“[Hillary] is judged — she is judged a little bit, I have to say, all of the controversy surrounding her and they’re both — Donald Trump and her, she’s judged a little bit on a Ginger Rogers standard, which is, is that the bar is so low for him. I mean, Ginger Rogers, the famous like she did everything Fred Astaire did but backwards and in heels.”
–—Matthew Dowd, ABC News political analyst, during today’s “roundtable” discussion on ABC’s “This Week” regarding the various scandals and controversies keeping Hillary Clinton’s poll numbers within striking distance of Donald Trump.
1. See, what did I tell you? It’s starting already. As with Obama, the news media, taking the lead from Democrats and feminists, will shamelessly use accusations of bias to argue away any and all legitimate criticism of Hillary Clinton as a manifestation of sexism. Boy, am I sick of that; everyone should be. It is a cheap, destructive tactic, designed to suppress opposition. And to have the gall to do this in the wake of the FBI notes showing a Presidential candidate either lying her head off or confessing utter incompetence, ignorance and stupidity…how insulting to viewers.
2. The Ginger and Fred line has to be retired. It was originally a joke, not a serious observation. Nobody, including Ginger Rogers and anyone who has watched a single Astaire-Rogers movie, has ever suggested that Ginger was as good a dancer as Fred. Ginger was good, Fred was brilliant. Did you ever seen Ginger do a dance solo, in heels or out? Why do you think that is?
Plus, Dowd using this chestnut ends up with Trump being Astaire in the metaphor, which is obscene. Fred is dead and we will never see his like again. Have some damn respect. Although I bet Fred is even graceful spinning in his grave…
3. Wait—Hillary is being held to a tougher standard than Trump? By whom? The bar is low for Trump? CNN fact-checks Trump’s speeches, but not Hillary’s. All the networks besides Fox spent the entire Democratic National Convention gushing and cheering, and the Republican convention mocking and sneering. Incoherent ad libs by Trump about “Second Amendment people” have the media bloviating for weeks, but Clinton using the State Department as an extension of the Clinton Foundation is muffled and buried.
Dowd can’t just say stuff on national TV that is fantasy like this, at least not ethically. Ironically, his statement that Hillary is being judged more harshly than Trump is a glaring example of how slanted toward Hillary the news media is.
4. Hillary’s argument for becoming President asks for a special standard. She’s supposed to be experienced, qualified, with prudence and judgment, unlike Trump. Then she is the one shown to have run the State Department with all the skill of a kid sitting at her mommy’s desk on “Bring the Kids to Work Day.” She loses a laptop. She gets phished. She’s overwhelmed! She’s confused! Doing better than this is a high bar?
What those FBI notes reveal would be bad for someone who had no experience, but for a woman who claims to be uniquely qualified, it’s ridiculous…embarrassing…scary.
________________
Pointer: Alhouse.
Ethics Alarms 
I think I’d judge Hillary on the Joan Crawford standard. Personality wise they are about the same.
Different scale. Joan could’ve run the country without lying, but with one hand wielding a wooden hanger behind her back.
Yes, yes, I know: that was Faye. Come to think of it — Faye could do it without the hanger!
Speak softly and carry a large hanger?
I admire your capacity to be so often surprised by this kind of behavior. It must mean that you still have hope where I do not: that is, that you keep hoping that someone, just one, in the news business will exhibit ethical thought and behavior. You and Diogenes have much in common.
After I called Diogenes’ name in comparison to you, I thought I’d better check my own facts and look him up. Having done so, may I amend my statement to say that you and Diogenes have AT LEAST ONE THING in common? (The Stoicism movement aside, Diogenes was kind of a hoot… or nut, depending on your point of view. In any case, aside from you both looking for an honest man, I recall my overall comparison, Jack.)
What Ginger did NOT do was work out all of the choreography beforehand, which is something that Fred did.
She also didn’t lead…
What I find upsetting is that Clinton and Trump lie. Hillary’s lies are not so obvious, but a lie is a lie. In the Trump campaign, Melania plagiarized, she lied about her personal credentials (which she didn’t have to lie about) and those lies continued when she perjured herself regarding her caviar skin line that went south. She then lied (and this wouldn’t matter if she wasn’t set up to be the First Lady) about her Visa status and of course this normally would’ve been swept under the rug except that her husband has made illegal immigration his platform. Donald has hit Hillary over her Saudis ties with the Clinton Foundation, yet Donald has done millions of dollars with the Saudis, which has recently been discovered. They are BOTH lying and Mr. Trump is being a hypocrite because he keeps flip-flopping on the things he said before (which we have tapes of) and then says he never said that, and blames the press.
This whole election process disgusts me.
I can think of many reasons for the Saudis to write large checks to Donald Trump, (and vice versa), in his capacity as an independent business person. What reason would the Saudis have to write a check to a Hilary front/slush fund in her capacity a Secretary of State? The Clinton Foundation is in no sense a legitimate charity, solely based on it’s astounding ‘overhead’ percentage (read Bill/Hilary $ and sinecures for cronies.).
I await an exhaustive FBI record of Donald lying about his breaching national security rules and laws. Melania may have also lied about her cupcake recipe being an old family secret, when in fact she got it off the internet; I assume MSNBC is on that story.
There is such a thing as order of magnitude. Donald has many flaws, but your examples of deceit are not even apples and oranges, more like apples and dinosaurs.
Then she is the one shown to have run the State Department with all the skill of a kid sitting at her mommy’s desk on “Bring the Kids to Work Day.”
In Dowd’s defense, Trump is getting the kid glove treatment compared to the person who was the GOP nominee last time. No accusations that Trump gave people cancer for fun and profit, no talk about Trump bragging about animal cruelty, it doesn’t seem like Trump is into S&M or even B&D unlike the 2012 nominee, and the press hasn’t done a big expose with someone who Trump called a poopie-pants when Trump was 3 years old. Considering the proctological way the press usually treats Republican nominees, the press has barely even covered Trump.
That’s a weird take. Trump is repeatedly called a racist on news broadcasts and in opinion columns. The silly episode about Romney’s “binders full of women” where the news media intentionally construed an awkward phrasing into a major news story has been duplicated over and over again with Trump, most recently with his offhand remark about “the Second Amendment people” being treated as if he was calling for an assassination. The New York Times directly admitted that it felt it was the duty of journalists to slant coverage to defeat Trump. Even if what you claim is true (it’s not), Dowd wasn’t talking about Trump being held to a lower standard than Romney; he’s not running against Romney. He’s running against Clinton, the news media is blocking and tackling for her, and his statement that SHE was being held to an unfair standard was dishonest.
That’s exactly it, journalists put a lot of effort towards casting Romny (and McCain, and for that matter Bush) in a bad light but with Trump there isn’t any of that digging for old enemies or just the right obscure quote to twist, they just use what Trump presents them with openly. Where are the teams of reporters examining his school transcripts for a whiff of anything to make him look bad? Where are the legions of investigators interviewing everyone who might possibly have seen Trump since he learned how to walk, trying to find one who is willing to say Trump was once rude to them?
Sure journalists are openly justifying anti-Trump bias (as if they wouldn’t be biased against anyone running with an ‘R’ after their name), but mostly they just call him ‘racist’. Sorry, but that word has been so abused that it has lost it’s sting and soon we can expect people to proudly announce that they are racists, like Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed of, who believe that dark skinned people are just as capable as light skinned people and should be held to the same standards, and be judged on the basis of their character instead of held to lower standards because of quotas or special set-asides or race-based hiring policies. When all white people are racist by definition, calling a white person a racist isn’t an insult.
Sure, if you compare how the press is treating Clinton with how Trump is treated then she seems to have it easy, but comparing to the efforts the press put into securing her election to the efforts the press put into Obama’s elections and she’s got hard mode.
Well, sure, because Obama was just shallow and inexperienced, but charismatic and black. Hillary is neither, a liar, inept and corrupt. The press is biased, but its not completely dim. It can’t be too enthusiastic about Clinton.
As for Trump, they don’t have to dig. He’s an idiot. Anyone who doesn’t mind that he’s an idiot won’t care about anything else. That’s Trump’s strength. Hillary voters will get disgusted with her and decide not to vote, but Trump voters have no standards at all.
I’ve said it before… One you called Romney (Or McCain for that matter) unbalanced, evil, sexist, racist and dangerous… You really don’ have anywhere left to go when someone who actually deserves the some of those labels hits the stage.
Is Trump being treated better than Romney, or are we just numb to the media’s buzzwords?
Neither. Romney was treated more unfairly, because he was falsely painted as someone he was not. Trump is worse in reality than what Romney was falsely accused of being, so the excessive criticism of him can be equally unfair, but less damaging, so it seems better.
Maureen Dowd lost her credibility the day she pronounced fascist fishwife Cindy Sheehan as possessed of “absolute moral authority” to pronounce on the morality of not only the Iraq War but all wars. Too bad Cindy was too busy attention whoring to realized she was being used.
This is a shocking turn of events, absolutely shocking!!!
When did ethical standard get flushed?
Who would have thought that something like this would happen with Hillary Clinton running for President?
This is what politics have become…
See if you can identify (over the next 2½ years) any propaganda patterns that the Clinton propaganda machine uses that has already been used by the Obama propaganda machine.
Sexism smears are going to get much, MUCH worse. Just watch as the media fills the propaganda cup with sexism smears to overflowing as we progress through the next couple of years.
Anyone wanna lay odds that there will be groups popping up and marching in the streets around the USA after Clinton is elected chanting “Female Lives Matters”?
It’s a sign of terrible things to come when the public can be manipulated by propaganda so easily.