By Dave Lindorff
It’s kind of bizarre reading about supposed “feminists” who are reportedly claiming they’ll vote for McCain rather than Obama, now that “their” candidate, Hillary Clinton, is out of the running for the presidential nomination.
First of all, John McCain is clearly the candidate of the anti-abortion crowd, but that’s not the half of it. He’s also the candidate who says Anthony Scalia, John Roberts and Sam Alito are his kind of judges. We’re talking here about guys (yeah, guys) who think a woman’s place is in the home, and who only recently ruled that if she’s discriminated against on the job, and doesn’t learn about it for a decade or more, a woman can’t do anything about it, because the original offense of underpaying her happened more than 180 days ago. McCain is also the guy who, after his wife suffered a serious car crash and became disabled, dumped her for a younger, richer woman. A feminist’s dream, this guy.
And how about Hillary Clinton? When she was supposedly getting her “White House experience”—you know, the “co-presidency” she was supposedly part of during the eight years her husband was president and she was First Lady—she and Bill oversaw the “end of welfare as we know it.” What that fine piece of legislation did was limit people to five years on the dole. That’s for life. It doesn’t matter what misfortune befalls you later on.
Now many single women left to raise kids by fathers who either ditch them or who never stepped up to the plate as fathers in the first place, have a hard time, between lack of adequate child care facilities and discrimination on the job, keeping the rent paid and food on the table. Many of them need government assistance well beyond that five years—a period of time not long enough to even get one kid into full-time school, much less two or three. That didn’t matter to Hillary, the great champion of women. She and Bill were busy triangulating and figuring out how to keep their White House position, and that meant selling out poor people, and especially poor women with kids. Welfare had to go.
For the rest of this article, please go to: Hillary's Whiners
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DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net
