Hillary Clinton and Robin Lakoff, the Idiot Professor
I am mad. I am mad because I am scared. And if you
are a woman, you should be, too. Emailgate is a
bitch hunt, but the target is not Hillary Clinton. It’s us. The only reason the
whole email flap has legs is because the candidate is female.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Robin Lakoff’s opinion piece in Time (excerpted above) is arguably the
stupidest thing yet written about the 2016 election, and an ocean of stupidity
has been flowing for months. Her piece is the mother of all non sequiturs.
Lakoff, a professor of
linguistics, of all things, leans into this screed with her raw emotion, how
she is feeling. And guess what? She is not happy. “I am mad”. Who cares? Join the crowd. I am mad.
All of my friends are mad. Everybody
is mad these days, and for good reason.
But wait! She is scared too, which is the reason, she
says, she is mad, a curious causality. Can someone be scared and mad at the same time? Why would an arch feminist, supposedly a
sophisticated thinker, jump into the fray all lathered up with the favorite
unhappy stereotype of the emotional, hysterical woman?
So far, though, we only have a
very mad and very scared woman, but here is where the non sequiturs begin, a
leap from a personal whiny sounding “how I feel” (fine, again, who cares) to
the mailed fist feminist ukase, “if you are a woman you should be too.” We have
moved now to the grand pronouncement ex
cathedra. So, the deplorable status
of women isn’t bad enough, they (all of womanhood) should like Lakoff be
quivering with rage and fear, furiously jabbing pins into their Donald Trump voodoo dolls.
Because? And off we go, a dumpster-dive into an alternative universe where
facts, logic and empirical reality have no bearing on our understanding of
current events.
“Emailgate is a
bitch hunt, but the target is not Hillary Clinton. It’s us.” A “bitch hunt?” No, let’s try for a simpler time and channel
Sargent Joe Friday – “just the facts, Mam.” The target is Hillary Clinton. She set
up the private email server, exempting herself from the law and the rules, plus
lying about it. The FBI director said she was “extremely careless.” If she
would have done what she was supposed to do there would be no Emailgate, no one
complaining about Hillary and her emails, no FBI investigation, no
pronouncements of her carelessness. You don’t have to be Noam Chomsky or Hannah
Arendt to comprehend such a simple cause-effect relationship. What you do have
to be to ignore it is a tenured grievance specialist, intoxicated by your own
moral goodness, dedicated to interpreting your place in the world as an eternal
victim, invincibly oblivious to world as it really is.
However, let us continue this journey in the land of
feminist paranoid imagination. “The only
reason the whole email flap has legs is because the candidate is female.” Really?
Take a peek at “Ten times people were punished
for far less than what Hillary Clinton did”. These ten people listed,
including Bill Clinton’s former National Security Advisor, Sandy Berger “were actually punished for
similar or lesser offenses than what Mrs. Clinton got away with.” Seven of them
were men. http://www.thepoliticalinsider.com/hillary-clinton-email-10-punished-less/#ixzz4P3JYmLQA
How does this square
with “it’s only because she is a female” thesis? You don’t let empirical reality intrude.
But being in a
fantasy world, let us go on and pretend that in some years past Hillary had “transgendered”
herself into Heinrich Rodham Clinton. Now as a man (gender is whatever you want
it to be, so if you say you’re a man, you’re a man) running the Department of
State now he sets up his private email system and sends out classified documents
over the unsecured server. Would the FBI not pursue an investigation of
Heinrich Rodham Clinton?
But enough of Lakoff's world. Being in it just briefly is too disorienting. Let’s go back and
try to understand why this Berkeley professor is so scared. Mad, I
understand. Radical feminists are always
mad and always will be. If and when Hillary becomes President they will be mad because of the sexist opposition.
But what is she scared of? She is
tenured, presumably, so she has life time job security and no penalty for
saying and writing whatever pops into her head, no matter how ludicrous, fatuous
or absurd. She is at Berkeley, for God sake, long a haven for
the oppressed, protected by the diversity inquisitors, full of “safe spaces”,
guarded by “trigger warnings”, a place where even “micro-aggressors” are
ruthlessly tracked down, pilloried and ceremoniously ejected. If Professor
Lakoff is scared at Berkeley, we have to be deeply, deeply sorry for her. Medication
recommended.
But, as she says, “if you are a woman, you should be, too”…
that is, mad and scared. Well,
Professor, good luck with that. Keep trying. There is an abundance of things
for women today to be mad and scared about, but the vast majority of them do
not hang out at Berkeley and they probably see things a bit differently.
Shame on you, Time.
Have you no standards?
Interesting what her post election feelings are.
ReplyDelete