The first presidential debate came down to who had the bigger flag pin. The second debate this week boiled down to binders. Specifically, Mittens the misogynists' notable quote that he tackled gender inequality in the workforce as Governor of Massachusetts.
"I went to a number of women's groups and said, can you help us find folks? And they brought us whole binders full of women," Willard proudly stated during the debate this week.
I've heard of a school of fish and a murder of crows, but binders of women -- that's a new one! Is that a plural marriage Mormon thing? Is that how sister-wives are selected, from binders? Republicans are famous for objectifying women, paring them down to their various body parts and/or stereotypical gender roles to control them and keep them suppressed. So this is no big surprise, except that it underscores the utter ineptitude of this man to lead ... anything. He was (mysteriously) gaining support among likely female voters before the debate, so it will be interesting to see how this latest gaffe affects his numbers.
How he's managed to gain any non-Mormon female support is one of the most perplexing questions in this campaign. RomRyan have repeatedly voiced their disdain for women, for their reproductive rights, privacy rights, equal pay rights, educational rights, and their rights as "legitimate" rape victims. Why any self-respecting woman would support a candidate who questions her right to manage her own body functions without male intervention -- be it the right to have an insurance-covered mammogram, access to the HPV vaccine, birth control, to refuse unwanted vaginal probes, forced viewing of anti-abortion videos ... the list goes on and on.
Camp Romney has been largely quiet about Bindergate, but VEEP wananbe Paul Ryan did issue this statement:
"All he simply meant was that he went out of his way to try to recruit qualified women to serve in his administration when he was governor," Ryan told "CBS This Morning." "That's really what he was saying. And, by the way, he has an exceptional record of hiring women in very prominent positions in his administration, and that's the point he was making."
Wanna fact-check that a tad, l'il Paulie? Mittens is hardy a feminist. As CEO of Bain Capital, he never met a woman he wanted to promote, according to Boston.com...
"Romney did not have any women partners as CEO of Bain Capital during the 1980s and 1990s. The venture capital and private equity fields were male-dominated, to be sure, especially during Romney's time. Women started to break into the upper echelons of the firm after it started a hedge fund, called Brookside in 1996. Today, 4 of out of 49 of the firm's managing directors in the buyout area are women."
As a Bishop in the Mormon church, his reputation on women is even worse, as Geoffrey Dunn writing for HuffPo reminds us and we've discussed before -- his attempt to coerce a female member of his church to carry a baby to term despite her physician's warnings that the pregnancy was killing her, and urging another single mother to give her child up for adoption to a married couple. There are a couple of binders who won't be voting for him this year, you can be sure.
And I doubt NOW is going to be handing him any awards in the near future.
