Tina Brown Exemplifies the 'War on Women'
First a clarification to The Daily Beast’s editor-in-chief Tina Brown: Gargoyles are supposed to ward off evil spirits. That “appalling cast of tabloid gargoyles” was what the rest of us like to call courageous whistleblowers participating in freedom of the press.
Brown’s gargoyle reference appeared in her article “How Monica Lewinsky Changed the Media.” It probably shouldn’t be acknowledged as anything more than the snarling, saliva-dripping nastygram that it reads like. It seems that in light of Ms. Lewinsky’s latest Vanity Fair interview, the liberals are afraid all the old scandals will create a mudslide on the internet highway as they contemplate a Hillary run in 2016.
Brown correctly states that Matt Drudge changed the face of news when he broke the story that our President was having an affair with an intern; but she intentionally puts the cart before the horse: Bill Clinton changed the presidency forever before any of that happened. And while Drudge has to be credited with being the first to use this modern technology to usher in a new age of information dissemination, the fact remains that with the advent of the internet, it was inevitable that news coverage would change forever with our without him. The early bird got the worm.
Brown’s latest rant sounded like a crabby old woman who hates the world for leaving her behind. Perhaps she never wanted the media to change, never wanted technology to advance. Maybe she preferred to keep Woodward and Bernstein slumped over their typewriters hunting and pecking with their index fingers as they performed a carefully controlled demolition of the president from behind their wooden desks.
The problem liberals have with the internet is that it’s open to anyone. The problem Tina Brown has with Fox News is that more people choose to watch it than any other cable news channel. No one is holding a gun to viewers’ heads to control their remote. One must conclude that the problem liberals have is with freedom itself.
Worst of all, Brown’s article personifies the aggressive “war on women” that the Democratic Party keeps fighting, even as they throw red herrings toward Republicans to distract from their own denigration of American women.
Surely denigration is an accurate description of what Brown’s article does to Lewinsky, Linda Tripp and Lucianne Goldberg. Brown attempts to belittle Lewinsky for using her notoriety to produce a handbag line and doing an HBO documentary. Contradictorily, she criticizes her for “going far enough away to escape” the aftereffects of the Clinton scandal.
Like a teenager in a brat pack, she goes on to attack the physical appearance of all three women. She scoffs at Lewinsky for appearing in a “seductive sofa pose” instead of as an “unretouched…real 40-year-old woman.” Goldberg she describes as “cackling,” just so there’s no confusion about the “witch” insinuation; and for Tripp she reserves the harshest rhetoric, attacking her clothing and hairstyle -- sixteen years later -- and saying she looked like a “drag queen.” (I assume using this as a derogatory term is okay with the LGBT community, but I’m guessing if any other news sites said Brown looked like a man-suited lesbian, some group would be up in arms.)
Brown’s column exemplified liberal spin, passing the blame and stomping out personal responsibility. Nice try Brown, but “the things that shocked us” were our president’s actions, lies and cover up; not how the information was obtained or disseminated.
The liberally concocted Republican “war on women” has droned on my ears. I have seen the lines at the food pantries; they are mostly women, most of whom have only entered the ranks of the hungry or unemployed since Obama took office. There are your war refugees.
I’ve seen the liberal war on women. I’ve seen them say they wish Sarah Palin would be gang raped; I’ve heard them tell a female Republican Senator, “I want to rip out your uterus and eat it.” I’ve seen women attack God and life itself in a faith-mocking, baby-killing PSA. I’ve seen Michele Bachmann demoralized by other women in a way that can only be called nauseating. Somehow though, in a political piñata game, liberals spin women around and point them away from their real victimizers.
Tina Brown concludes her article by saying that Bill Clinton’s slimy offenses heralded the “death of privacy” simply because the media covered them. Liberals still don’t understand how a president making an executive decision -- that may involve sending Americans to their death -- could be adversely affected by having oral sex performed on him under his desk as he did so. They also never understood how such actions could lead to blackmailing the most powerful man in the world, or how such blackmailing could have disastrous effects for our country.
Do you really want to go there Ms. Brown? Because conservative women are ready for it. We’ve got a ton of stories to tell your highly coveted voting Millenials around the campfire; ancient stories that include courageous women like Paula Jones and Juanita Broaddrick .
We know you already told Hillary she shouldn’t run in 2016, so what’s up your sleeve? Maybe, by the look on your face in that humungous picture you display over everything you write, you are contemplating running for the highest office yourself. Wait, that’s not possible because you didn’t become a U.S. citizen until 2005.
No matter, I’m sure Tattler is looking for a good feature writer to highlight their “frothing world” of gossip. Maybe it’s time for you and Piers Morgan to leave the colonies and book a steamer back to England. You can always go back to writing fashion and idle talk for the British aristocracy. You see we Yanks don’t take too kindly to having cheeky Fleet Street Brits coming over to give us lectures on the “death of privacy.” We call it hypocrisy.
Susan D. Harris can be reached at http://susandharris.com/