Legal Commentary

Judith Warner's Memo to Maureen Dowd

By Big Tent Democrat

NYTimes' Judith Warner:

[A] peculiarly gendered form of trivializing scorn still tags our secretary of state. Just two weeks ago, The Washington Post had to remove from its Web site an ostensibly humorous video sketch by two of its prominent political journalists that juxtaposed a picture of Clinton’s face with a bottle of derogatorily named beer. This sort of thing bodes badly for the country’s ability to treat her — and the issues she most passionately champions — with appropriate respect.

“We have our own work to do at home,” [Melanne Verveer, the State Department’s new ambassador at large for global women’s issues,] told me. “We trivialize the importance too often of these issues: the ‘women’s issue’ — you put it in quotes, that little category over there, the box you check. What we have to do is realize these are the issues; if we want societies to prosper and if we want our own security, we have to raise the status of women.” . . . Can all this complexity attract — much less sustain — the attention of the public?

Maybe — if we stop viewing everything Clinton does as entertainment.

This piece seems directed at Maureen Dowd.

Speaking for me only

Full post as published by TalkLeft on August 13, 2009 (boomark / email).