Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Vocabulary Annotation 2 - Updated

This just in. A new definition of chutzpah, courtesy of Maureen Dowd: "Mrs. Obama is the new, unwilling contestant in Round Two of the sulfurous national game of 'Kill the witch.'

Update: It seems we are in for a bumper crop of chutzpah this year. Not surprising, when you think about it. People who stoked the fires of an orgy and danced around the rising flames in full-throated, abandoned glee, even though they continue to harbor that same lust, don't like to admit it in the light of day. So they lower their adjectival decibel level a bit, and point at somebody else. Mirrors are definitely verboten.

So... I'll periodically add new entries to the Chutzpah Chronicle.

The latest: Frank Rich, as acutely captured by BTD today. This particular specimen, like Dowd's piece, is the commentariat species of the genus, I'm Not a Sexist -- Only Republicans Do That. Other rapidly growing mutations of this virus are the variants, Yes, There Is Sexism, But It's Not Why Hillary Lost... and Isn't It Possible To Hate Hillary and Not Be a Misogynist?

Another subspecies: I Can't Hear You. La la la la la. I'm Not Listening. Do de do de do. As in Daily Obama's lead diarists devoting exactly one commentary in their "Why Hillary Lost" fest to the issue.

And one more -- this the most familiar (sadly) of all: Sure the Bitch Don't Like It When I Smack Her Around a Bit, But She Asked for It... and Besides, What's She Gonna Do? Leave the Kids? Latest entry, as (somewhat ruefully, but still cluelessly) described by Keith Olbermann's producer in the profile of KO in the latest New Yorker:

... just as Obama must work to win Clinton supporters for the fall campaign, Phil Griffin has to repair a fractured audience base, a portion of which saw sexism in his network’s Clinton coverage and vowed to boycott MSNBC. Griffin knows that some of that anger is aimed at his star anchor. "It was, like, you meet a guy and you fall in love with him, and he’s funny and he’s clever and he’s witty, and he’s all these great things," Griffin said of the relationship between Olbermann and the Clinton supporters among his viewers. "And then you commit yourself to him, and he turns out to be a jerk and difficult and brutal. And that is how the Hillary viewers see him. It’s true. But I do think they’re going to come back. There’s nowhere else to go.”
Update 2: Chutzpah of the hedged New Yorker variety: Hedrik Hertzberg -- he of the encomium to Chris Matthews and the remarkable assertion that demonstrating in favor of counting votes is the same as demonstrating against counting them -- offers his so-thoughtful reflection on the need for Obama to reach out to Hillary's erroneously aggrieved women supporters... and for them to respond in grateful kind.

Please feel free to use the comments to continue fleshing out this emergent epidemiological morphology.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I couldn't agree more. How can the unabashed and venomous leader of round one dare to take umbrage at "round two of the sulfurous national game of 'kill the witch'." This makes her the most hypocritical and disingenuous columnist in America, she who has taken blatant misogyny and prejudice to a heretofore unimagined level. As an aside, her writing is disorganized and tangential...she should be off the NYTimes OpEd. Now.

Falstaff said...

They would probably replace her with Camille Paglia: http://www.salon.com/opinion/paglia/2008/06/11/hillary/