June 28, 2005

Ed Klein's dirty secret? . . .

by

Another angle on the attack by Ed Klein against Hillary Clinton that got little attention amongst all the right wing commentators knocking Klein last week comes from Tina Brown, who, in her Washington Post column, speculates that “Maybe it’s a secret fantasy of girl-on-girl action that makes Ed Klein obsess about Sen. Hillary Clinton’s supposed lesbian ethos.” Brown notes that “Every time Klein describes anyone female in Hillary Clinton’s circle, you hear the clump clump clump of stereotype-lesbian footwear. Melanne Verveer, her White House East Wing chief of staff, is ‘dark haired and mannish-looking.’ Susan Thomases has ‘frizzy salt-and-pepper hair, frumpy clothes, down-at-the-heel shoes and an expletive-laden vocabulary.’ Evelyn Lieberman, the White House deputy chief of staff, is ‘short, a little overweight with grayish hair,’ while the orientation of the Hillary-driven picks for Cabinet appointments, Donna Shalala and Janet Reno, ‘are shrouded in deep ambiguity’ (not).” The approach failed with conservatives, says Brown, because “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that misogyny is a sure boomerang.” It failed with many others because it begged the question: “At what point is a successful woman permitted to move on? If George W. Bush can be born again and be absolved for his dopey frat-boy past and eat his National Guard records, when does Hillary get to slough off the ancient scaly legends of her relationship with Bill . . . ?”

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.

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