Transference
I wasn’t reading the Blogger Boyz back when the Iraq invasion was a-cooking, so I don’t have muscle memory of their bellicosity. But in Bad Mother, Anglachel makes a persuasive psychological case that war guilt is partly behind the BB’s hatred of Hillary:
Josh Marshall, Matt Yglesias, Mark Kleiman, Kevin Drum, and any number of other high profile bloggers were all rah-rah war supporters when it first began. They had no real reason to support it besides wanting to kill people and get some revenge. They were reading the New York Times and Judith Miller and gulping the White House kool-aide as avidly as they gulp Obama’s kool-aide today. C’mon, c’mon, c’mon, we gotta get Saddam! They swore by Colin Powell. If Powell said there was proof, well, by golly, that was good enough for them.
~snip~
Then the war goes tits over teakettle and they realize that they are on the losing side of the argument. They are guilty as hell for having brought their considerable intellectual talents to bear on promoting an unjustified war and they want to blame someone else for their bad judgment. I know, Hillary made me do it! She should have been a better mommy and kept me from indulging in my murderous desires! Bad Mommy! Bad!
The fact that she will not join in their villification of her, refusing to be badgered into admitting that she made her decisions on the same basis as they did (reasons they project onto her), saying clearly that she made what she thought was the right decision at the time, drives them even more batshit insane. They want Mommy to kiss it and make it better and she said tough luck, kiddos, learn to live with your mistakes. They want someone else to take on their guilt, to relieve them of their sins against the body politic, and she is not going to let them off the hook. Their fanatical identification with Obama in no small part is because of their wishful thinking that if they glom onto someone who denounced the war when they were beating the war drums, this someway, somehow, will absolve them of their trangressions.
I’ve long believed that a mommy complex is part of the Hillary problem for a lot of men, so this rings true to me. What do you think?
13 Responses to “Transference”
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Red Queen says:
I hadn’t thought about the mommy complex side of it, but it makes sense.
I do think that Hillary can’t come out against her vote because unlike Edwards, she would be brutalized as woman who can’t be trusted on decisions about wars and serious boys stuff. And I think it’s incredibly dishonest of anyone to claim otherwise.
March 17th, 2008 at 8:52 pm EST -
tdraicer says:
Sounds right to me. Of course we could e-mail them a copy and ask them.
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atheist woman says:
Delurk. Of course it is a mommy thing. The mommy factor is the only way to ever explain the bruhaha over her clothes, as women in this culture could only ever be virgins/mothers or whores (cleavage aaaah). The fact that she supported the war only further messes with their psyches, as that shows she isn’t NURTURING.
That reminds me. Why the spaghetti monster did Anyone Ever Support This War? I just don’t get it.
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therealUK says:
Anglachel does some interesting posts.
The “Mommy” thing (along with all the rest of the sexist baggage) is a factor in the way all(*) men relate to women, HRC no exception.
And that she just won’t fit into the boxes they insist on trying to shove her into makes them extra extra mad, and send them straight into “burn the witch” mode.
(*) rare exceptions are the actual grown-up men, but of course they’re the very ones who don’t actually need this footnote.
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/ehj2 says:
Since I so frequently agree with you, this is frustrating. But here goes.
The Democrats who bothered to go read the NIE (National Intelligence Estimate) on Iraq, not just the summary provided by the White House (a document which a member of a minority party should view with some skepticism), voted against the war.
Hillary didn’t bother to read the NIE, voted for the war and supported the White House in all sorts of heinous crimes against humanity and the Constitution, and has thus contributed to one of the most insane and costly errors of this country in its history.
We’re now beginning to look at a $3 trillion dollar bill for a war that Bush said God told him to enter, that Wolfowitz declared would “pay for itself,” and that Rumsfeld infamously said would only require 30,000 troops and — significantly and stupidly, for the head of the Department of Defense, an agency almost notorious for its deep strategic planning — no plan.
Gutting and bankrupting your own country and the very instruments of governance while sowing discord throughout the Middle East and lying to your allies should be a career ender.
As a so-called feminist, Hillary supported a war that has made the lives of millions of women, from Afghanistan to Iraq and Palestine, far worse off.
As a feminist, Hillary supported a war that has cost the mothers of thousands of Americans their children. Do you honestly believe there’s anything she can do to make up for that?
How do I explain to my neighbor, who has lost a child in this war, that your Hillary is a feminist or even a humanist — when she didn’t even bother to read the relevant documents that would have assisted her in making an informed decision for this strategic vote?
Are you and your readers familiar with the term “due diligence”? In essence, the more you have at risk, the harder you are obligated to work to ensure risk management and a tolerable (if not favorable) outcome.
Hillary had her 3:00 a.m. call — and she answered decisively and wrongly.
I’m sorry, but Hillary Clinton is the wrong feminist for the White House.
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The Ghost of Violet says:
So you didn’t vote for Kerry in 2004?
Kerry didn’t read it either, because he was briefed personally. As was Hillary.
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/ehj2 says:
i’m sure you know the fancy latin phrase for the fallacy of argument by change of subject; but, deftly done.
let’s recall, however, that we’re still talking primary here, not general election. to answer your question, i voted for kerry (and you’ll probably also recall his vacillation on this issue, for which he was villified); to answer your unstated question, i will vote for hillary if she wins the primary, as she’s still a better feminist and humanist than mccain.
but my point is that we can’t hold hillary up as a leader of the progressive movement, or the feminist movement. and she can’t hold herself up as some kind of strategic wise woman for taking 3:00 am calls. her standing ovation during bush’s address on the “success” of the “surge” places her in the wrong camp STILL on this issue — and being wrong on war is as wrong as you can be.
to make this as clear as i can — in the heinous fantasy of preventive war, we’ve now dropped hundreds of tons of depleted uranium on a country defended by teenagers in pajamas with $50 rifles, and hillary is still cheering.
—
oh, and not all the democrats who read the NIE voted against the war. i meant to change the term “democrat” to something more subjective, like “intelligent progressives,” before i pressed “post” …
if hillary really was the leader of her party and its philosophy, the true heir of her husband’s international situational awareness, as she claims — and the feminist champion you claim — she herself would have organized a group reading of the NIE with her party before that vote.
the republicans have never entered war without using the moment to weaken the constitution and strengthen the oval office. she was willing to pay that price to “look strong on defense” in a 2008 presidential election. and she helped take us to war against a country the NIE clearly stated had no weapons of mass destruction.
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The Ghost of Violet says:
ehj2, I oppose the war as much as you do. I wish Hillary hadn’t voted for it. But it seems to me you’re falling into the typical anti-Hillary rhetoric that she personally led us into war.
When the Iraq vote came up she was in the second year of her first Senate term. She was a junior Senator, not a leader of the party by any means.
As for choosing between Democrats, there is no question in my mind that overall Hillary possesses superior judgment to Obama. The more I see of the latter the less I respect him. In fact I would say now that he strikes me as a person with exceedingly poor judgment who simply cannot be trusted with much of anything.
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/ehj2 says:
Dr. Violet,
I will happily work for and vote for Hillary when she wins the primary.
Thank you for your incredible and unflagging support for her here.
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Ugh says:
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julia says:
Can I remind everyone of something?
Obama has always voted to fund the war,
He is the 4th biggest recipeint of military funding.
It makes me crazy to see his supporters shout that he is the one who will get us out of Iraq. We have built million dollar military bases in Iraq that are comfortable gated villages. They were not built for the Iraquis,
but to house American militia and private contractors. Whoever ‘wins’ the election will not end the war, and it makes me so mad to see HC called a ‘war horse’. If BO had been a senator for as long as she has, he’d have voted for it - sentaors are bought, the front runners have little
choice. Look at so-called progressive Peter DeFazio (OR) who is only a congressman - I know he is against the war but if votes to stop funding it, goodbye job.It seems to me that if somehow Obama did ‘win’, he would be in an extremely delicate position and
his life would depend on following corporate rules. And thus ’staying the course’. -
Ugh says:
Here is a link to an old Media Girl post about the infamous “pie fight” blow up:
http://mediagirl.org/blog/medi.....ics-hubrisKos hasn’t changed. Some “feminist” bloggers have sucked up to the big Blogger Boyz for career reasons, but the Boyz haven’t changed at all.
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Violet says:
Someone pointed me to this diary at MyDD about what current anti-war Obama supporters thought back in 2004.
The hypocrisy of the Blogger Boyz is astounding. In 2004 Josh Marshall wrote that:
“Voting for the war resolution was not remotely the same thing as going to war at the first possible opportunity.
“Forcing inspections meant seeing what inspections would yield. And seeing what inspections would yield was the best insurance against getting ourselves into the current situation and finding that the WMD, which constituted the premise for the whole endeavor, didn’t even exist.”
Now, of course, Hillary’s vote for the AUMF means that she was personally responsible for starting the war. In fact she’s personally responsible for every drop of blood. Hell, she just voted for the AUMF because she’s an evil sadistic monster who wanted Iraqi orphans to suffer.
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