Like Maria Said Paz: Sandra Bernhard

Thursday, November 05, 2020

Sandra Bernhard

We're noting comics this go round for a theme post. We're all waiting for results and maybe now's a good time for laughter?

Sandra Bernhard came along in the early 80s with her own style.

"Here we go again (Ava and C.I.)" (THE COMMON ILLS):

Last night, as Joe Biden floundered, FACEBOOK rushed to assure everyone that he was still alive.

"Joe Biden is live now." If only the campaign were.

The day after the election and six states not yet called and 83 electoral votes up for grabs. It's anyone's race. Here we go again.

Come on now
Oh oh oh oh oh
Here we, here we, here we go again
Well, boy

I caught you slipping (mmm), ooh, you must be trippin'
'Cause now I know, oh, yes I know, mmm
About your other girls in your past, in your black book
A very long time ago, oh oh oh oh
Well, you must think I'm crazy
You must think I'm blind
If you want to keep me, boy
Then stop wasting my time

Here we go again
It's the same old song
You're thinking you're gon' do me
Like the other ones before, baby
Here we go again
It's the same old song
Ooh, straighten up your act
Or else I'm walking out the door

All this time (all this time) I thought that I (I)
Was the one who had the problem, oh yeah, mmm
I gave you everything, hoping things might change
But still you ain't around, so, whoa oh oh
You must think I'm foolish (oh yeah)
You must think I'm blind (Do you think I'm blind?)
If you want (if you want) my precious love (my precious love)
Then stop telling me lies (stop wasting, wasting my time)

-- "Here We Go Again," written by Troy Lee Broussard,Trina Broussard, Jermaine Dupri, Trey Lorenz, Mauro Malavasi, David Romani and Wayne Garfield, first appears on Aretha Franklin's A ROSE IS STILL A ROSE.

Here we go again.

If anyone's image is improved right now, if anyone's stock is on the rise, it's Hillary Clinton's and, no, we're not joking.

Joe may yet pull out a victory. But that's not what he promised -- a squeaker. He and his whores swore he was going to beat Donald Trump and beat Donald in a landslide. We're not just talking about the polls in the lead up to the general election, we're talking about from 2019 and forward. He had, what was the word? Oh, yeah: Electability.

The unstated implication was that Hillary didn't have it.

He was going to be better than Hillary. Why was that again? Help us out?

Because he was promising better programs than she did?

No, that wasn't it.

Because America would unite together for the historic first of electing a White man president?

No, not that either.

Because he was such a better speaker than she was?

No, no.

What was it?

Oh, yeah, because he had a penis. It probably no longer functioned as a sex organ but he had a penis. That's what this was about from day one. Woody Harrelson nailed it in the first SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE skit when he told America to rest at ease: Daddy's home.

All it took was that dangling Y chromosome -- that was the unspoken but implicit promise.

The 2020 election was all about disrespecting women.

We realized that back in February but leave it to professional bachelor Keith Olbermann to come along yesterday and really nail the point down.

Tuesday Keith Tweeted, "Yes, @realDonaldTrump has always been, will always be, and on the day of his bid for re-election, still is: a whiny little Kunta Kinte."

Poor Keith, it wasn't the mid '00s and people weren't so desperate for anyone to call out Bully Boy Bush that they'd look the other way. Instead, he was slammed for racism. (Kunta Kinte first appears in Alex Haley's 1976 ROOTS and when the book was turned into a mini-series in 1977 LeVar Burton and John Amos played the role.)

Faced with an outcry, Keith deleted the Tweet. After the deletion he Tweeted, "I was using an old 70's-80's technique for calling somebody a c*** without writing/saying c***, just using a sound-alike to call Trump a c***. Deleting previous, largely because this one clarifies the c*** part.''

Confronted with his racism, Keith struggles to stay aloft and figures the best way to do so is with sexism.

The c-word. It's an insult to women in the US. In 2008, it was pretty much shocking to see Matthew Rothschild and others using the word and giggling over it. Matthew giggled at the so-called PROGRESSIVE about an anti-Hillary group whose initials spelled the c-word. The words become less shocking -- how quickly and how coarsely our discourse has become -- and we usually refer to it as Cher's favorite word.

But back to Keith. There he is, in trouble, desperate to save himself from charges of racism and he offers sexism. And he does so because this country doesn't give two s**ts about sexism or about women. That's the reality 2020 drove home.

Elizabeth Warren and Tulsi Gabbard were both on the receiving end of sexism. It's easy to chart that. But it's equally true that all of the women running for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination were targeted with sexism. That was especially obvious early on with Kirsten Gillibrand who was attacked by Al Franken's fools. Al had multiple complaints from multiple women. He also had a damning photo that the USO found both disgusting and embarrassing. Because Kirsten led the calls for his resignation -- a resignation Al went along with -- she was attacked repeatedly in 'progressive' circles.

History was re-written by Al Franken and his idiot cult who astro-turfed over the reality that Al supported the Iraq War. Who ignored his non-stop sexism which stands out most to us when he had Meg Ryan on as a guest for his awful AIR AMERICA RADIO program. Meg was against the Iraq War and spoke of that and the need for an immediate withdrawal. Al? The coward waited until after she was off mike and leaving to tell his listeners that Meg wasn't really informed and, of course, more informed people like himself knew better.

That is the perfect example of 'mansplaining.' But Al's cult is as sexist and dumb as Al Franken.

This go round, Tulsi, Elizabeth, Kirsten, Kamala Harris, Marianne Williams and Amy Klobuchar sought the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. Six women. And often, you would read gripes that this or that woman needed to drop out because her presence was hurting another woman's chance to sew up the nomination.

Interesting, though, there were 29 candidates. If six were women were the others non-Cis genders? No, they were men. 23 were men. And no one ever made the case that if this or that man would drop out that it would help another man because there were too many men in the race.

23 men in the race and a-okay. But six women and suddenly we're reading that too many women were in the race?

Too many women for whom?

As Norman Solomon and others made clear repeatedly, six was too many but so was one. Just one woman was enough to qualify as 'too many.' So they repeatedly slimed Elizabeth Warren. And then when everyone dropped out at the urging of Barack Obama so that the race was now down to Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, these same pigs who'd made one sexist argument after another against Elizabeth started whining about how she wasn't endorsing Bernie. They should have been glad -- doing cartwheels, in fact -- that Elizabeth was being kind enough to stay out of it. She was always going to endorse Joe over Bernie due to the problems she and Bernie had and due to the way his worst supporters had treated her and, let's be honest, because she saw the writing on the wall: Democratic leadership wanted Joe.

You saw the hatred for women in what the press made the biggest moment in the Democratic Party debates -- Tulsi's trashing of Kamala.

This was ground breaking, so many commentators (including Michael Tracey) insisted. Tulsi had destroyed Kamala.

We never saw it that way. And we were right.

"Destroyed" Kamala ended up the running mate on the ticket. That doesn't sound like she was destroyed. Maybe Tulsi was? Maybe Andrew Yang was? Maybe Beto was destroyed?

Kamala wasn't destroyed.

But sexism fueled the way the media viewed and portrayed the exchange. They turned it into a cat fight and celebrated it with glee.

What they should have done is examined both candidates. Were the charges true of Kamala, the charges Tulsi made. (Yes, they were but the press really didn't want to go there.) And they should have examined Tulis and her behavior in that debate. Consistent?

No.

Not at all consistent. She walked onto the stage as the self-proclaimed anti-war candidate. And this is the debate where she attacked Kamala on something other than war. It is also the debate where she was expected to take down Joe Biden. This expectation came not only from her supporters but also from the press because of all she'd said in the lead up to the July debate that finally found her onstage with Joe.

So if she went gunning for Kamala, you know anti-war Tulsi went gunning for Joe, right? Wrong. She gave him a pass. It was shocking. It was shocking to watch. It was shocking to the moderator of the debate CNN's Jake Tapper. So shocking to him, in fact, that he took the question back to Tulsi and gave her a second chance. All she offered was that Joe Biden had apologized for voting for the Iraq War. No, he had not. He apologized -- or said a weak 'sorry' -- only for trusting Bully Boy Bush. He didn't regret his vote. He regretted the way Bully Boy Bush executed the illegal war.

That's not an apology. It also doesn't get into all that he did as a senator after the war started or the damage he did as vice president when Barack had put him in charge of Iraq. That included his initial backing of the awful Ambassador Chris Hill over the top US commander in Iraq Gen Ray Odierno, that includes his brokering The Erbil Agreement -- a legal contract that overturned the votes of the Iraqi people and gave Nouri al-Maliki a second term -- the second term that led to the rise of ISIS in Iraq . . .

That's not the full list. And anyone who's 'anti-war' and running to become president damn well should have known that.

Tulsi refused to confront, call out or even fact check Joe.

And we're not just talking about the debate.

The press is sexist and they loved reducing that debate to a 'cat fight' between two women. As a result, Tulsi got two to three days of press coverage the likes of which her campaign hadn't seen before and would never see again. During those interviews, over and over, 'anti-war' Tulsi vouched for Joe Biden.

If you're not thrilled with Joe as a nominee, never forget that anti-war Tulsi went into the July debate determined to knock one person off the stage and it wasn't the only one on the stage who voted for the Iraq War.

29 candidates. Many dropped out. But we saw the sexism in play when Kamala dropped out.

As noted here in the December 4th "Iraq snapshot:"

Let's close this discussion with numbers.

24.

That's the number of Tweets Michael Tracey has done about Kamala Harris since the news broke that she was dropping out of the race.

1.

That's the number of Tweets Michael Tracey did about Steve Bullock since the news broke that he was dropping out of the race.

24 and 1. It's an obsession and, yes, it's Bash The Bitch. As Ava and I noted when Katie Couric was the target in 2006:

For some of the left, though not all, that's at the root of their pursuit of Couric. It's the gift of impunity that allows them to operate in a fact-free environment as they compose the charges against Couric. But those who hear such a statement and nod agreeably are also engaged in the national pastime of bash-the-bitch.
Bash the bitch is as American as apple pie and rush to judgement, so who are we to complain? If it makes us "America haters" to say "Just a minute now" then so be it. Let all the ones partaking in bash-the-bitch wrap themselves in Old Glory, we'll call it the way we see it.
Here's what we see. A woman's trashed. For what she did?
Oh cookie, please, it's for being a woman. Read the commentaries. "Cheerleader" is a trumped up charge -- as usual, the true crime is gender.

Michael Tracey and a lot of others need to look at their actions in the last 24 hours. There's a lot of latent sexism bubbling up.

Throughout 2019 and 2020, we felt like it was 2008 all over again. That's when anything could be and was said about Hillary. 2016 saw a huge improvement. And we wondered at the time if that was because we'd all grown or if was because Hillary being the nominee meant some partisans had to keep it in check?

It was clearly the latter to judge by 2020.

Tara Reade told the truth. And she was slimed for it. We're moving over to that topic because a lot of women need to be called out.

Some women supported Joe Biden. Guess what? If you're not a feminist, we don't really care. If you're a feminist, we do care. If you're a feminist, your support was outrageous. Joe is accused of assault and you prioritized him over a woman.

Why do women not come forward? Because they're not believed or because the dominant society justifies the assault and makes excuses. Linda Hirshman is not a feminist. If that's too harsh, at least join us in saying, "She's not a good feminist."

She says she believes Tara but she was voting Joe.

Don't call yourself a feminist. If you believe a woman and you back up her attacker, you're not a feminist.

A woman could be and was sacrificed and we were told it was for the good of the many.

No, it wasn't.

And they were backing Joe, these 'feminists,' at a time when they didn't have to. There was talk, because Joe was still so weak in the polls (as he is right now), that Andrew Cuomo or Gavin Newsom might be able to sweep the convention. Those 'feminists' could have used their voices to publicly pressure the DNC into selecting an alternate candidate like either Cuomo or Newsom. Instead, they three in the towel and, with their words and actions, made clear that, to them, rape is no big deal, that, to them, the suffering of women is no big deal.

And, in the end, wasn't that Joe's real campaign slogan?

Lucy Flores and other women bravely came forward to talk about his harassment and their reward was Joe issuing a non-apology video and days later making fun of their complaints as he spoke to a union audience.

Over and over, it was made clear that women did not matter.

That was true in the selection of Joe because the underlying point was that he would beat Donald unlike Hillary. Senile, feeble Joe was going to do what Hillary couldn't.

He may yet accomplish that. But the election remains up for grabs as we write this and he has not delivered anything he promised.

Anything? Excuse us, that's imprecise. The only thing he and his supporters ever promised was that he was electable. They insisted that he was more electable than Bernie Sanders, they implied that he was more electable than Hillary Clinton and now, as he struggles throughout the vote counting, it's becoming even more obvious that he was never the best choice.

Maybe some of the above will be explored if he loses? Probably not. A lot of liars are very vested in the pretense that Joe was the best our party could do.

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