Hell hath no fury like...
...Women whose candidate has been scorned by Chris Matthews.
Here's some of what these women are mad about:
Using overtly sexist language, (Chris Matthews) has referred to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) as a "she devil" and compared her to a "strip-teaser." He has called her "witchy" and likened her voice to "fingernails on a blackboard." He has referred to men who support her as "castratos in the eunuch chorus." He has suggested Clinton is not "a convincing mom" and said "modern women" like Clinton are unacceptable to "Midwest guys." He has called her "Madame Defarge" and "Nurse Ratched."
After Clinton won the New Hampshire Democratic primary, Matthews asserted: "[T]he reason she may be a front-runner is her husband messed around." He described her performance at a debate last Saturday as apparently "good enough to seem good enough here for women who wanted to root for her anyway."
His sexism is hardly limited to comments about Clinton. During coverage of the New Hampshire primary, he said that Clinton is the only viable woman presidential candidate "on the horizon." He couldn't think of a single female governor eligible to run: "Where are the big-state women governors?" he asked. "Where are they? Name one." In fact, several of the states that currently have women governors are comparable in population to the states in which the male presidential candidates serve or have served as governor.
In November 2006, shortly after the Democrats took the majority in Congress, Matthews asked a guest if then-presumptive speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) was "going to castrate Steny Hoyer" if Hoyer (D-MD) were elected House majority leader.
During coverage of a presidential debate last spring, NBC News chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell was compelled to remind Matthews that Sen. Barack Obama's (D-IL) wife, Michelle, is a Harvard-educated lawyer after he focused obsessively on her physical appearance.
The good news is that people are speaking out against Matthews' flagrant, persistent sexism.
Of the New Hampshire primary results, the blog TalkLeft, observed:
"It was a revolt of women sick and tired of the likes of Chris Tweety Matthews and the Media Misogynists.
Barack Obama did not lose New Hampshire. The Media did. Their misogynist hatred of Hillary Clinton was soundly rejected by the voters. Especially the women voters of New Hampshire...
A backlash against Obama?
Ohio resident named Cynthia Ruccia, a spokesperson and organizer for a group calling itself "Clinton Supporters Count Too." She said the group -- numbering in the hundreds, and organized in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Michigan -- stands ready to boycott the Democratic Party if Clinton doesn't win the nomination, and will work against superdelegates who support Obama over Clinton as a means of registering their displeasure with the party.
"We have a plan to campaign against the Democratic nominee," the group said in a press release Thursday. "We have the (wo)manpower and the money to make our threat real. And there are millions of supporters who will back us up in the swing states. If you don’t listen to our voice now, you will hear from us later."
Ruccia tells ABC News that she believes "millions" of women share her group's views, though they have only begun to make contact with like-minded women. They're disgusted, she said, that Democratic Party leaders haven't more aggressively denounced sexist media comments and coverage in the campaign, and are angry at the drumbeat for Clinton to get out of the race.
"We're just at the boiling point," Ruccia said. "Women will sit back and be quiet about things for a while, but we've had enough. Unless Hillary Clinton is our nominee, we are not going to support the nominee...."
People who argue against Hillary as VP are braindead. The numbers Obama will lose without her could be staggering.
