Support the VEA

We had sworn off doing any more vagina-related posts because the traffic they bring is just too weird, but when my overworked typist stumbled across the image above (provenance unknown, alas) on Facebook, she couldn't resist. Longtime readers know that the preferred description around here for lady people is vagina-equipped (which we're pretty sure we started using during the 2008 election). Nonetheless, we appreciate the appeal to natural law in the VEA's claim that women are endowed with their lady parts as all persons are endowed with rights to, you know, life, liberty, and blah de blah de blah. We are also totes on board with the slogan, Screw us and we multiply, and the hilarious reclaiming of the creepy Masonic emblem on the back of the dollar bill as a symbol of the might of a million vajayjays. We're down with that, obviously.

So, who'll be the Mockingjay for this fiery band of vulvalogocentrists? Who are we prepared to declare as the VEA's Soldier of the Week? Who is endowed with or schooled in the perfect combination of media-savviness and sistah-hood to deserve this honor? So many sheroes, so little time to blog them.

We might have given the nod to the official go-to gal of Roxie's World, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who had a brilliant week this week, achieving "late-breaking adoration" and "pop cultural ascendancy" -- in addition to the global domination she has enjoyed for the past few years -- by being cool enough to catch the wave of the Hill-arious Texts From Hillary meme launched by Adam Smith and Stacy Lambe. (That's the final image in the series there on the left, with Mme Secretary's actual texts to the site's creators. Here's the concluding "thanks for the meme-eries" message from Smith and Lambe.) How good was Clinton's week? WaPo declared her the Internet's "new queen of cool." Jezebel gushed that she had managed to "make herself seem even more badass than she already was. Well played, Hillz." Shoot, even the execrable Maureen Dowd, whose psychotic anti-Clinton ravings during the 2008 primary battle earned her this blog's undying enmity, had a nearly nice column on Clinton's "newly cool image," though she couldn't resist tossing off a couple of gratuitous digs -- e.g., saying that the pictures that launched the meme make Clinton look, "as Raymond Chandler would say, . . . 'as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.'" Ah, MoDo, you never disappoint.

Anyhoo, we take nothing away from Hillz's glorious achievement in opting instead to name actress and activist Ashley Judd the first (and perhaps only -- you know how lax we are about these things) Soldier of the Week for Vaginally Endowed Americans. Judd had a pretty awesome week, too, and not just because Becca Winstone, the character she plays on her new ABC series, Missing, added bank robbery to the impressive set of kick-a$$ skills the retired CIA agent has at her command. (Shoot, in the first episode alone, Becca garrots a guy, breaks into a jewelry store and a warehouse, gets through a couple of high-speed chases while wearing wildly inappropriate footwear, reconnects with a sultry, torch-carrying ex-lover, and does a decent job of speaking several languages. Also: She gets shot, falls into a river, and survives for episode two. Quel surprise, oui?)

Don't get us wrong. The Vaginally Equipped Americans of Roxie's World are devoted fans of Missing. It is totally formulaic and often gobsmackingly implausible, but it is utterly delightful to watch Judd's Winstone haul a$$ all over Europe in an effort to find her kidnapped son and solve the mystery of her late husband Paul's life and death. (Paul was also CIA and was killed by a car bomb ten years earlier.) The plot may not be believable, but Becca is, thanks to Judd's steely eyes and razor-sharp maternal instincts. What can we say? We think the world could use a few more vengeance-seeking soccer moms who can fight like a ninja and hack into a computer.

But that's not why Judd is our VEA Soldier of the Week. Nope, she gets the nod and perhaps a mockingjay pin of her very own for her righteous response to a flood of snarky commentary and speculation about the state of her face, which has been puffed up recently by steroids she took for a nasty sinus infection. Judd used the occasion to offer up an indignant yet nuanced reply that took on the whole machinery of patriarchy and the way that public as well as private conversations about women's bodies are used to rob them of their power and dignity by reducing their personhood "to simple physical objectification." It's a smart, fiery piece that acknowledges women's complicity in the problem. "Patriarchy is not men," Judd explains. "Patriarchy is a system in which both women and men participate. . . .It is subtle, insidious, and never more dangerous than when women passionately deny that they themselves are engaging in it." Sing it, sister!

Judd didn't just write her little diatribe and go back to the business of being famous -- and beautiful. She followed up by doing a powerful interview with NBC's Brian Williams in which she talks about the experience, contextualizes it through deft comments on the hypersexualization of girls and women, and invites others, men included, to share their own "puffy-face" or "big-butt" moments, stories of being shamed or hurt by judgments about their bodies. She's also continued to bang the drum on Twitter, with a steady stream of affirmations and links to other posts (by far less famous people) on the subject. You don't follow @AshleyJudd? Well, sucks for you, sweetheart. Melissa McEwan does, and so do we, as of this week.

Ms. Judd, paws up to you, for talking back to patriarchy rather than being shamed or silenced by it. You recognized a teachable moment and used the power of your celebrity to make the most of it. Vaginally Endowed Americans and fair-minded individuals everywhere salute you for your honesty and your astuteness. You are our VEA Solider of the Week. Peace out.

(Photo Credit: Richard Drew, via)

MoDo Must Go!

From the New York Times Web site:

May 17, 2009

NY Times Columnist Admits Using Blogger's Words

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 11:38 p.m. ET

NEW YORK (AP) -- New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has admitted to using a paragraph virtually word-for-word from a prominent liberal blogger without attribution. Dowd acknowledged the error in an e-mail to The Huffington Post on Sunday, the Web site reported. The Times corrected her column online to give proper credit for the material to Talking Points Memo editor Josh Marshall. The newspaper is expected to issue a formal correction Monday.

The error appeared in Dowd's Sunday column, in which she criticized the Bush administration's use of interrogation methods in the run-up to the Iraq war. In the original column, Dowd wrote: ''More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when the Bush crowd was looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.'' Marshall last week wrote virtually the same sentence. But where Dowd's column used the phrase ''the Bush crowd was,'' Marshall used ''we were.'' Dowd, who won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1990, told The Huffington Post that the mistake was unintentional. She claims she never read Marshall's post last week and had heard the line from a friend who did not mention reading it in Marshall's blog.

A spokeswoman for the Times late Sunday referred requests for comment from The Associated Press to remarks Dowd made to The Huffington Post. In the updated version on the Times' site, Dowd's column had this note: ''An earlier version of this column failed to attribute a paragraph about the timeline for prisoner abuse to Josh Marshall's blog at Talking Points Memo.''

Note to Newspaper Industry from Blogosphere: Riddle me this: Who's the parasite and who's the host? And what's that you were saying about print journalism saving the republic from an army of pajama-clad, laptop-wielding nincompoops?

Note to NYT Op-Ed Page: My typist has some time off coming up. I'd be happy to rent her out to you a couple of mornings a week. Really. Impeccable research skills. Decades spent learning the difference between her words and other people's. Extremely limited capacity for projecting her twisted fantasies onto other people. Or dogs. Really. Read this blog. You'll see.

Note to MoDo: You might think about taking off for the Hamptons early this year. And never coming back. Have a sandwich. Or three. Have a drink. Before breakfast. And if you are going to let casual chats with friends substitute for reporting and research (you know, that stuff some of your more old-school colleagues refer to as work), then you might at least consider taking the occasional note and maybe asking a question every now and again -- Nothing rude or challenging, mind you, but perhaps something along the lines of, "Fascinating -- Where did you happen to read that/see that/hear that?" It might save you some trouble and your employer some embarrassment in the long run. Just sayin'.

(Image Credit: Dallas Observer)

Meet Fred Flintstone

Warning: Rants ahead. Long post, few links, hardly any jokes. Enjoy the eye candy. It's the only treat you'll get here today.

(Photo Credit: Random search of internets on "Fred Flintstone")

Tough week here in Roxie’s World, kids. Emotions are running high. Nerves are raw, frayed, exposed. Everything feels slightly off kilter, a little out of joint. It could be we’ve entered into the fourth stage of our grief over the apparent implosion of Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president – depression – though there is evidence some of us may have jumped back to stage two – anger. We’re glad y’all are here for us. We need our extended pack of happy political animals right now.

I pause here to note that there are no crybabies in Roxie’s World – or “whiny-heinies,” as they were called in the colorful Texas of Goose’s girlhood. We don’t see the junior senator from New York as the tragic victim of a vast sexist conspiracy. We recognize that the campaign itself is responsible for much of the pickle in which it currently finds itself. For example:

• We’ve thought for a long time that Clinton should fire pollster/strategist Mark Penn and dump the middle-of-the-road strategy he and the Democratic Losership Council have been advocating for so many years.
• We doubted the wisdom of running on experience in a year when voters were clearly eager for change, in part because it made it harder for the campaign to capitalize on the exciting, history-making aspects of Clinton's candidacy.
• We are shocked that the campaign didn’t have a game plan for contesting the nomination past Super Tuesday, having obviously assumed that their girl would wrap things up on that day.
• We give the Obama campaign major props for the brilliance of its ground game – the plan to rack up wins in small states and caucuses and keep the big states close enough to prevent Clinton from opening up an insurmountable lead in the delegate count. If he gets the nomination, it will be in large part because he and his team ran a nimble race that was strategically much smarter than the one run by the seasoned veterans of team Clinton.

Fine, so by some measures Clinton is getting beat fair and square. Then why do we feel as if she and to some extent we – her doggedly loyal supporters – have been kicked in the gut as she has morphed in the public imagination from the inevitability candidate to the vanquished witch who refuses to melt despite the buckets and buckets of water that have been poured on her? Why are we finding it hard to gather ourselves for the moment when she graciously steps aside and we are expected – as good sports and loyal Democrats – to switch out the yard signs, cover up the bumper stickers, and officially declare Roxie’s World a pro-Obama zone?

Because even if we don’t believe Clinton has been done in by a vast sexist conspiracy, the toxic levels of sexism and misogyny that have been released in the course of the primary campaign have saddened and sickened us. We reject the claim that the resistance to Clinton is not resistance to the notion of a woman president per se but merely resistance to the notion of this woman as president. As our pal the Gregarious Victorianist pointed out in a recent e-mail exchange, that is the logic of sexism pretending not to be sexism: I don’t have any problems with women, such logic goes, just this woman. And this one, and this one, and that one, and that one . . . We’ve seen that logic in action too many times to pretend it isn’t still very much with us. We’ve seen it in hiring and promotion decisions at the university, in the bitchification of women who too strenuously assert themselves in leadership positions, in the marginalization of women’s issues as narrow, special interests (even though women comprise a majority of voters). Consciously or unconsciously, such biases persist and have manifest themselves in a number of ways throughout the campaign. See, for example, the collected screeds of the venomous Maureen Dowd or the mountains of articles written that focus on aspects of Clinton’s person or body (hair, clothes, cleavage, laugh, tears) rather than on the substance of her campaign.

The men of MSNBC, led by Tweety himself, Chris Matthews, are in a class by themselves as the true Fred Flintstones of this campaign, for turning coverage of a woman candidate into what felt at times like a high-tech gang rape, so pronounced were their prehistoric masculinist biases and so gleeful and one-upping were they in the venting of them. Matthews may think he can redeem himself by “tough” (but long overdue) questioning of an obscure Obama supporter who clearly wasn’t ready for prime time, but his foaming-at-the-mouth excitement over every setback suffered by the Clinton campaign betrays an animus toward women’s aspirations to power that can’t be covered over by pointing toward his allegedly strong wife Kathleen. Matthews would be an embarrassment to his profession if the profession of cable network talking-head show host were in any way capable of embarrassment.

Tweety is not, of course, the only Flintstone to rear his obnoxious head in the course of this already long campaign. Jonathan Kaufman had an article in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week on the battle for the votes of working-class white men. Not all of the men profiled in the story expressed sexist opposition to Clinton (some, alas, expressed racist opposition to Obama), but such resistance to her candidacy is widespread enough that one Ohio political strategist flatly declared, "For a lot of blue-collar guys over 40, Hillary Clinton is a poster child for everything about the women's movement that they don't like -- their wife going back to work, their daughters rebelling, the rise of women in the workplace.” On the other hand, Dan Leihgeber, a steelworker, tells the reporter that he supports Senator Clinton for her experience and positions. Kaufman reports of Leihgeber:

He carries a book bag to work every day with his lunch and a newspaper inside and a Clinton button pinned to the outside. Some days, he says, he turns the bag around so the Clinton button doesn't show; he says he doesn't like dealing with his co-workers' derogatory comments. Mr. Leihgeber says he wouldn't be heckled so much for an Obama pin.

Mr. Leihgeber then offers one of the saddest yet most illuminating comments we’ve seen on the Democratic campaign of 2008:

"People don't want to speak out against Obama because of the fear of being seen as racist," he says. "It's easier to say you want to keep a woman barefoot and pregnant . . . .You can call a woman anything."

Moose can identify with Mr. Leihgeber’s story of the Clinton button on the book bag. She was in the hallway at school on Wednesday (the day after the latest string of Clinton defeats), rushing to get to her office before class, with her similarly festooned book bag thrown over her shoulder. A colleague came up behind her and said, in a voice thick with sarcasm, “Whoa, that’s dedication to the cause. Did you go out to Wisconsin to vote again?” “Yeah,” Moose tartly replied, “and you see how much good it did.” Her colleague – a good guy and actually a pretty good friend – went on to taunt her with some remark about Clinton’s vote on Iraq. She countered with something about Obama’s votes to continue funding the war he claims so much wisdom for opposing, and then she realized she needed to disengage – in part because she had to get to class but in truth because she realized she was deeply, viscerally angry.

Why did her colleague need to gloat about his candidate’s victory and needle her about her candidate’s defeat? Why has the left found it necessary in this campaign to turn Hillary Clinton into an evil power-grabbing bitch who must be driven from the field, her reactionary ideas consigned to the dustbin of history? Why must her supporters be mocked and ridiculed as sellouts, fuddy-duddies, and agents of neoliberalism – when there are, in fact, no substantive policy differences between Clinton and Obama?

People have worried a lot about Obama’s supporters staying home if Clinton manages to “steal” the nomination by winning Ohio and Texas, sewing up the superdelegates, and enfranchising the voters of Michigan and Florida. No one seems to worry at all that Clinton’s supporters might get mad enough about the way they and their candidate have been treated to sit out the election. If Obama gets the nomination and does not choose a woman as his running mate, we will know he is taking women’s votes for granted. He’s counting on them to be good sports, to be gracious in defeat, to be placated by a few more rallies with Oprah.

Or he knows what Dan Leihgeber knows: You can call a woman anything.

What would it take to consign that sad assertion to the dustbin of history, sweet denizens of Roxie’s World? What kind of change would we all have to be to make those words unthinkable? You tell me, beloveds. Your favorite dog blogger is one tired old bitch tonight.

Saturday Funnies

My typist has a cold, and a deep laziness has settled over Roxie's World here in the middle weekend of February. We haven't yet come up with the magic formula that is going to save Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign and rid the world of sexism and dangerously vapid media coverage. We are so astonished by Tweety's confession this week that hearing a speech by Barack Obama sends "this thrill going up my leg" and by MoDo's assertion, with no apparent trace of irony or self-consciousness, that "attacks against powerful women can be harsh and personal and unfair, enough to make anyone cry" that we are tempted to cover our head with our paws and declare Roxie's World a media-free zone. But we couldn't do that to you, our legions of loyal fans, who are out there, patiently waiting for a weekend treat from your favorite dog blogger. Here are a few morsels from the goody bag, mostly things passed along by devoted members of the pack.

Did Roxie's World neglect to wish you a happy Valentine's Day? By dog, I think we did! Here's a little Valentine greeting passed along by the moms' high-powered enviro-politico pal (who was last seen in Roxie's World wielding an ax for Hillary Clinton):

And here's something Moose stumbled on halfway through her first cup of coffee this morning:

And here's a cartoon that was much funnier when it was published in early January, before we started worrying that John McCain might actually be electable (with thanks to an exceptionally devoted reader who doesn't yet have a blog-name, though we are considering several that involve witty allusions to cats, England, New Jersey, and the racial politics of the Victorian period):

Speaking of cats, if two Maureen Dowd columns a week is not enough to line the floor of your litter box, check out the amazing Dowd-O-Tron from 23/6. You can make your own MoDo column any day of the week with just a few clicks of the button! (Caution: Studies show that spending too much time in the mind of MoDo may be hazardous to one's health, causing toxic levels of thoughtless causticity and uncontrollable bouts of pointless antiphonal word-play.) (With thanks to deputy internets troller Dudley the Beagle, who sniffed this out before his nose got so high in the air from Uno's win at Westminster that he stopped returning our calls.)

Eager for the absolute latest on the Obama Messiah Watch? You'll find it here at Is Barack Obama the Messiah? It's supposed to be a parody, but we're wondering if it might not have the opposite effect. Still, we'd be happy if one of our devoted fans were to call our snarky references to Jesus Christ Superstar in Wednesday's post to their attention. We wouldn't mind ending up in the list of "Heretics and Unbelievers" in their sidebar.

Finally, June Star phoned in from the Garden State Parkway the other day with word that Jon Stewart made a reference to the War on Terriers in a piece he did on the triumph of Uno the beagle at Westminster. It's short, funny, and related to the long-awaited end of the writer's strike in Hollywood. Follow the link; the video wasn't loading completely when we had it embedded here, so we took it down.

That's it, kids. We promise more original material when Moose and her head are on speaking terms again. Love you. Mean it.

The Hermeneutics of Hillary

Today, there is another song on our minds, that classic of obsession recorded by the immortal Ms. Patsy Cline:

I fall to pieces
Each time someone speaks your name
I fall to pieces
Time only adds to the flame

(Photo Credit: Ruth Fremson, New York Times; Hillary Clinton and daughter Chelsea embrace on the evening of Super Tuesday, 2/5/08)

Flat-Out Funniest Bit to Emerge on the Phenomenon of Obsessive Hillary Hatred (from TBogg [musing on another alleged incident of misty-eyedness by Hillary] by way of James Wolcott, who voted for Senator Clinton yesterday in New York):

Clintonalia scholars studying her every gesture will tell you that a smile (accompanied by her harsh and unappealing laugh) means that she is thinking about how much she would like to destroy America. A pensive look means that she is wondering who Bill is fucking at that moment. A raised eyebrow means that she's going to have Vince Foster killed. Again. In fact she has no emotions, no expression, that is without meaning, whether it is to fulfill her insatiable need for power or, in some cases, to hide her secret insatiable need for power. Part of it is Hillary and part of it is the fact that she is a woman (and God knows that dealing with white women can be a problem) and they have mysterious ways of sending us signals.

Clearest Proof Yet that Maureen Dowd Has Simply Lost Her Mind with Hillary Hatred (Or, Proof that, If Elected, Hillary Will Be America's Second Black President:

her pitch is the color of pitch: Because she has absorbed all the hate and body blows from nasty Republicans over the years, she is the best person to absorb more hate and body blows from nasty Republicans.

Darkness seeking darkness. It’s an exhausting specter, and the reason that Tom Daschle, Ted Kennedy, Claire McCaskill and so many other Democrats are dashing for daylight and trying to break away from the pathological Clinton path.

Another Reason to be Grateful that Bloggers Are Keeping a Close Eye on MoDo (from Bob Somerby at The Daily Howler by way of Digby, Ace Detective of Media Sexism):

Maureen Dowd is morally sick—she’s just unwell—about those vexing gender issues. Her sickness has been apparent for years. In that respect, she’s much like the Times’ own Britney Spears; she’s someone who needs intervention. But even worse than her moral sickness is her constant, world-class dumbness. If humans civilization continues to develop, future generations will look back on such work with unease, as we look back on medieval medicine. What might it say about us, they will ask, that our ancestors “reasoned” that way?

Compelling Evidence that There May Be More Than One "Bitch" Involved in This Race:



Moose is bitter about not having come up with that brilliant line about Hillary having Vince Foster killed. Again. But there is joy in Roxie's World over the Super Tuesday results, beloveds. The pundits are eating crow again. The Democrats are pretty, however deadlocked, and the Republicans are savagely going at one another. Dems are voting in droves all over this gloriously messed up land, and finally, next Tuesday, the Moms will get to vote in what Mark Shields just dubbed the Crabcake Primary (MD, VA, DC). Hold on to your hats, America -- The Girls are voting for the Girl!

Hold Your Fire

(Image Credit: Richard Thompson, The New Yorker)

What’s wrong with this picture? Oh, you know, everything.

The good news is that the Clinton and Obama campaigns have declared a “truce” in a war of words about race that was threatening to overwhelm the truly great news of this election season. Let’s not forget that, kids: Democrats are awash in qualified, appealing, history-making candidates for president, while Republicans are riding a swift boat to election hell being co-captained by a flat-earther, a Mormon, and a guy wound so tight he can make a victory speech look like a prayer for a bowel movement. Don’t ask, but some denizens of Roxie’s World are pretty familiar with what such prayers look like.

By the way, did y’all hear that poor little Maureen Dowd went off on Shrub’s big trip to Six Flags Over the Mess We Made of the Middle East and got so damn sick she had to get treated by the president’s very own personal physician? Wa Po’s Reliable Source reports that MoDo was too sick to write her column for Sunday’s Times. Question for the ethicists of Roxie’s World: Are we evil for thinking that’s a good thing?

Anyway, back to the Showdown at Race/Gender Gap. We’re a little late getting to this story, which has been the talk of the blogosphere and the mainstream media for the past several days, so we won’t bore you with a bunch of links to stories you’ve already read or a bunch of speculation about who started the “war” and who benefits from it and who is harmed by it and whether the Dems’ propensity to get mired in identity politics is the one way to guarantee that the dude with the impacted bowel moves into the White House come January 2009.

No, what we want to talk about is the way we talk – or don’t talk – about race and gender in American politics. The metaphors we habitually see in the media – of wars and truces, games and cards, showdowns and smackdowns – are an indication of how, um, impacted our discourse on these subjects is. The images are all violent and adversarial, drawn from an economy of scarcity yet framed in individual rather than structural terms. The New Yorker cartoon is depressingly familiar in depicting members of two different groups historically lacking in power faced off against one another rather than joining forces to demand a redistribution of power from those who have historically hoarded it. The cartoon figures eye one another warily, as they must, because neither is prepared for that deeper struggle, which would not be a “war” but an even more fundamental re-imagining and re-structuring of social and economic relations. And we sure don’t want to go there, do we?

What became painfully clear in the whole “Who’s playing the race card?” imbroglio is that both Clinton and Obama are trying to run as white men. Pushed to the wall after her loss in Iowa, Clinton, one might argue, reluctantly played the gender card by publicly choking up and showing herself to be “just one of the girls” in an effort to appeal to women voters in New Hampshire. Obama, taken aback by his loss in New Hampshire, went ballistic on Clinton’s fairly banal suggestion that Martin Luther King had a healthy respect for the role politicians had to play in effecting social change in an effort to appeal to African-American voters in the upcoming South Carolina primary. Each selectively and ambivalently embraces her/his status as the first serious female/black contender for the presidency, preferring instead to fall back on a comforting language of competence or transcendence as a way of reassuring voters that this “change” election won’t really change much at all. Vote for me – I won’t set you free, but I’ll make you feel good, and that’s what counts.

We founder when we collectively stumble into the abyss of race or gender because we have no honest way of discussing the deep, material yet informal inequalities that remain when legal impediments to equality have been largely eliminated. (Bob Herbert’s column on misogyny this week was an encouraging example of the kind of conversation we need to be having, as was Pam Spaulding’s comment on our inability to speak frankly about race.) We grow impatient and pretend that the work is done because we seem unable to figure out how to do the work that so clearly needs doing. Would a president Clinton or Obama move the nation toward a way of taking on those difficult, necessary tasks? Hard to say, but it’ll never happen if they don’t put the guns down, turn around, and look each other straight in the eye.

Do You See What I See?

Newsflash: Roxie’s World has busiest day ever in wake of Clinton victory in NH – Breaks 100 “unique visitors” in 24 hours barrier for first time!

Guys in Clicks and Eyeballs (CE) turn cartwheels in cubicles as wild celebration erupts! Creative Team (CT) and Political Division (PD) vie to take credit for stupendous breakthrough! “It’s because Roxie dropped the F-bomb,” a member of CT insisted. “It showed readers how passionately she cares about what’s going on, and they responded to that heart-felt display of raw emotion. We’ve had her on too short a leash. We need to let her run free, put it all out there – Let Roxie be Roxie!” “That’s ridiculous,” replied an analyst from PD. “Our data shows that readers don’t come here for vulgarity and death threats – ‘Get me my cattle gun,’ pshaw – but for lively yet reasoned political debate from the unique perspective of a progressive dog with strong ties to queerness, feminism, and academia. It’s a weird little demographic, I admit, but it’s our demographic, and that’s what has readers coming in droves.”

Meantime, off in the red chair, Moose’s shoulders ache from too many hours trolling the internets for images and analysis, but she is thinking, in the wake of all this success, of launching her own blog – maybe calling it “Butch PhD” – with visions of a thousand page loads a day dancing in her fevered brain. Mark Twain, director of the Office of Persona Management here in Roxie’s World, stalks off in disgust, muttering, “I’ve known butches, I’ve worked with butches, and you, m’am, are no butch.” He heads to Ishmael’s, the bar down the street from RW Enterprises, LLC, global headquarters.

(In truth, credit for the surge in traffic is due in part to the “Hillary’s Tears” post landing on the Buzzfeed list of Best Links on the topic. We’ve been in first or second place for most of the week [and we'll stay there if y'all do like you're supposed to do and click over to Buzzfeed and then back to us]. Thank you, Buzzfeed, and thank you, America, for turning politics into an obsessive focus on superficial personal traits, qualities, foibles, and quirks. Roxie’s World is deeply grateful for your profoundly shallow preoccupations.)

Now back to irregularly scheduled blog-a-licious programming. How about a fun round of everybody’s favorite game, Write a Caption for this Photo in the Voice of Someone Who Is Either Extremely Annoying or Incredibly Influential (or Both)? We’ll start. Words in italics were actually written by the person being imitated.

(Photo Credit: Carlos Barria, Reuters)

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd: There was a poignancy about the moment, as their eyes locked together in a gaze of mutual narcissism and insatiable ambition. The triumph of the mother set the stage for the ascent of the daughter. In that moment, Chelsea Clinton began planning the campaign of 2028 and her mother, recognizing the family spark in the young woman’s eyes, silently promised to do everything in her limitless power to assure their dynastic dreams would be fulfilled, even if all the girls hated them and all the boys thought they were ugly and nerdy and dull.

Professor and provocateur Camille Paglia: Hillary and Chelsea together are a classic feminazi package. The toxic gender bias is written in their adoring faces and is evident in poor, beneath-contempt Bill being relegated to the deep background of the photograph. Chelsea’s perversely prayerful hands underscore the near-messianic scale of her mother’s ambitions. Her daughter is just the latest in the long line of adoring women with whom Clinton has surrounded herself in an effort to seal herself off from the masculinity she disdains.

NBC “analyst” Chris Matthews: I hate to say this, but I am just going to say this because it’s a fact. The two of them together look really witchy, don’t you think? I mean, it’s double, double toil and trouble, isn’t it? Men look at this picture, and it just really grates on them, because you imagine what they might be saying to each other there, and it’s just fingernails on a blackboard, you know, because they’re probably looking around for some baboon’s blood, and that can’t be good.

Wa Po fashion editor Robin Givhan: Chelsea is never going anywhere with that nose. And, Hillary, gray boiled wool on a commander-in-chief? Please! Would you call Condi for a consult on true dominatrix dressing?

Lefty academic feminist blogger BitchPhD: I’ve got a cold and a fever and am too tired to do any serious blogging about this, plus PK has a soccer game this morning, and I still don’t know who I’m going to vote for in the Democratic primary, even if Obama never talks about women and Edwards’s recent comments about Hillary’s display of emotion were totally sexist, but I just want to say that I like this picture on feminist grounds and mom grounds. If my kid were a girl, I would be totally thrilled if she looked at me that way as I prepared to take over the world.

Nation columnist Katha Pollitt: I can’t comment on this photo. If I comment on this photo, I am perpetuating a system of gender bias that judges Hillary Clinton on the basis of appearances rather than policies and traps her in a double bind over and over again: if she wears a black pantsuit she's too masculine and if she wears a pink shell she's too feminine; if she's serious she's humorless and if she laughs she "cackles." That said, I think it’s a really sweet photo. If people don’t stop attacking her on these ridiculously sexist grounds, I am going to end up voting for her to spite them.

Please feel free to continue the game in comments. This one could go on forever, kids!

We're also pleased to report that a serious blogospheric backlash against Hillary-bashing seems to be taking hold. Much of the criticism is aimed at two of our favorite objects of ire, Mo Do and Chris Matthews. We should probably create a regular feature called something like The Quotable Blogosphere, to showcase little gems such as these:

Every vote for Hillary Clinton is a knife through the heart of Maureen Dowd. -- Lance Mannion

I wonder if Chris Matthews realizes that every time he or one of his fellow gasbags blithely reveal their sexist lizard brains like this, another little feminist gets her (or his) wings. -- Digby

There are also some tinkle-inducing Mo Do parodies out there, including a brilliant one by Jon Swift called "The Crying of Maureen Dowd," and another on Sisyphus Shrugged called "shorter Mo Do." Tom Watson has a funny piece called "The Matthews Meter" that explores whether the bloviator's "obsessive and openly sexist campaign against Hillary Clinton help or hurt the New York Senator in New Hampshire." We think it helped, so instead of firing Matthews we now call on MSNBC to put him on the air 24/7 until November 4. We just have to find a way to keep Moose away from the cattle gun until then.

Peace out, kids. Time to end our long, busy day in the blogosphere and do some actual, um, living!

Hillary's Tears

Last year, in a professional situation of significant stress, Moose learned an uncomfortable lesson: She is a woman who cries under pressure. The discovery did not please her. Moose has a big heart. We think it's one of her charms. But she likes to think she's a tough girl when she has to be, so those unexpected (and briefly uncontrollable) tears in the workplace were acutely embarrassing to her. Today, in New Hampshire, Hillary Clinton got visibly emotional as she answered a voter's sympathetic question about how she manages to keep things so together out on the campaign trail. She didn't break down into a full-on boo-hoo, but the iron lady of American politics was clearly choked up as she spoke of how -- and why -- she does what she does. See for yourself:



You know the same cynical crew that spilled buckets of ink deconstructing Clinton's "cackle" will have a field day debating whether the display of emotion was genuine or yet another calculating effort to con voters into entertaining the possibility that she is a human being with an actual beating heart. I can see the Maureen Dowd column now, and I bet a year's supply of kibble that NBC's Andrea Mitchell will be on the news tonight with some breathless behind-the-curtain report on how the tears were a desperate, orchestrated response to polling data showing that 4 out of 5 New Hampshire voters believe the former First Lady is a replicant. In her on-the-ground reporting from Iowa the other night, Mitchell kept pointing out that the party in Clinton's campaign headquarters the night of her dismal showing in the caucuses was staged. Andrea passed along this "news" as though every other loss in American political history had been followed by a spontaneous gathering of ridiculously happy people that just happened to be captured by television cameras, so we look forward to her in-depth analysis of Clinton's tears.

Wa Po's Anne E. Kornblut, not known for her sympathetic coverage of the junior senator from New York, witnessed the display of emotion and seems to have found it genuine. Her blog post on the moment is here. Newsweek's Karen Breslau was there, too, and thought she caught a glimpse of the Clinton she got to know during her years of covering her as First Lady: "an engaging, warm and witty woman, a first-class road-trip companion who seemed to spring to life as soon as her plane left U.S. airspace." More importantly, an undecided voter who was on the scene was also moved by the moment. Breslau's report, which is here, concludes:

"It got me," said Jane Harrington, a voter from Newington who came to the session trying to decide between Clinton and Obama, whom she had seen a day before—and really liked. "I wanted to see who the real Hillary was. That was real." The question now is how many others will feel the way Harrington did—and whether the emotional moment came too late.

The consensus in Roxie's World is clear: Tough girls don't intentionally cry in public, so when they do it comes straight from the heart. We feel for you, Hill, and with you. Hang in there. The nation you seek to lead is mostly a bunch of cry babies anyway. Sew up that vote, and you'll win in a walk.

Update: Great op-ed in Tuesday's NYT by Gloria Steinem on gender as a force in American life and the current election and on why gender barriers are taken less seriously than racial barriers. It speaks to the debate that broke out in comments here on the "No Country for Bold Women" post. Go read it, children, and we'll resume that conversation while the vampire killers are sharpening up their stakes after Clinton loses in New Hampshire. Love you. Mean it.

Update #2: The Good Old Girls continue to weigh in on this subject. Katha Pollitt offers a fiery denunciation of John Edwards's smarmy, sexist suggestion that the incident suggested Clinton might not be "tough" enough to be president. Hmmm. Let's see. Just how "tough" is the guy who sent his wife out to attack the woman candidate in the race and hid behind her support for same-sex marriage as a way to protect himself from criticism for his poll-tested opposition to it? The glorious Pollitt talks to Pat Schroeder, who knows a thing or two about the political risks for women of public displays of emotion, about the incident and responses to it. "I'm so sick about the way Hillary is treated I can hardly talk about it," the former congresswoman and presidential candidate tells Pollitt. Amen, Pat!

Update #3: As predicted here in Roxie's World, noted cat-fighter and Clinton-hater Maureen Dowd holds forth on Hillary's nefarious plan to "cry her way back to the White House." Yep, that's right. Thanks, Mo Do, for continuing to meet the exceedingly low expectations we have for you. You truly had to scale the heights of Dowdian genius to inject both Richard Nixon and the misogynistic stereotype of Clinton as "the school girl with geeky glasses and frizzy hair, smart but not the favorite" into your commentary, but you managed to do it. All of us visually impaired smart girls appreciate your tireless work on our behalf.

Bitches, Unite!

Why is Roxie's World issuing a clarion call for bitches to unite? (Don't feel left out of the call, fellas -- Some of the biggest bitches I know are boys. You know who you are, and you know how much I love you and your raging bitchiness.) Moose is back on duty in the red chair and has been gathering the evidence for this Thursday night theme party. Just to prove she hasn't gone rusty in the research department, she tracked down an embeddable version of the John McCain campaign event in South Carolina on Monday in which a female supporter asked, "How do we beat the bitch?" Now you can watch it without leaving the happy confines of Roxie's World:


Don't you just love how Republicans go about the sacred task of restoring honor and dignity to the White House? Don't you admire the steadfastness of their commitments to country-club fashion hits of the 1970s? I mean, someone needs to stand by ponytails, scarves, and gold hoop earrings, don't you agree? Not to mention tans in November and bottle-blond hair. Aren't we glad Republicans will fight to the death to defend those? You tell me what you think of McCain's response to the question. By my bleary old eyes, he pauses with what might generously be described as a pained expression on his face (but doesn't McCain always have a pained expression on his face?) before joining in the laughter and then declaring it an "excellent question." He then cites polling data suggesting he is best positioned to "beat the bitch" before offering a perfunctory declaration of respect for Senator Clinton. His campaign has disingenuously claimed he "first responded" by stating his respect for the senator, as pointed out yesterday in Talking Points Memo.

Even New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, a bitch-hating bitch if ever there was one, seems a little put out with the War on Bitches this week. Her Wednesday column ran under the plaintive headline, "Should Hillary Pretend to Be a Flight Attendant?" Mo Do is upset with a spate of new studies suggesting that bias against intelligent, ambitious women is alive and well, both in the world of hetero dating as well as in the work place. Turns out the moms' moms were right when they told their daughters boys would be scared off by girls who came across as "too" smart or ambitious. (The moms' moms neglected to mention that at least some girls find smart girls a turn-on, but, lucky for me, they managed to figure that out by themselves.) Not surprisingly, the unreflective single gal Mo Do doesn't seem to have noticed that her own relentless and catty attacks on Clinton are part of the problem she laments, but, hey, maybe she'll figure it out over the next lonely Cosmopolitan she sips while watching reruns of Sex and the City.

Next, we turn to global uber-bitch, Benazir Bhutto, who was released today from her second house arrest since returning home to Pakistan last month. (Memo to John McCain: If you can't beat the bitch, arrest her ass!) The Bhutto Death Watch continues here in Roxie's World, though we know y'all know that means we are just in awe of this bitch's bravery. Bhutto had an Op-Ed piece in Wa Po yesterday calling on Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf to resign.

Finally, we call upon the mighty bitches of Roxie's World to respond to an outrage against bitch power that is roiling the world of . . . competitive bridge.

(Photo Credit: swangames.com)

These four bitchin' babes -- Jill Levin, Jill Meyers, Debbie Rosenberg and Irina Levitina -- represented the United States in the world bridge championships last month in Shanghai. Click on the image so you can read the little sign Rosenberg is holding up declaring, "We did not vote for Bush." The sign has provoked an absolute kerfuffle in bridge circles. (I know, I know, kids -- You didn't know there were bridge circles, did you, and that they were as politically charged as the more rarefied circles you travel in at, say, your gym?) The Times reports the sordid details of the drama here. The women face the prospect of a yearlong ban from competition for their protest, which they insist was spontaneous and aimed at expressing solidarity with international friends in the competition who had raised questions about U.S. policies and actions. We're pleased to report that the French team has expressed support for the Americans in fine bitch fashion. According to the Times, the French sent an e-mail to the federation's board and others saying:

By trying to address these issues in a nonviolent, nonthreatening and lighthearted manner . . . you were doing only what women of the world have always tried to do when opposing the folly of men who have lost their perspective of reality.

To which Roxie's World can only reply: PAWS UP, and cut the cards. Wait -- Do they do that in bridge? Never mind, kids. The point stands: Bitches of all ages, sexes, and breeds are under assault. We've got to stick together to fight the meanies and the misogynists, the warmongers and the chick-haters. Are you with me, kids? Can we deal you in?

(Props to the blogosphere's original bitch, BitchPhd, whose post on the McCain event put us onto this theme.)

Still trying to wrap your mind around the saga of the Bridge Bitches? Keith Olbermann interviewed a couple of them on tonight's show. Vid is here.

You Heard It Here First

Roxie's World has been saying for months that New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd was bereft of ideas, her mind swept clear of anything resembling original thought. Apparently, Mo Do agrees! Her Sunday column was leased out to the sublimely ridiculous Stephen Colbert, who made much better use of that precious real estate than Mo Do does even when she isn't indulging in her passionate hatred of all things Clinton. Go read it. It's fun, even if its not-so-hidden aim is to flack Colbert's new book, I Am America (And So Can You!) Hey, Mo Do, how 'bout renting your little space out to me sometime, huh? The Times could use a bit of canine perspective if you ask me.

Further proof of our skill in spot-on political analysis may be found in Katha Pollitt's latest column in The Nation. Pollitt, unlike yours truly, has not made up her mind about who to support in the Democratic presidential primary, but her answer to the question "How Different Are the Top Three Dems?" is "not so much." She evaluates the leading candidates' positions on the war, domestic policy, and ties to corporations and concludes that Hillary Clinton doesn't deserve the thrashing she is getting from progressive media and Barack Obama doesn't deserve the halo lefties keep trying to fit on his smooth head. Why, kids, it's almost as if she read Roxie's World's endorsement of Hillary! Paws up, Katha -- Great minds do think alike!

Barbara Ehrenreich is no Clinton fan, but she's got a funny piece called "Running on Ambien" that criticizes Obama as well as Clinton for being boring in the course of the inhumanly long campaign season. "Just a year ago," writes Ehrenreich, "the hot question was, Is America ready for a black or female President? As the campaigns wear on, the question has shifted to, Can America survive the tedium of its black and female candidates?" She recognizes Obama is running as safe a campaign as Clinton is and, as a result, "hasn't turned out to be any more challenging to white America than re-runs of the Cosby Show." Fine, Barbara, but we're backing the dull one with all the experience rather than the dull one who is trying desperately to promote himself as a Black Jack Kennedy.

I'm sure you all missed me over the weekend, didn't you? You were expecting a nice, long weekend post, and you didn't get it and that made you want to cry into your scrambled eggs, didn't it? It was Moose's fault, of course. She ran away from home this weekend, if you can believe such a thing, went off to the beach all by herself to "write a talk." I said to Goose, "What's the deal? Moose talks all the time. Suddenly, she needs a script?" It's some English prof thing. She's been invited to go give a big fancy lecture to a bunch of people. When Moose finally came back this afternoon, I asked her what her lecture is going to be about.

"Well," she said, "it's kind of about you."

"Me?" I said. "Why do you want to go off and talk to a bunch of English profs about me?"

"Well," she said, "I want to tell them about your blog."

"My blog?" I said.

"Yes," she replied. "I want to talk about the happy little corner of the blogosphere you've created and what it can teach us about how people read, write, and connect with one another in the 21st century."

"Fine," I said, "but you'll explain how things work around here, right? I mean, you know, that I'm in charge and I do all the really hard stuff, like the thinking and the writing and the making up of names for new departments, right?"

"Absolutely, Rox. It's your world. I just type here."

"So when is this lecture, anyway?"

"November 8 at Rutgers University."

"Can anybody come?"

"Sure. It's free and open to the public. It's at 4:30 in the Alexander Library on the New Brunswick campus."

"Uh-huh. And does it have a title yet, this 'talk' of yours?"

"Yep. It's called 'On the Internet, Everybody Thinks I'm a Dog: The Queer Adventures of an English Prof in the Blogosphere.'"

"Cute. I would've come up with something funnier."

"I'm sure you would have, Rox."

"In the meantime, we don't even have a picture to go with this post. My readers expect that, you know. They love their eye candy."

"I know, Rox, and I'm really sorry. I sent Goose a pretty sunrise picture from the beach, but I can't figure out how to get it from my cellphone to the blog. How about a pretty dolphin picture? I saw dolphins while I was at the beach, and you know that's very auspicious."

"Fine. Whatever. Just give the kids their eye candy. Can't figure out how to get a picture from a cellphone to the blog. Harumph. I'm going to bed."

Make It Stop

Please, someone, take Maureen Dowd's laptop away from her before she writes another word about Hillary Clinton. I am an old dog with a leaky heart, and I can't take it anymore.

Please, tell her that her favorite analogy -- insisting that the Bush and Clinton families are alike in being "dynasties" -- is wholly specious and unconvincing. The Bush family has been close to the centers of political, economic, and military power in the United States since the early decades of the twentieth century. (See Kevin Phillips, American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush if you don't believe me.) Hillary Clinton married a guy who never met his father and became president the old-fashioned way: by getting more votes than the fella he ran against. She's been elected to two terms in the U. S. Senate and has a crazy idea that she might be at least as capable as the moron currently occupying the Oval Office. But Mo Do wastes precious inches of real estate in The New York Times with choice quotes like this one from Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, who "once told" Dowd:

She’s never going to get out of our faces. ... She’s like some hellish housewife who has seen something that she really, really wants and won’t stop nagging you about it until finally you say, fine, take it, be the damn president, just leave me alone.

Don't you love that chummy "once told me" formulation? I can see them leaning across the table toward one another in some impossibly chic Manhattan bar. Beads of sweat slide slowly down the glass that holds Mo Do's cosmopolitan. When Wieseltier hisses out the phrase "hellish housewife," Mo Do has to swallow hard to keep from indelicately spewing her beverage across the room. She laughs so hard her face almost moves. Almost. She is having so much fun she thinks she might order something to eat. But no, it's Thursday. If she eats today that's it for the weekend.

Frank Rich was hatin' on Hillary today, too. His piece isn't as venomous as Mo Do's, but he and his colleague seem locked in a contest to find the worst possible analogy to describe the Clinton campaign. Rich compares her to Al Gore in 2000 -- cautious, long-winded, equivocal, running a safe campaign aimed at not losing rather than winning the election. Digby aptly describes Rich's less than illuminating comparison as "utterly useless lightweight psycholanalytical drivel," to which Roxie's World says, "Paws up!"

More pleasant reading can be found in the Times in A. O. Scott's thoughtful look into the mind and music of Mr. Bruce Springsteen, whose new album, Magic, will be released this week. The Boss will be hitting the road with the E Street Band this fall, and we can look forward to a potent mixture of pop and politics from the group. Springsteen has clearly had it with the outrages of the Bush years and is making no effort to conceal his contempt. One song on the new album, "Last to Die," asks the question a young John Kerry asked the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when he came back from Vietnam: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" Roxie's World will have a review of Magic up soon. The moms got an advance copy, thanks to a kind friend in the Garden State. And, yes, they've got tix for the DC show, which Moose managed to procure all by herself on the internets last week when Goose was out of town. (Usually, only Goose is trusted with the sacred task of procuring Bruce tix. Moose might get flustered and end up with Celine Dion or something. We are awfully proud that she managed to shoulder this awesome responsibility. We're thinking maybe Condi Rice should send her to Burma to work out that whole mess between the monks and the junta.)

Finally, Wa Po found a gay Iranian. Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said last week in remarks at Columbia University that there weren't any. Incredibly, he was wrong. There are queers in Iran, and they are finding the courage to find one another, to come out, and to try to educate people via the Web and through dialog. We applaud their bravery, and we wish them well in their education project. Trust us -- We know what it's like to have a dumb president who acts as if you don't exist much of the time.

Click, watch, listen, children. Here's "Radio Nowhere," fresh off of Springsteen's Magic:

The M Word(s)

Have you ever noticed that when you start noticing something you suddenly notice it everywhere? For example, words beginning with "M." Lately, Moose and I have noticed, from the observation deck that looks out over the broad expanse of Roxie's World, that words beginning with the thirteenth letter of the alphabet are popping up like weeds. (Of course, we also notice a fair number of actual weeds when we're out on the observation deck, which overlooks our ridiculously large back yard, but for the moment let's focus on the metaphorical weeds rather than the literal ones, okay?) Lest you think we're just an old dog obsessed with a new scent or an English prof determined to find patterns in everything, consider the following examples:

Marathon: The Democratic majority in the Senate held an all-night session last night in an effort to break the Republican filibuster on a bill to begin withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq. Mattresses were brought in so that senators could curl up to plan their big speeches about their deep misgivings toward the increasingly fuzzy mission of the troops in Iraq. Wa Po described the session as a marathon, while Republicans did their best to dismiss it as a "stunt." Roxie's World gives it a hearty paws up for keeping the war front and center on the American political stage. Even if it was a "stunt," it beats hell out of the stunts Republicans pulled when they controlled the Congress. (Can you say, "Terry Schiavo?") Think Progress was live-blogging from the Senate session and has some good bits up here. Crooks and Liars has vid of Senator Mary Landrieu's speech here.

Menstruation: Are you surprised that the Geniuses of Western Civilization have figured out how to stop menstruation before they figured out how to end the war in Iraq? Is it just me, or does that reflect a certain misdirection of energy, a flawed arrangement of priorities? Or does it merely prove that the Geniuses of Big Pharma have an easier job to do than the poor suckers stuck playing war games in the bowels of the Pentagon? Or that Prick Science is ahead of Prick Militarism, to return to the pointed theme introduced by Sister Gloria Steinem in the piece we referred to in Sunday's post? We offer these rhetorical questions in response to Karen Houppert's Op-Ed in yesterday's NY Times regarding the FDA's recent approval of a new birth control pill, Lybrel, that causes cessation of periods. We'd heard about Lybrel before, but Houppert, who wrote a book called The Curse: Confronting the Last Unmentionable Taboo, Menstruation, offers a trenchant analysis that tracks shifting attitudes toward menstruation alongside anxieties about women's expanding roles and raises good questions about the medicalization of normal bodily functions and stages of life. (This is one of those subjects that really sets Moose off, so we'd best be careful. She is not by nature a conspiracy theorist, but she sincerely believes that pharmaceutical companies have been paying research scientists to invent new diseases in order to expand the market for new drugs. Restless Leg Syndrome? Check. Social Anxiety Disorder? Check. Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder? Moose puts a check on this one, though she fully acknowledges the painful realities of PMS, having lived with it for years.)

Marriage/Madam/"Monogamy": We have a torrent of M words released in the hilarious story of Louisiana Senator David Vitter, a family-values conservative whose phone number turned up in the logs of the so-called "DC Madam," Deborah Jeane Palfrey. We won't cruelly mock Vitter's poor wife Wendy for her stand-by-your-man routine, despite the fact that she herself was cruel and arrogant enough to say during the Lewinsky mess that "I'm a lot more like Lorena Bobbitt than Hillary [Clinton]. If he does something like that, I'm walking away with one thing, and it's not alimony, trust me." We won't even make fun of her questionable fashion judgment in choosing to appear before the cameras for the traditional damage-control press conference in a form-fitting, low-cut dress that, from a distance, looked like leopard skin. (If you're interested in that, though, Countdown had a pretty catty piece along those lines last night. It's here, but the video wasn't available when we checked.) We're content to sit back and chuckle at the deserved comeuppance of another "family-values" hypocrite frantically trying to assert his right to privacy after years of working to impose his Pharisaical moral framework on the rest of us. Dana Milbank has a funny piece on Vitter's sneaky efforts to avoid the press since his return to Washington this week. Ruth Marcus has a spot-on analysis of how bogus the privacy line is, given that Vitter may have committed crimes in his dalliances with Palfrey's alleged prostitution ring. Here are Mr. and Mrs. Vitter, looking not quite ready for their close-ups:

Maureen Dowd: We know we've been pretty tough on MoDo here in Roxie's World recently. We think she deserves our righteous criticisms of her mindless Clinton-bashing, but today we give her a paws up for a good column that rips into the Bush administration following the release of a new National Intelligence Estimate which concludes that "al-Qaeda has protected or regenerated key elements of its Homeland attack capability by reestablishing a haven in Pakistan and reconstituting its top leadership." (See Wa Po's analysis of what the report does to the administration's rationales for the war in Iraq. It's here.) Our favorite lines from MoDo's column are right at the beginning:

Oh, as it turns out, they’re not on the run.

And, oh yeah, they can fight us here even if we fight them there.

And oh, one more thing, after spending hundreds of billions and losing all those lives in Iraq and Afghanistan, we’re more vulnerable to terrorists than ever.

And, um, you know that Dead-or-Alive stuff? We may be the ones who end up dead.

Mormon/Mitt/"Monogamy": We could write a book on this Gordian knot of M words. For the moment, we will merely venture the kind of political prediction that is rare here in Roxie's World, given that we hate to create opportunities to be proven wrong. Nonetheless, we do hereby predict that if Mitt Romney wins the Republican nomination for president, the Democratic landslide of 2008 will make the LBJ landslide of '64 look like a squeaker. We say this because religious bigotry is alive and well here in the United States of Fundamentalism. Wa Po's Chris Cillizza and Shailagh Murray cite a Post/ABC News poll suggesting strong resistance to a Mormon nominee among Republicans. The poll shows that 30 percent of Republican voters said "they would be less likely to support a candidate if he or she were a Mormon. Of that group, forty-nine percent said there was 'no chance' they would back a Mormon for president." Their report is here. We like those numbers so much that we're ready to launch a new group called Democrats for Romney. We also think HBO should start running its fabulous new show about polygamy in the suburbs, Big Love, for free on non-cable stations. The moms think it's the queerest thing on TV now that The L Word is between seasons, but they also think it would do tremendous damage to Romney's candidacy by suggesting that every hard-working telegenic Mormon man probably has a couple of spare wives hidden in his closet.

Okay, kids, time to get up off the couch. Next M word on the list is MOVE. Peace out.

Count the Vaginas

(Photo Credit: Melina Mara, Washington Post; the inner circle of Hillary Clinton's campaign)

Are you worried that Roxie's World is taking a turn for the crude and anatomical? Are you more worried that, with our third Hillary post in a row, we've abandoned our position of neutrality in the Democratic primary race and are transforming your favorite dog blog into a bastion of mindless Clinton worship?

Relax, kids. The creative team and the political division are closely monitoring the situation and are determined to maintain Roxie's World's high standards of. . .popping off about whatever it is that happens to capture our attention on any given day. We just couldn't resist calling your attention to Lois Romano's terrific piece on Hillary's estrogen-fueled inner circle in this morning's Wa Po. Cynics will argue that Romano got suckered by a team of femi-nazi loyalists looking to humanize a candidate so often perceived as cold and calculating. (Snarky aside to Maureen Dowd: There's your lead for your next column. We'll let you use it for free if you promise to credit Roxie's World.) We say paws up to Romano for calling attention to the talented group of women who form the core of Clinton's campaign team. "Never have so many women operated at such a high level in one campaign," she writes, "working with a discipline and a loyalty and a legendary secrecy rarely seen at this level of American politics." In a couple of spots, Romano acknowledges the downside to the tightness of Clinton's inner circle -- the tendency toward secrecy, insularity, and a certain defensiveness -- but mostly she focuses on the fact that, "among her own staff, [Clinton] has cultivated a nurturing culture of collegiality and loyalty, a leadership style based in teamwork, and often favored by women, that values consensus over hierarchy." Heck, there are even weekly yoga classes at the campaign's Arlington headquarters! How much you wanna bet their periods are all in sync -- well, you know, at least among those who still have periods?

Moose is still chewing on that comment by Jen Moseley, quoted in The Nation piece on Hillary, that being a woman doesn't guarantee women will support Clinton, because "There's no vagina litmus test, people." She appreciates the point. She knows there are plenty of women she would vote against no matter how many birthday parties they threw for their devoted staff members. She also knows that feminism aims to create a truly equitable world in which differences of gender, sex, race, and class would cease to matter. In that world, there would be no need to count vaginas -- or notice skin color or income level -- but we don't yet live in that world or anything remotely like it. That's why a photograph of a group of smart, strong, smiling women working together to make history gives us a goosebump or two over morning coffee. The only way to get that world is to build it, and these poised, determined women look like they'd be pretty handy with the tools of world-building.

Roxie's World says let's give 'em a hammer and see what they can do.