was hovering near the top of the polls just last fall. She started to flail almost as soon as the scrutiny on her increased.

That happens to male candidates all the time, by the way.

Elizabeth Warren wasn’t punished. She merely failed to emerge victorious from a primary field of record size. The odds weren’t in her favor.

She was trying to claim the progressive ground that Bernie Sanders had an entire election cycle head start to grab.

It just didn’t work. If Elizabeth Warren is so competent and accomplished, she should take full credit for her failure.