So Hillary Clinton's eyes mist over while discussing how hard it is to run for president and how exhausted she is. The mainstream media respond with more overt misogyny than we usually get from them. The majority of critical coverage and insightful punditry typically chastises her for being too stiff, unemotional and coming off cold. Because women are not supposed to be cold, calculating leaders. Do we ever hear about how cold Dick Cheney is? About how unemotional and unfeeling his public presence is? The man is the true incarnation of evil but his stoic demeanor is indicative of his seriousnes and his ability to "make the tough decisions". There are countless other examples of male politicians being cold and unfeeling and not necessarily praised for it, but it simply doesn't figure into the equation. I mentioned Cheney just because he seems to be the prototypical example. But it works with most of them.

So then she cries and she doesn't have the...balls...to be president. John Edwards, the leading progressive-populist democratic candidate, talks about how it takes strength to be commander-in-chief--clearly making the point that Clinton does not possess that strength. Not only, apparently, is there no crying in baseball but there is no crying in national politics. The constant coverage and talking-head idiocy that took over the news for the days surrounding the New Hampshire primary and even into this week is making me sick. I am just now writing about this because I can finally do more than say, "Stupid fucking misogynistic heteropatriarchial fuckers". But then I realized that Katha Pollitt said it much better in her recent blog entry for The Nation. I love Katha Pollitt. She is freaking awesome.

Mitt Romney doesn't know what the Violence Against Women Act is and nobody seems to notice. Would anyone like some double-standard with their media misogyny?

And everyone is really enjoying saying Hillary, Obama, and Edwards. Which of these things is not like the other? Why is she, a sitting member of the United States senate, referred to by the media by her first name and not her last? NPR does this, RadioNation does this, and of course, Fox and the mainstream media do this, too. But, NPR's Bob Garfield recently did a great story about this on On the Media, one of the greatest shows ever, and offerred a great discussion of the use of Hillary's first name but not John or Barack's. There are certainly instances of the use of male politicians' first names in campaigns or disparaging nicknames (Slick Willie comes to mind) but news outlets tend to refer to them by their last names which in our society connotes respect and possession of authority.