PUNDIT WATCH
Douglas, Susan
PUNDIT WATCH Susan Douglas Snide Celebrations The last weekend in August marked the seventy-fifth anniversary of the ratification of women's suffrage, and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the...
...One of them, John Podhoretz of the new conservative rag The Standard, actually said on national television that the drop in weekly movie attendance from 1946 (90 million) to 1995 (25 million) "can only be explained by a decline in standards, a decline in quality, and a decline in taste...
...Well, hell, who wants to look at old footage of all those angry, karate-chopping, humorless, castrating Amazons anyway...
...We learned that Pat Buchanan wants a wall at least along the entire Mexican border...
...It's important to give such erudite policy analysts national air time...
...Over on This Week With David Brinkley, the lead question was, "Is Hillary Clinton's decision to go to China the right one...
...His accent was vaguely South African, and he spoke of immigrants as if they were body lice...
...The Tongue"—and didn't treat him like the pathetic, obnoxious, justice-obstructing boor he clearly is...
...The previous week, McLaughlin hosted a debate that asked, "Is the entertainment industry poisoning our values...
...Except for Hillary...
...Oh boy, more Hillary bashing...
...Because seventy-five years after getting the right to vote, we've come a long way, baby.M Susan Douglas teaches at Hampshire College...
...And the estimated 50,000 women in Beijing are probably just there to gossip and shop anyway...
...According to Republican pundits, she'll be endorsing slave labor and the forced abortion of female fetuses...
...The panelists were all white males...
...Evans and Novak, on CNN (with Fred Barnes sitting in for Rowland Evans), gave a half-hour of deeply respectful air time to Bob Packwood—a.k.a...
...The week before, when Roberts told Brinkley that Shannon Faulkner's withdrawal from the Citadel did a great disservice to women and hurts the cause of women's equality, Brinkley responded with mock concern, "We feel for you, Cokie...
...Television news made fleeting reference to the suffrage anniversary, and our newspaper of record, The New York Times, ignored it entirely...
...I guess it was really silly of me to think that this summer, when anniversary celebrations both jubilant and somber have been incessant, anyone would take note of feminist achievements...
...I know that during the coverage of Beijing, the media and pundits alike will explore the substantive issues raised there, that they won't simply dog Hillary, and they certainly won't seek out conflict so they can make the conference seem like a giant, international cat fight among unreasonable, strident harridans who just can't get along...
...How does McLaughlin do it—find a guy who somehow missed the invention of TV, suburbia, and the VCR...
...His comportment was that of a Rottweiler who had never known the benefits of a rabies vaccination...
...Cokie Roberts noted regretfully at the end of the discussion that "I wanted to celebrate the seventy-fifth anniversary of women's suffrage, but we're out of time...
...Unfortunately, at the end of August the regulars are on vacation, and McLaughlin does theme shows with guests who don't usually serve as pundits...
...Yeah, well, anything that might draw attention to the millions of women around the world who live in abject poverty, suffer genital mutilation, die unnecessarily in childbirth, or are battered by male relatives is probably inconsequential...
...It might suggest that anniversaries involving women are just as important as those involving men...
...Novak, in his closing encomium to Packwood, hailed him as "a fighter...
...But not so out of time that Will couldn't add sarcastically, "And it made the United States a paradise...
...Packwood pooh-poohed those trivial charges of sexual harassment as twenty-year-old news and then jovially recounted a story about how another Senator came up to him during the Senate Ethics Committee hearings and said, "Boy, I'm glad that's not me...
...The pundits chose a variety of touching tributes to commemorate these feminist milestones...
...No one even mentioned the strike, which back in 1970 was the largest feminist demonstration in history, and thus was a front-page story and dominated the nightly news...
...At least they aren't out of the mainstream the way those crazed feminists are...
...Oh well, that's OK...
...If that was me, we'd have to hold hearings in RFK Stadium...
...But at least this nativist ranting distracts attention away from the soaring emigration of jobs out of the country, sponsored by corporations especially fond of underpaid and overworked child and female labor...
...His position, if I am summarizing it correctly, is that we should halt all immigration tomorrow, possibly by walling in the entire country...
...As George Will put it, her attendance "completes the de-moralization of Hillary Clinton...
...Guest pundit William Kristol announced that "there's no national interest in Hillary Clinton going to China" for the international women's conference because "it's not an important conference...
...More chuckles all around...
...Their descendants now boast of such roots when running for President...
...The commemorations didn't stop here...
...It would be helpful if viewers were reminded that by 1920, in cities like New York, Chicago, and Detroit, "native Americans and their offspring" were already greatly outnumbered—by as much as three-to-one—by the foreign-born and by children born here of foreign-born parents...
...None of that will happen...
...Iknow you're waiting to hear about the festivities over on The McLaughlin Group...
...McLaughlin kept getting hysterical over the invasion of the immigrants and the "browning of America," warning that "native Americans [he doesn't mean Indians] and their offspring will become a minority in their own nation before the end of the next century...
...Her column appears in this space every month...
...PUNDIT WATCH Susan Douglas Snide Celebrations The last weekend in August marked the seventy-fifth anniversary of the ratification of women's suffrage, and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Women's Strike for Equality, a huge nationwide demonstration by feminists that announced the arrival of the women's liberation movement...
...was about immigration and featured Peter Brimelow, author of an anti-immigration diatribe called Alien Nation...
...Har, har, har: big, goofy, boys-will-be-boys chuckles from Barnes and Novak, whose laughter endorsed the notion that forcibly french-kissing your seventeen-year-old intern, not to mention twenty-some-odd other women, is simply a Senatorial perk, nothing the skirts should get so riled up about...
...This one—entitled "Is it time to shut the gates...
Vol. 59 • October 1995 • No. 10
