Hillary's bogus charge against Bernie that he made a sexist remark directed at her during the first DNC Debate two weeks ago was transparently concocted as a campaign "gotcha." Bernie's propensity for fairness and respect is one of his strongest hallmarks, and that alone made Hillary's charge of misogyny against him suspect from the get go.
Add to that the fact that the comment in question was one that Bernie has delivered numerous times this Primary season as a standard part of his stump speech - and also add to that her delivery of the accusation (10 days after the "insult") was in this VA speech, which was her first mention of it, presented in high dudgeon, followed by a knowing smirk.
It's a campaign gotcha of the most orchestrated and disingenuous kind. Hillary and her staff know, as anyone familiar with Bernie's campaign does (and they are certainly very familiar with his campaign) that the "let's stop shouting about gun control and have a national conversation" comment is his standard stump line on the subject (because he actually wants to get something significant done about it) - and stump lines become debate responses when a candidate is in the pressure cooker situation that national debates create for them. Her framing of it as "I've been told to stop shouting" is as phony and theatrical as her feigned umbrage was in that video.
But for those who are still of a mind to defend this ploy of Hillary's, let me show you, below the orange tangled web, how such an underhanded dig can easily and dishonestly be concocted out of the thinnest of pretexts.
In the electronic media, perhaps Hillary's most vociferous supporter in this controversy has been Melissa McEwan, owner of the Shakesville blog. Her commentary has been much referred to on this site and elsewhere by Hillary supporters with respect to the misogyny charge against Bernie. Just yesterday morning a rec'd diary linked to this post of hers that does so, most directly.
There's a lot wrong with this Shakesville post - including, perhaps most egregiously, McEwan's own purposeful misconstruing of this comment by Bernie,
All that I can say is I am very proud of my record on women's issues. I certainly do not have a problem with women speaking out—and I think what the secretary is doing there is taking words and misapplying them
to become, as McEwan twists it:
doubling down by accusing Clinton of being an oversensitive hysteric.
Interesting, no? Bernie saying "I think (she's)...taking words and misapplying them" becomes his calling Hillary "an oversensitive hysteric." (Hysteria, btw, is
a word that was borne of misogyny in ancient Greece.) I'll let others take that one apart, although it probably isn't really necessary.
But I digress. That Shakesville post is most informative to this issue in the following regard, as I've indicated above and in the title of this diary: it contains the seeds of what could be made into a baseless charge of prejudice against Ms McEwan. Check out this passage from the same post:
Wow. So, treating as laughable the suggestion that the language he used has a misogynist connotation, even if it wasn't intended that way, citing his record on women's issues (I bet some of his best friends are women!), and accusing Hillary Clinton of misunderstanding and looking for things to get mad about. ONE MORE SQUARE AND I'LL HAVE BINGO.
See, here's the thing: I am willing (barely) to take it in good faith that Sanders didn't intend to accuse Clinton of shouting, but was instead, as he further claims, referring to the general tone of the gun debate in the US. But who cares. The reality is that, by all appearances, he was accusing Clinton of shouting, and that necessarily carries with it a context repeatedly and ubiquitously used to discredit outspoken women.
See that? Melissa McEwan is an anti Semite! Don't get it? How insensitive can you be! First off, she's talking about Bernie, who's an elderly Jew, and she makes a snide remark about BINGO, the stereotypical gambling game of Florida Jewish retirees! And then to top it off, she makes a sly reference to the Shylock stereotype, the shifty old Hebrew whose word can 'barely" be taken at face value. Can't see it? You must be an anti Semite yourself!
And what's more, even if she didn't mean it that way, she should have known that that set of images
"necessarily carries with it a context repeatedly and ubiquitously used to discredit (senior Jews)"
(her words, after all) and her failure to apologize becomes her condemnation!
That's how you make that kind of bullshit up. And if you say that the rationale I've laid out for making that anti Semitic charge against McEwan is bogus and flimsy on its face, of course you'd be absolutely right. But if you compare my tongue in cheek rationale above to the trope that Hillary's crew has trotted out in an attempt to smear Bernie, well, one is just about as flimsy and concocted as the other is.
But if you're following is large and ardent enough, you might be able to pull off hanging the a manufactured racist mantle on the person who haplessly made those "anti Semitic" comments, just as you might be able to label Bernie a sexist for folding in a line from his stump speech as he responded to Hillary's denigration of his gun control positions during the debate...
...you might succeed, that is, as long as the person you're purposely maligning doesn't have a pretty sterling reputation and an engaged, alert set of his own followers.