RUSH: The Angry White Women Tour. This is yesterday, NPR, On Point with Tom Ashbrook. He’s talking with Katha Pollitt, who is a columnist for The Nation magazine, and Ashbrook says, ‘Let’s remember Rush Limbaugh, wondering if America wants to watch a president, a woman president ‘age in office.’ Katha Pollitt, you’ve carried the feminist flag for many years.’
POLLITT: Well, I’ve written maaany pieces about the sexist onslaught against Hillary Clinton, which I think is really shocking, just really shocking. You know, here’s something that, uh, listeners can do at home, is just pick a fem — uh, an anti-women insult like ‘ice queen,’ ‘Madame Defarge,’ ‘Lady Macbeth,’ ‘feminazi,’ and all the dirty ones, too.
ASHBROOK: Yeah.
POLLITT: Put it into a search engine in your computer, and you will find hundreds of thousands of hits linking — put that with Hillary Clinton, and you will find hundreds of thousands of hits. And these are not all from nuts on the Internet, um, but they’re from people like Rush Limbaugh. I just think this stuff is so disgusting, so horrible. And yet how did our media come to be controlled by these (laugh) aging frat boys, you know, who are on the radio because nobody wants to watch them age in office, either. They’re not so cute!
RUSH: (laughs) Katha Pollitt is who that was, Mr. Snerdley. She’s a columnist for the Nation. She left out some of the best ones. ‘Nurse Ratched.’ ‘Lady Macbeth’ and ‘Madame Defarge.’ Yeah. But, at any rate, they’re just upset. They’re upset. They think I killed the Hillary campaign. Well, I did. Actually, I did it two ways. Not just the illegal driver’s license issue in New York, but let’s not forget after one of those debates, I actually called her ‘sexy.’ You remember that? Yeah, I’m sure you blocked that out, but I have not forgotten that. Well known ‘white comedian,’ Paul Shanklin, his wife traces Hillary’s decline to that day, when I called her sexy. Katha Pollitt, however, ladies and gentlemen, was not finished. NPR’s Tom Ashbrook said, ‘Does that mean…? Never mind the media for a minute. But is the country over it, or is there still some kind of subterranean resistance to the idea of a woman as president that leads the country to reach out to Barack Obama, or John McCain, or you name it?’
POLLITT: I know people — I know women! — who will say things like, ‘I will never vote for her.’ They’re Democrats; they’re feminists. They will never vote for her. If you say, ‘Well, why is that?’ You get the weirdest answers. For example, uh, one of many old classmates, uh, said, ‘She’s elitist,’ and I’m thinking, ‘Well, let’s see. We both went to Radcliffe.
ASHBROOK: Hmm. Hmmm! Right!
POLLITT: We both live in nice apartments. None of us are there working in a lightbulb factory, but Hillary Clinton is too elitist? I think that there is something that both men and women are, uh — feel deeply threatened in their gender identity by a woman who is frankly ambitious, who is, uh, not, uh, spending her entire life giving them a great big maternal hug.
RUSH: Well, Katha, you’re agonizing here over a lot of things. The answer is right in front of you, why some women aren’t voting for her, why a lot of people aren’t. She’s not likable. When you get down to it — I mean, strip all this other stuff away — she’s just not likable. For all this talk about feminism, she’s where she is because of her last name and she’s where she is because of where her husband went. Now, she might have played a role in getting him there by stomping on the women who might have gotten in his way, but she wouldn’t be where she is if her name wasn’t Clinton. We spent a lot of time on Mrs. Clinton’s policies here, too, Katha. You might want to look at that. You might want to find out. People just don’t like her ideas and her autocratic manner. People are frightened. They think this woman is going to end up becoming a giant dictator, a control freak. Anyway, we’re not going to belabor the point. It appears to be a fait accompli now that the Democrat race is over.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Yeah, everybody is talking about the death of talk radio. The real story is the death of the feminazi! Well, at least the temporary death of the feminazi. They’re always going to be climbing back out of the coffins.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: One more comment here. Katha Pollitt is all upset here what’s happening to the feminists, what’s happening to the people not voting for Hillary; reducing her defeat to cheap criticism from people like me as sexist or whatever. Let me tell you something, Katha. The one person that has taken Hillary Clinton seriously in her public life has been me: analyzing her health care plan, analyzing all of the mechanisms that she screwed up, advising her husband from Paula Jones to any number of things, impeachment. This woman can’t do anything right, and I’m talking about within the realm she claims to be an expert. The other things are just an added bonus. She is Nurse Ratched. She does come across as a domineering, controlling, mean person. But she’s also incompetent, and we have cataloged this. You know, you people out there on the left, you want to criticize talk radio and so forth. Some of the most in-depth analysis of events and of policy is occurring in this country on talk radio, not in the Drive-By Media where they give you sound bites of anywhere from 20 to 40 seconds.
In the meantime, people are out there talking about the end of talk radio, the death of talk radio. The real story with Mrs. Clinton’s demise here is the death of the feminazi. The feminist movement as personified by Mrs. Clinton is dead. She also represents the sixties Baby Boomers on the left. You know, I thought this was going to be an election between a sixties Baby Boomer on the left and a sixties Baby Boomer on the right, like Rudy Giuliani, Romney. This is going to end up being something far more generational than that. But I thought it was going to be the last gasp of the anti-war feminists, the anti-war leftists from the Baby Boom generation. They’re gone! She has been dismissed, is what all of this means. The feminist movement as personified by militant, angry women from the sixties and seventies is dead. It has no influence anymore. It cannot even beat a candidate with no experience, a rookie, who speaks in platitudes.
The real story here with the demise of Mrs. Clinton, Katha, is that the feminist movement has no influence anymore, in a major political sense in this country. We have outlasted it; we have beaten it back. All militant feminism is, by the way, folks, is just one of the many tentacles of liberalism out there, and this tentacle, which is working its way into our… By the way, it’s not dead. It’s not totally dead, but it is been reduced in its national political influence. The tentacles of feminism are still out there screwing up marriages and screwing up child care and this kind of thing, and that’s going to be the case for a long time. Militant feminism gave us the notion that every father is a predator. It gave us the notion that every father is a predator and abuses kids. Those kinds of things are still with us. But in terms of militant feminism as an agenda articulated by a leading feminazi winning elections, it’s not the case.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: By the way, for those of you who subscribe to the Limbaugh Letter, forgive me, I’m gonna give you a little heads up over something that’s coming in the stupid quotes section of the issue currently in the works, the March ’07 issue, because I just finished my brilliant monologue on the death of feminism as represented by the spiraling downward to defeat Hillary Clinton campaign. But I think actually what’s happening here is that some feminazis may be adopting Obama as one of their own. Here’s one of the stupid quotes coming in next month’s issue. It’s from Bonnie Erbe, who is a liberal columnist for Scripps Howard News Service and also hosts the all-feminist chat show on PBS called To the Contrary. Here’s what she said: ‘Metrosexual, pro-choice, pro-health care, anti-poverty Obama is, in every political sense at least, more of a woman than Hillary Clinton.’ So Katha Pollitt, I think you should call Bonnie Erbe and have it out and settle your differences out there.