Quote:
Originally Posted by SEC_Chick
I guess I am just tired of the left's belated enlightenment on things. Like when Romney was mocked for his 80's foreign policy, but what do you know? Russia is a super serious threat now. And the pieces about Bill come out only after they ridiculed Romney for his binders of women and Pence for trying to remain above reproach in relationships with women (though I hate Pence and calling his wife "Mother" is totally worthy of being mocked).
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With apologies to the Sermon on the Mount, what bothers you is not that the enlightenment is belated, it's that the vision of justice is partial. I think your point is a variant of Matthew 7:3-5: Why does the left focus on the beam in the Right's eye instead of the mote in its own? Those hypocrites should first get the mote out of their own eye, and only then will they be in the position to righteously do something about the Roy Moores of the world.
No one is pure in politics, and if you want to dwell on hypocrisy, there's plenty to go around.
It can't have escaped you that conservatives used attacks on Bill Clinton to weaken Hillary Clinton. They said they were doing it at the time. Now, Bill Clinton's fans in the Democratic Party aren't on the left. He scored short-term political points again and again through a succession of Sister Souljah moments, constantly triangulating, more often than not for his own transient purposes rather than to accomplish liberal goals. So a lot of lefties have a lot of complaints about him, and his treatment of women (including Hillary) is only a part of it. But Hillary means a lot to a lot of women (some of whom I live with) and they weren't interested in dragging her down, which is why you are hearing some of this about only now that she has stepped off the stage (is she gone yet?). Is that principled? Obviously it depends on which principles matter most to you, because there are trade-offs.
I never thought that Bill saw women just as women. I never thought of him as a likely rapist, even though I found it easy to see him as a harasser. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but that's how I read him. With Romney and Pence, something different is at play. With both of them, it seems to me that their religious views make it too easy for them to see women as a different species, and when Romney talks about binders of women and Pence won't meet with women to remain above reproach, both are suffering from a cramped understanding of the essential humanity of half of the species, calling to mind Simone de Beauvoir's quote that "Man is defined as a human being and woman as a female – whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male." Neither Romney nor Pence, whatever their other qualities, seem able to see women as fully human. Whatever Bill Clinton's other deficits, his relationship with Hillary suggests that's not his problem. YMMV.
