Misogyny talk left to the US today
Image: "Women in binders" source; The peoples cube
The winning of a Security Council seat at a lobbying cost of $25
million plus substantially increased foreign aid expenditure seems to have settled
down the misogyny talk from the government today. Tony Abbott has been accused of wanting
to put a wrecking ball through the economy and sack public servants, but he
seems to have been given a pass on the War on Women meme.
Given that the Macquarie Dictionary
has amended its definition of misogyny from hatred of women, which critics have
pointed out didn’t really fit Tony, to a much more expansive one which with a
large dose of spin could sound almost credible to someone who really wanted to
believe it, perhaps Gillard is reviewing her tactics.
There is also the possibility that
with the pressure off, and in the interests of the Australian US alliance, she
has been able to redeploy her ‘Abbotts war on women’ spin team across the
Pacific to help her ally with his ‘Romney’s war on women’ campaign. Given the President’s response to Romney’s ‘women in binders’ remark about recruiting capable women into his
state administration, this seems likely:
US President Barack Obama has made rival Mitt Romney pay for his awkward ‘‘binders full of women’’ comment that took on a life of its own after their feisty second debate.
During a heated Tuesday night (US time) showdown, Republican nominee Mr Romney recalled consulting ‘‘binders full of women’’ when he was searching for qualified women to serve in his cabinet when he was governor of Massachusetts.
Much like Romney’s ‘‘Big Bird’’ comments at the first debate two weeks earlier, thousands of people seized on the binders remark, and by Wednesday a “Binders full of women” FaceBook page received 303,000 likes. …
Mr Obama latched on to the oddball expression at his first post-debate campaign stop, in the political battleground of Iowa, where he used it to highlight his record on women’s rights and his plan to hire thousands of maths teachers.
‘‘I’ve got to tell you, we don’t have to collect a bunch of binders to find qualified, talented, driven young women, ready to learn and teach in these fields right now,’’ Mr Obama told a crowd at Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa.
This
is a rather puerile effort at using a strawman argument in response to his
opponent’s statement. The
President seems to be using the method of argument whereby, "If you can't beat your opponent's ideas, you
distort those ideas and maybe make some up. If you don't have a record to run
on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run away from.” It was after all Obama’s own statement
from 2008.
With
the campaign emphasis now firmly back to his botched economic policies, botched
foreign policy, and botched energy policy, it is doubtful that this will make
any bigger impact than the Big Bird attack.
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