Obama-Era Pelosi = Pre-Obama-Era Clinton

Apparently American reactionaries require there to be one highly visible white female in Washington on whom they can focus their irrational loathing. Before Obama got elected, that woman was Hillary Clinton. I was always amazed at how much the wingnuts despised Hillary, but more to the point, how transparently their hatred was simply an inversion of their sexist fear.

But things have changed -- Clinton is now part of Obama's cabinet, and by siding with Obama, she finally finds herself in America's good graces. All the non-Democrats who voted for Obama --moderates who have fled the Republican party since Limbaugh took over as RNC chairman, and independents* -- who, to their credit, just can't reconcile the cognitive dissonance resulting from the simultaneous claims that "Obama is doing a good job" and "Hillary is a shrill power-hungry feminazi crypto-lesbian bitch" -- feel an aching void where their cowering hatred of Hillary used to be.

But now there's Nancy Pelosi!

Granted, Pelosi was a Republican whipping-boy ("whipping-girl" just sounds too overtly S&M for its intended meaning to come through) ever since she assumed the Speakership, but this recent CIA torture bullshit has proved to be the spark igniting the powderkeg. All those disenfranchised Hillary haters finally have a new, competent, politician with a powerful office and a vagina, all at the same time, on whom they can unload their loathing.

I'm not a fan of Pelosi -- to be honest, I am utterly neutral toward Pelosi. There are plenty of folks on the left end of the political spectrum who would dispute my having called her "competent," and I can see why. But I can recognize when ostensibly neutral political maneuvering is being used to disguise misogynistic fear. Hang in there, Nance.

* There are two kinds of people who claim to be "independent" -- (a) informed people who have their own idiosyncratic set of principles that doesn't completely align with either party, and (b) clueless people who feel guilty about never having paid enough attention to politics to figure out what their principles are, but don't want to risk painting themselves into a conversational corner by arbitrarily claiming to agree with one party over the other.