Those terrible mountebanks.

I questioned whether I'd ever seen the word "mountebank" in the newspaper, so I searched the NYT archive � all the way back to 1852 � and got 782 hits, beginning with "Really, this Louis NAPOLEON is a very provoking fellow" ("the appearance of the mountebank in the character of a king").

Quite a few of the hits were repetitions of H.L. Mencken's 1926 description of William Jennings Bryan: "a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without sense or dignity . . . deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, . . . all beauty, all fine and noble things. . . . Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not."

One often encounters "mountebank" in a string of contradictions about a person, for example, Theodore Roosevelt: "He transformed the 20th century; no, he overextended the 19th. He was a progressive trust buster; no, an imperialist demagogue. He was a defender of liberty; no, a power-hungry mountebank � a pioneer environmentalist, a bloodthirsty hunter; a farseeing visionary, an energetic clerk."

I see that future President Woodrow Wilson � upon hearing of the death of President McKinley in 1901 � said: "What will happen to the country with that mountebank as President?"
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"Since Hillary never gave us 'closure' by braining the big boy with a frying pan, it was delicious to see another brainy lawyer ding him with a 32-page order and fine."

"The judge dryly mocked Mr. Clinton's tortured definition of his tryst. 'It appears,' she wrote, 'the President is asserting that Ms. Lewinsky could be having sex with him while, at the same time, he was not having sex with her.'"

I'm just reading an old Maureen Dowd column. Clinton v. Jones comes up today in the Conlaw1 readings, and I was looking for something.

Notice the old violent-females-are-funny meme, replete with a frying pan as the weapon. I wonder if younger people today even remember all the ancient humor involving wives hitting their husband with a frying pan.

Maureen Dowd says Hillary Clinton "can�t figure out how to campaign as a woman."

That's a statement that is sexist IF the assumed proposition is true: that Hillary Clinton is trying to "campaign as a woman."

So, does Dowd establish the necessary proposition? Dowd points to Hillary's 2008 campaign and asserts that "Hillary scrubbed out the femininity, vulnerability and heart" because: 1. Mark Penn (her chief strategist) had written that voters look to the President as "the 'father' of the country," not a "first mama," and 2. Bill Clinton�s post-9/11 advice to all Democrats was that it works better to be "strong and wrong than... weak and right." Consequently, Hillary was too pro-war on Iraq, or, as Dowd puts it: Hillary "act[ed] like a masculine woman defending the Iraq invasion" and lost out to the "feminized man" who denounced it.

Yes, that's right: Dowd calls Obama a feminized man and equates resistance to war to femininity. So far, Dowd is looking utterly and confidently sexist.

After losing Iowa and watching New Hampshire slip away to the tyro, Barack Obama, Hillary cracked. She misted up, talking to a group of voters in New Hampshire when a woman asked her how she kept going, while staying �upbeat and so wonderful.�

... [I]t was a triumph because she seemed real. As The Washington Post�s Dan Balz wrote in his campaign book, it �let a glimmer of her humanity peek through.�

Hillary always overcorrects. Now she has zagged too far in the opposite direction, presenting herself as a sweet, docile granny in a Scooby van....

[I]sn�t there a more authentic way for Hillary to campaign as a woman � something between an overdose of testosterone and an overdose of estrogen, something between Macho Man and Humble Granny?...

Hillary is a woman, so why talk about what it means to campaign "as a woman"? Hillary is a specific person. We all know her very well. If she's dialing weakness and strength up and down for political reasons and we can see it, she seems dishonest and devious. Dowd's word "authentic" hits that problem. To equate weakness and strength to femininity and masculinity is sexist stereotyping.

Dowd doesn't take responsibility for her sexism. In fact, she ends the column by projecting that sexism onto Republicans. Hillary's "Republican rivals...  are coming after her with every condescending, misogynist, distorted thing they�ve got." I predict that the GOP candidates will go out of their way to seem gender-neutral and to avoid giving Hillary and her supporters material they can use to do more War-on-Women politics. It's Dowd who's plying misogyny right now, using stereotypes like "granny" and the masculinized woman.

Hillary's real problem is inauthenticity. Dowd's saw that and admitted it as she rambled along the gender track, where she needed to be to get where she wanted to go: Those Republicans are terrible.

"Jeb, or '45,' as he is already being called, hasn�t even announced, and we�re already trapped in the byzantine psyche of Bushworld."

Writes Maureen Dowd.

[H]e�s being yanked in a tug of war between his father�s side, which insists privately that Jeb is a realist who surely must have disapproved of the Iraq invasion, and his brother�s side, which publicly demands that Jeb go full-hawk, becoming the third Bush to use the military in Iraq....
Though Jeb is more apt to do his homework, he�s unformed on foreign policy, like his brother � except that his brother was elected before 9/11. Now the neocons who treated W. like a host body for their own agenda are swirling around Jeb, ready to inhabit another President Bush....