Tuesday, October 04, 2016

Male Supremacy




The right-wing media, and Hot Air's Larry O'Connor specifically, should learn something from Rush Limbaugh. When you're told that someone saw you with your pants down, simply claim the charge came from a lying hack because you did not have your pants down.  O'Connor would say "the complainant was looking at me sideways and din't realize that the pants were only partially down, and that was only because I was sold the wrong size."

On ABC's This Week, Rudy Giuliani said Donald Trump is

a genius at how to take advantage of legal remedies that can help your company survive and grow. I want a man who’s a genius at figuring out how to take this country, that’s -- moving in the wrong direction, where we’ve had a basically jobless recovery, where we’ve had growth of less than 2 percent for two years. That’s pathetic! Don’t you think a man who has this kind of economic genius is a lot better for the United States than a woman, and the only thing she’s ever produced is a lot of work for the FBI checking out her e-mails.







Limbaugh knew to defend Giuliani, attack the messenger, and get out. After claiming "It's not what Rudy Giuiani said. It's not what Rudy Giuliani meant," he slammed the media by adding

They know it. They just don't care. They think they can pull all these tricks and most people will never spot it; most people, if they do spot it, won't care.

The media thinks most people agree with them anyway. The media thinks that most people hate Rudy and hate Trump just like they do, and so they don't care. They don't care if you see them lying through their teeth, misrepresenting, out of context, whatever. They get away with it far more than they're ever held accountable, so why should they stop? "Did Rudy Giuliani really mean to say Donald Trump would make a better president than Hillary Clinton because he's a man? ...

Wisely, he never answered the question, and should have advised O'Connor, who remarked

Gee, that’s kind of an important modifier at the end of the “woman” reference, isn’t it?...

Giuliani was clearly contrasting Trump’s business acumen with Clinton’s sordid track record in public service which continues to languish under the cloud of suspicion and multiple FBI investigations. He referred to her as “a woman” while conducting the comparison because, well, she’s a woman.

 O'Connor proceeded to replace "woman" with "man" in the quote, arguing that it would not have been strange if "reoriented to male-specific pronouns."

He was wrong, confused, and confusing. and Amanda Marcotte ate him up and spit him out as she explained

Oh dear, someone was out sick the week their English teacher taught sentence diagramming, or they would know that the “and” in Giuliani’s sentence separated two independent clauses. In fact, Giuliani’s statement might have read better as two separate sentences, since the first clause really needs a question mark at the end of it:

“Don’t you think a man who has this kind of economic genius is a lot better for the United States than a woman?”

“And the only thing she’s ever produced is a lot of work for the FBI checking out her emails.”

The “and” is just an artifact of the spoken language, which tends to be littered with more conjunctions that more formal writing.

Whether it takes a genius to avoid paying federal income taxes as long as Donald Trump probably did, it does not take one to figure out why Rudy Giuliani is one of the GOP presidential nominee's most enthisiastic advocates







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