From the grasping at straws department:
According to the CNN/ORC International poll, which was released Friday, 55% of Americans surveyed say the GOP doesn’t understand women. That number rises to 59% among all women and 64% among women over 50.
“That last number is intriguing, since older women are more likely to vote Republican than younger women. Yet younger women don’t have as much of a problem with the GOP on this measure,” CNN Polling Director Keating Holland said.
“That suggests that the problem women have with the Republican Party may be related less to the policy positions the GOP takes and more related to the attitudes behind those policies and the tone the party takes when addressing them,” he added.
Yeah, if the mostly white male Republicans would call them “loose women” instead of “sluts” when they explain why insurance should pay for Viagra but not Mirena, I’ll bet that under 50 number will continue to move in the GOP’s direction.
I can’t think of a sharper policy divide than the one between Republicans and Democrats on reproductive health. Probably the difference between over 50 and under 50 women is that those over 50 actually remember when contraception and abortion weren’t taken for granted. Democrats need to sharpen up their messaging and that under 50 number will move in their favor.
Also, too: I understand that there are other issues important to women other than contraception. Name one where Republicans have a better policy position than Democrats.
Baud
Wilson Heath
Premise: older and more conservative women see more of the GOP’s sexism routinely from traveling in those circles, and they know just how pervasive it is.
Napoleon
I think because the older ones are voting Republican they understand how they have to hold their noses when they vote Republican, where the younger ones who may not just don’t understand how extreme they are (they are voting Dem for a bunch of reasons other then related to purely women issues).
@Wilson Heath:
This sounds extremely plausible.
Baud
Shorter CNN: The real story here is that women just don’t understand the GOP.
aimai
@Wilson Heath: I also think, just looking around at women I know, that as women approach Menopause and the later years of marriage–that’s the “Over 50 crowd” they stop suffering fools gladly. I know that, technically, in Red states, married white women tend to vote Republican, just like their husbands. But even those women, apparently, are sick of their husband and his friends ranting on and on and on every day about sluts and slut pills. And they’ve noticed that the morons their husband’s parrot are not married, or thrice divorced, or have shady relationships with women in their own lives.
The problem the Dems are having with younger women is simply that younger women don’t vote (like the youth vote in general) and may not be paying much attention to the blathering of old white guys on the TV.
Chris T.
Well, they, uh—
I mean, there’s…
Er…
I got nothin’.
dmsilev
Two wet suits and a dildo? Oh, wait, you said policy position. Never mind.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: As a Democrat and a life long male, I have to say I have never understood women… But I care enough to try. Is that good enough?
YellowJournalism
OT, but the great Shirley Temple Black has died. While I didn’t agree with her political views of her adult years, her movies introduced many children to classic film and great musical entertainment. Her movies are also a bond between my mom and me. My mom rented them for me all the time when I was a kid. I still enjoy many of the movies as an adult. She had talent at such a young age that was taken for granted. Her life story is fascinating.
I think I’d be more upset if it weren’t for the fact that we just lost PSH, who was not finished giving us great performances. Black lived a very full life and left at the true end of her movie career.
MazeDancer
It’s not business, it’s personal.
Every woman over 50 who entered the labor force right out of school remembers being on the frontlines against sexism only too well. She knew these smug, nasty, boss monsters personally and probably was asked to fetch coffee – or endure a pass – more than a few times.
There is no remote theory in experiencing the current GOP attitude toward women, only sharp reminder that the battle is far from over. Younger women are just coming to recognize that feminism is not the man-hating, dirty word they were fooled into thinking it was.
This time, there are plenty of men on the ramparts against sexism, but the battle is still the same as it was 30, 40, or 50 years ago. Or, even, some might say, the same as when the troops came home from WWII and asked Rosie the Riveter for “their” jobs back.
Belafon
I’m gonna tie this into John’s post: If the Democrats select a woman as a presidential candidate, the shit the Republicans will throw at her will cement women’s voting for decades.
The poll generally reflects how Americans vote: Almost exactly like they did last time. I think the time period most people are paying the most attention to politics is when they are young adults: 18-25. And they tend to vote that way for the rest of their lives. Consider the fact that most young adults aren’t paying that much attention anyway, and you get what we’ve got in this country.
rikyrah
Kids Explain The Meaning of Love
http://msnvideo.msn.com/?channelindex=3&from=en-us_msnhp#/video/1e0e8971-b0b1-41a2-4436-7320f3ab1257
rikyrah
@MazeDancer:
I not only relate this to contraception, woman reproductive rights, but you can also take this line with voting rights.
Black voter participation was more than White voter participation in 2012?
Why?
Because of all the attempts at GOP Voter Suppression.
The GOP got on tv talking about ‘voter fraud’ which doesn’t exist, and pretended like that was supposed to fool Black folks, who knew exactly what James Crow, Junior looked like.
When you have people in your family, in your circle, at church with you, at the barbershop or beautyshop than can tell you about:
1. Being made to take a literacy test
2. Being made to take a poll test
3. Actually being asked to tell how many bubbles in a bar of soap
4. And STILL were blocked from being able to vote until the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act were passed..
That shyt isn’t ‘ history’. That’s family talk at the dinner table, the barbershop, beautyshop, family BBQs
That shyt isn’t anything BUT PERSONAL.
Both my parents grew up in the Police State known as the Jim Crow South. My father would have been FORTY-TWO YEARS OLD before he would have been able to vote if he had stayed in the state of his birth.
And, the GOP thought that Voter Suppression shyt was gonna fly?
Seriously?
aimai
@MazeDancer: I must also add that (speaking as a woman over 50) the particular accusations they make against both HRC and Alison Grimes resonate very oddly. HRC is being pummeled for the fact that her husband took a trophy mistress–she’s the victim here, even by right wing standards, and yet she is being asked to pay the price. AG “took money from Woody Allen” a guy who Republicans already hate and always publicly hated as the very definition of Hollyweird/Jewish/Liberal success. They could easily, and have in the past, always demanded that Democratic politicians hand money back every time it comes from a political actor on the left. This time they are hanging their demand on the presumption that he sexually abused his daughter and that he cheated on his girlfriend.
In both cases the real victims are women, the real culprit (such as it is) is male entitlement. As a woman I’d go further and argue that both HRC and Mia and Dylan Farrow suffered because they accepted, though each in different ways, a subordinate wifely/female role in which men get to do what they want regardless of the repercussions and older women are penalized and rejected for being old and easily replaced by a new sex toy. That’s not left or right, that’s the patriarchy and of course Republican politicians and wealthy men are swimming in it.
Considering that they voted Vitter back in and he is now running for Governor, that they instantly forgave Mr. Appalachian Trail and he’s now back in Congress and that they hung on to Ensign and the bathroom toe tapper to the bitter end the obvious hypocrisy and transparent mendacity of their claim to be “defending” women by attacking women political figures is just jaw dropping. And its also perfectly tone deaf. They are demanding that HRC pay for the sins of her husband, and that AG –a female politician–pay for the sins of Woody Allen.
I’ll tell them how to run this con for nothing. You can’t pose as a supporter of women on the backs of other women while tearing down women in political power. You can’t pose as the champion of sexual assault victims by using them to gain a little advantage for Mitch McConnell’s campaign. You can’t pose as the champion of women in the workplace while punishing HRC for her husband’s supposed sins in his workplace.
the Conster
I’m in that over 50 group of women, and I’ve had it up to fucking here [[raises hand to forehead]] with grumpy whiny old white men. We get it – you’re not the boss of everyone anymore and you don’t like it and want everyone to know and to be as miserable as you are. Every single old white guy I see bloviating on TV now – regardless what they’re saying – I just want to tell them to please just STFU and listen. They had their chance.
rikyrah
President Obama to launch major new effort to help young men of color
By Zachary A. Goldfarb,
Published: February 10
President Obama will launch a significant new effort this week to bolster the lives of young men of color, seeking to use the power of the presidency to help a group of Americans whose lives are disproportionately affected by poverty and prison.
Obama on Thursday will announce a new White House initiative called “My Brother’s Keeper,” which will bring foundations and companies together to test a range of strategies across the country to support young male minorities, taking steps to keep them in school and out of the criminal justice system, a White House official said. He will also announce that his administration will launch a more vigorous evaluation of what policies work best and publicize results to school systems and others across the country.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/president-obama-to-launch-major-new-effort-on-young-men-of-color/2014/02/11/cc0f0a98-92cd-11e3-b227-12a45d109e03_story.html
Sly
My suspicion is that this is more a function of race than age. Non-Hispanic whites make up about 64% of the general population, but are 75% of the 65+ population. While all white age groups broke for Romney, and all non-white age groups broke for Obama, the fact that there are more white voters over the age of 65 skews the results of that particular age group and makes age look more deterministic than it actually is.
bemused
@aimai:
Over 50 women like me are also totally pissed off that these authoritarian, ignorant as dirt cretins are punishing our daughters, dil and granddaughters.
Speaking of Republican women: Kathleen Parker’s jaw hit the floor because Obama “lamented eroding protections of religious liberty around the world”. But, but what about eroding religious liberty here. She said she has no disagreement with women wanting insurance coverage for contraception but she wonders why Obama adm is so bent on forcing people, imposing it’s own religious rules on, Hobby Lobby, Little Sisters, etc to provide coverage for what they consider abortifacient contraception. Parker makes me grind my teeth.
RSA
I’m a 50-year-old guy, which means I turned 18 in 1981. There have been gradual changes to pervasive sexism in the workplace, but I can’t think of a good reason why 50-year-olds would see things differently from 40-year-olds or 30-year-olds. (Though I understand that work in 1960s was a different story.) Maybe I’m missing something?
I’ll speculate that the higher numbers for older women might have more to do with the realization that GOP policies have not only hurt them but also their kids, who are just starting out.
ETA: That is, what bemused said.
AxelFoley
LOL at mix tryin to be like DougJ with the rap lyrics in the thread title.
bg
I think there is probably a very small overlap between the over-50 women who think Republicans don’t understand women and the over-50 women who vote Republican. I think mostly they are not the same people.
jibeaux
@Sly: That’s probably true, but the higher numbers of older women reporting that Republicans don’t understand women is still intriguing since they’re voting for Republicans anyway. It suggests to me that while they don’t like their chauvinism, there’s something else that’s appealing about them and it’s just a damn headscratcher what that might be. Or, it could be that the polling is a little different now because of the attention paid to HRC, and if she weren’t a factor maybe it would look more like you’d expect.
aimai
@Sly: I agree with this analysis. Older voters skew whiter and more Republican so you are going to get more older white female Republicans taking up a larger percentage of the pool of older white female voters in general–in comparison to younger voters. But that doesn’t mean that there is something about older white females that makes them naturally vote Republican. It just means the two pools of voters are different and the proportions are different partially if not entirely because of race and immigrant based repression of older AA and Hispanic voters.
At any rate I want to pick up on the point that “other issues interest women voters than contraception.” I would like to see us drop the language of balkinization. Contraception is the terrain our enemies fight on because it symbolizes an entire world of beliefs and policies surrounding women and children and life and work. They are fighting us on abortion and contraception because these are the tip of the iceberg for all kinds of rights to full membership in civil society. They are also fighting us on child abuse (conservatives oppose all forms of rights for children for fear that these would be used to break up the power of the patriarchal/christian family), on public school funding, on gay marriage, on adoption, on foster care, on taxes for social welfare etc… because all of these permit women, children, and men to fully participate in civil society as educated, healthy, empowered human beings.
To me the fight over contraception is really a seamless garment, to borrow a term from the Catholic Church. You can’t have a healthy, educated, democratically fit population without excellent free public education, national health care, contraceptive care, family leave policies, welfare policies, Schip, food stamps, Head Start, Gay Rights, voting rights. These all go together and are all “women’s concerns.” Contraception isn’t off to the side and something we have to worry about because we have wombs. Its central to our lives and the full functioning of women as adults and as mothers and as political persons. Only with adequate contraception and all the other rights I’ve enumerated could women get the fuck out of the house and into the public sphere to deal with all that other stuff like the economy and foreign affairs.
Mark S.
@YellowJournalism:
For some reason I thought she died years ago.
bemused
@RSA:
When I get the opportunity, I tell younger women to read Gail Collins’ book, When Everything Changed, The Amazing Journey of American Women From 1960 to the Present. 40 years of astonishing progress for women. It’s hard to even imagine now that women had to get permission from their husbands to apply for a credit card. So many younger women have never known the commonplace discriminations against women and the hard struggles for equal rights. I also recommend older women read this book because I know I had forgotten quite a bit and learned a lot that didn’t hit my radar screen.
Matt
Wait, so is objecting to “you slutty sluts shouldn’t be able to get slut pills you already paid for” an objection to the “policy position” (that women shouldn’t have access to contraception) or just to the “tone” (that any woman who enjoys sex is a slut)? Is there really a difference?
Hill Dweller
@Belafon:
I’m not so sure. Despite all their crazy legislation targeting women’s reproductive rights, Republicans still enjoy a sizable lead among married white women.
aimai
@Hill Dweller: You should read the thread.
Cervantes
@OzarkHillbilly:
That depends. Have you ever understood men?
currants
@rikyrah: Yes. And THANK YOU for putting it so plainly.
Your comment makes me want to, I don’t know, high-five you, or hug you, or –gawd, I don’t even know from sports, but makes me feel like we should huddle and bellow ROWR and then go roaring down the– up– the .. I don’t know, field? Streets? Voting precincts?
Point: 2014 matters, and 2016 and every one after that.
negative 1
A potential counter narrative to the suggested one is that the largest group of female voters who identify as evangelical are 30 – 49 . I’d bet that they think the GOP understands them just fine. Now, as to why that is (is evangelical Christianity a recent thing? Do people mellow their views as they age?) would be an interesting study.
Belafon
@negative 1: But that’s a pretty narrow definition. That’s like saying the largest group of female voters who are left handed are 30-49. If you take all voting women, and then cut out those that are not evangelical, you could be left with 100 people. Even if 60 percent of those are 30-49, so what?
Cervantes
@rikyrah:
Thank you.
aimai
@negative 1: I agree with Belafon, I think that’s probably a misreading of the statistics. First of all Evangelicals as voters are a relatively recent phenomenon–they were brought into politics in the last thirty years. They are more likely to be voters than other groups of people because they are already organized through their churches and their votes are offered to political parties and particular political leaders as a bloc. So they are reliable voters in midterm and quadrennial elections, politics is front and center, and they are organized and aligned with a specifically white, evangelical, christian, republican, party.
But that doesn’t mean that as a proportion of the entire voting population they are big enough to be dispositive as they move, like a swallowed pig, through the snake of American politics. They are a bulge, like the baby boomers were, and after they age up and out the power of their voting bloc will decline immeasurably.
negative 1
@Belafon: I don’t necessarily disagree except that per the same study 26.1% of the population identifies as evangelical, and the pew study only polled those of voting age (18+). So it’s not a small number. Add to that there is a swell in the ages we are looking at (or that a total of 70 or so percent of that population is under the cutoff for the article’s survey (under 50). The difference in the article’s survey by demographics is only 5% — figuring that there is a margin of error, the pew study could easily explain 3 or so percent.
My point is more that some of that difference may not be a messaging issue, it may be a demographics issue. Especially because without seeing any survey on this stuff I would have thought the numbers would have been reversed.
piratedan
I get the feeling that the GOP still taps that evangelical nerve about bootstraps and jeebus that still plays in many places that are comprised of our midwestern and southern citizens. Never mind about all that new testament stuff, give us someone to disdain and feel superior too and they’ll march in lockstep tyvm. Besides, why should white women feel any less entitled than their alpha-male bubba types who won their hearts. People is people and sometimes this racial/tribal bullshit defies actually thinking about who is zooming who.
Belafon
@negative 1: And I agree with you that this group is fucked up. My manager and I fit in that age range, and while we are men, there’s a story from him that fits. He was talking about how he would have been too proud to be on his parent’s insurance after college through age 26. And I’m thinking “so you would have been ok with a $15K hospital bill?”
negative 1
@Belafon: Everyone’s always too proud to have done something in a hypothetical world. Funny how the price of their pride drops when they’re faced with an actual bill. But I suppose he’s a hypothetical tough guy.
TS
In the 1960s – nothing was more important to me than contraception. What the GOP well understands (and does not like) – the birth control pill provided women control over their own reproduction function that they had NEVER had before. They could ignore what their husband said, what their church said and control when they had children. It was mind boggling awesome.
BobS
Is it possible that the higher number for women over 50 is reflective of the fact that they’re the age group more likely to be watching cable news stations that regularly discuss Republican problems with women voters?
Cervantes
@aimai:
A few years ago, in the run-up to the 2008 election, Pew did a study in which they found evangelicals lined up as follows:
In comparison the youngest faith populations were Moslems and Hindus.
NB: These numbers are approximate, not gender-specific, and from memory, caveat lector.
Roger Moore
Does you use of the quote in the title mean you’re going to change your handle from Dread Pirate Mistermix to Mister Mix-a-Lot?
RSA
@bemused: Thanks for the recommendation! It sounds good.
Betsy
@Matt: Yeah, that was an unbelievably stupid comment from that “polling expert.” He’s basically bought into the belief system of the Republican strategists: that the problem is not their policies, but the harsh language they are couched in.
They think that “appealing to women” (or the blackity blacks, or whomever) is about fooling them with sweet words.
Ahem, attention Repubs: It’s the shiv, you idiots.
Betsy
@negative 1: Evangelical churches basically only want married people with children. They have no idea what to do with single or childfree people, other than stick them in a “singles group” so they can hopefully hook up, hitch, and breed.
They also do an excellent job of connecting parents to a support network in the church that links them to daycare, other moms, play groups, church schools, etc.
So it’s really no surprise to see a disproportionate number of [women of an age to have kids present in the home] — that is, women 30 to 49 — in that group.
IowaOldLady
I’m old enough to remember when using contraception was talked about as the responsible thing to do and the sluts (because we always need sluts and these had welfare babies) were the ones who couldn’t even get their act together to do that.
Betsy
@negative 1: also, in real life, his parents might have objected to his pride — they were the ones who knew they would have cashed out their retirement savings in the event of an unexpected health crisis.
They were older, and wiser, and knew what he did not as a young man.
Betsy
@IowaOldLady: glad you shared that recollection.
We forget too soon.
Omnes Omnibus
@rikyrah: Righteous rant. It is also a reason I think Scott Walker may be in more trouble than people suspect in Wisconsin. Every person of color who got fucked around with in 2012 or accused of fraud during the debate over voter ID is going to be at the polls. And they won’t be voting for Walker.
@aimai: You can’t have a healthy, educated, democratically fit population without excellent free public education, national health care, contraceptive care, family leave policies, welfare policies, Schip, food stamps, Head Start, Gay Rights, voting rights.
Exactly.
Mnemosyne
@jibeaux:
I’m not scratching my head over it at all. White supremacism trumps gender identification.
WereBear
@Mnemosyne: It goes even deeper than that. Evangelicals are told to sacrifice to advance their social agenda.
So it does no good to point out that their vote makes themselves suffer.
That is the point.
bemused
@WereBear:
They are probably more likely to buy into suffering if other people not like themselves suffer more.
Petorado
Right on cue, James Tarranto decries the feminization of drunk America. Every time these guys open their mouths about defending violence toward women, a cohort of formerly Republican women voters get their wings.
srv
It has never been a mystery why the 1% and older white men vote Republican.
It is a mystery why anyone else does. Unless you just assume they’re idiots.
Seonachan
This part is really misleading. Look at the crosstabs in the link provided in the linked article. 2 things jump out at me:
1. They don’t break down women by age group, only total sample by age group, but even there the two younger cohorts (18-34 & 35-49) have margins of error of 8% and 7.5% (as opposed to only 5.5% each for 50-64 & 65+). So, a lot fewer younger folks in the survey, and so few young women that the margin of error would be too high to say anything meaningful about it.
2. Just taking all young people (men & women) in the sample, it isn’t the case that they’re more forgiving of Republicans, specifically, than their older counterparts, but of both political parties. 47% of 18-34’s say the Republicans understand women’s concerns, as opposed to 42% of all ages. But 73% of this youngest cohort says the same of Democrats, vs. just 63% of the total sample.
So assuming the sub-sample size doesn’t render the whole question meaningless, I’d guess that the generational dynamic at play is more likely to be along the lines of: younger people = less engaged in politics = less inclined to answer this question (for either party) with a “NO” (implying you’re aware of the political issue in question, and have a reason for saying so, and perhaps you might be asked a follow-up question on), whereas a “YES” could be more of a “sure, yeah, I guess, whatever”. The “No Opinion” response rate is 2-4% per cohort, which seems very low for a general survey.
Tone In DC
Great rant. No doubt it’s personal.
Everyone here has most likely seen this story.
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/10/25/2835101/gop-asks-party-official-resign-admits-voter-suppresses-democratic-votes/
These idiots say shit like this in front of live microphones. They send e-mails about this. Since January 2009, they’ve let their freak flag fly. And they seem to think other people are okay with this blatant discrimination and mistreatment.
Their winger cranial-rectal inversion must foster this delusion.
Cervantes
@Seonachan:
Exactly: not the most useful analysis.
Frankensteinbeck
@aimai:
Not only do I agree absolutely, but I like how you laid that out in detail.
Sly
@jibeaux:
Intriguing, yes. But I’m not sure anything definitive can be said as to why at this point.
It’s all speculative, but we may be dealing with an age group of women who make clearer distinctions between the political identities of woman and married woman than younger groups. Though they may identify with the latter more than the former, this doesn’t preclude identifying with the former entirely.
@aimai:
That’s not really my point. White people skew Republican, driven largely by white men and the white women who marry them. I don’t think there’s anything implicit in age that makes someone more Republican; again, non-white older voters tend to vote Democratic, they’re simply drowned out by all the white older voters who vote for Democrats. There are, however, various cultural markers associated with whiteness and maleness that makes conservative orthodoxy attractive, and there are more people in the older demographics, by circumstance of population, who identify with those cultural markers. This is true even if there are, technically, more older white women then older white men; it’s cultural, not physiological.
This is tangential, but the same is essentially true about the confluence of religiosity and voting patterns. White evangelicals vote Republican, non-white evangelicals vote Democratic (and overwhelmingly so). There are simply more white evangelicals than non-white evangelicals, so if one doesn’t account for race one can easily come to the conclusion that a person being an evangelical makes it more likely that they’ll be a Republican.
wuzzat
I am in the unfortunate position of knowing (and being related to) multiple white women over 50 who vote Republican despite most of them being pro-choice and all of them being pro-contraceptives. (Grandma stopped having kids in 1960. Ask her how!)
Most of them have bought into the media narrative that Democrats are weaker on foreign policy and less fiscally responsible than Republicans. Half of them are just flat-out racist, although most of them would never come right out and say it. Some of them see their husbands having Fox News-inspired mental breakdowns over the pending demise of Truth, Justice, and the American Way, and figure getting a Republican back in the White House might calm them the fuck down.
That said, a fair few of them who would have voted Romney voted for Obama instead because they weren’t about to let Paul Ryan anywhere near their reproductive rights. I actually do suspect that the percentage of white women in the “over 50” group who voted for Obama is higher than what the statistics say, because there is a certain segment of this demographic that would vote for Obama but not want to admit that they did. You know, in case their menfolk/parish members/racist bookclub found out.
Tata
@aimai: To me the fight over contraception is really a seamless garment, to borrow a term from the Catholic Church. You can’t have a healthy, educated, democratically fit population without excellent free public education, national health care, contraceptive care, family leave policies, welfare policies, Schip, food stamps, Head Start, Gay Rights, voting rights. These all go together and are all “women’s concerns.” Contraception isn’t off to the side and something we have to worry about because we have wombs. Its central to our lives and the full functioning of women as adults and as mothers and as political persons. Only with adequate contraception and all the other rights I’ve enumerated could women get the fuck out of the house and into the public sphere to deal with all that other stuff like the economy and foreign affairs.
THIS. This is the whole enchilada. This is it.
TerryC
@Wilson Heath: They’re married to the bigots, or were.
Gretchen
@bemused: Yes. The young women don’t know what it was like before. They think they have gotten where they are because they’ve competed fairly on a fair field. They flat-out can’t imagine what it was like when the field wasn’t fair, when women couldn’t get a credit card or buy a house or car without her husband’s signature, when she would get fired the minute her employer found out she was pregnant, and certainly couldn’t get a job after the baby was born, when she’d get thrown out of nursing school or lose her teaching job if it was found out she was married, never mind shacking up with someone. I was watching Gilmore Girls with my daughters when they were teens. A major plot point is that the teenage girl aspires to go to Harvard. I told them that when I was her age, I couldn’t aspire to go to Harvard, because they didn’t take girls. They flat-out couldn’t believe it. Why wouldn’t they take girls? I remember when I was in college being told that girls shouldn’t go to medical school because it was “a waste of a place”, because you’d just quit practicing when you had kids. Now more than half of medical students are women, and they just think that’s the way it’s always been, or would have been if girls just tried. I really wish kidz these days knew how much they’ve been given.
AxelFoley
@Roger Moore:
HA! Well played, my friend!
Paul in KY
@Belafon: I would have been too proud to let anyone know, but if it made economic sense, I have been on their policy in a heartbeat.
Paul in KY
@srv: I know why alot of them do, but their reasoning is stupid (IMO).
Paul in KY
@wuzzat: If these ladies are Catholic, you need to talk up Hippy Pope Francis and various comments made by him that national Republicans hate.
johnny aquitard
@jibeaux:
Nothing about being a woman prevents them from being an authoritarian follower or a bigot or a fool as well.
The women who vote republican but don’t like the consequences of republican policies when it affects themselves is classic gooper mindset. And that they keep voting republican despite knowing it is harmful to them is also classic gooper.
Conservatives do this with gay rights, they do this with the environment, they do this with just about everything that is a culture war shibboleth of the right. They will cut their noses off to spite someone else’s face. It’s just how the conservative mind rolls.
johnny aquitard
@aimai:
Conservatives do not believe in democracy.
They do not believe in education.
They do not believe in empowered people.
They do not believe in ‘created equal’ because deep down they do not believe God is equitable or even values all things equally.
They claim they love Jesus, they profess again and again they follow him. Yet again and again they willfully and deliberately ignore the message of the New Testament.
Imagine if conservatives actually believed the gospel of Matthew: “Whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me”.
What sort of political expression would one expect from a person who truly believes that? Gay-bashing? Slut-shaming? Vote suppression? Contempt and aggression toward the most afflicted and the least able in society to defend themselves? Blaming the poor for being poor? Exalting the rich for being rich? A politics of resentment?
I do not see how it is possible for them to truly believe such a gospel and still insist on doing the things they do to the least of us.
Conservatives do what they do because they simply don’t believe in a ‘full membership’ of humanity for people not like them.
JoyfulA
@Gretchen: Not to mention those old Male help-wanteds versus the Female help-wanteds.
wuzzat
@Paul in KY: Most of the Catholics ain’t that Catholic. It’s a “40 minutes out of your week and fish on Fridays” kind of thing, hence all the birth control love. I wish I could figure out how to fix the “weak on foreign policy” meme… Obama and Clinton both get/got that thrown at them by the media, and as far as I can tell, both Bushes had the diplomatic skills of a plastic spork and got a free pass.
JGabriel
wuzzat:
Actually, the elder Bush had decent diplomatic skills. Even Molly Ivins* relates in one of her books how Bush the Elder’s personal relationships with foreign leaders gave him the ability to call them up and discuss diplomatic issues with them as if they were old friends. That’s no mean skill.
Bush pere had crap strategic judgement in my opinion, as show by our lack of engagement in helping the Soviet Union’s transition to democracy, and failing to signal Hussein that there would be repercussions for attacking Kuwait. But strategic judgement is a different beast than diplomatic skill.
(*Edited to Add: I wanted to provide a link for this, but there were just too many search results on “Ivins Bush” to find it. The story I’m thinking of is in her second book, IIRC, if anyone wants to look for it.)
kc
Now does this work?
Cervantes
@JGabriel:
Yes, except that given his experience in the intelligence world, there were episodes — one might even call them apparent failures of diplomacy — from Iran-Contra (yes, at a minimum his staff was involved); to April Glaspie and Saddam Hussein; to Noriega and “Operation Just Cause” — where his “undiplomacy” was so obvious that one had to wonder what skulduggery he might have been up to.
Paul in KY
@wuzzat: Good on ya for trying.