Honestly, I know enough biology to know that it can’t be. It just can’t. And yet how else to explain the sudden ignorance of a guy as sharp as Bob Somerby? He’s talking about Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow beating up on Stupak for tribalistic, Village reasons.
Somerby finds that inappropriate.

For ourselves, we think pro-choice groups have every right to bail on the bill if they decide it ends up affecting choice in unacceptable ways. But then, we also think that anti-abortion groups have the right to make the same sort of decision. That is, to jump ahead just a bit: We assume that different people, acting in good faith, may judge the morality of a measure in different ways.

Leaving Olbermann and Maddow aside, this is the first time I’ve seen Somerby completely miss a question of right and wrong.

What if the amendment read, “Hair straightening is unnatural and immoral. No medical costs associated with complications can be paid for using any Federal tax dollars.” Would he be as tolerant of that viewpoint? Male circumcision is an unnecessary procedure whose only health benefit comes from compensating for poor hygiene (or, in the case of AIDS, from the unnaturally thickened skin of the glans). Would he be as quick to understand people with moral objections to the deformation of men? (Note to the humor-challenged: I’m paralleling anti-abortion attitudes, not actually arguing for a specific kind of anatomy.) If I felt it was immoral and harmful to everyone to overpopulate the planet, and attached an amendment saying that no Federal money should ever be spent on pregnancy, childbirth, or infants after the second child, would he sagely say my morality could become law if I had the votes?

I could have all the morals I want about these things. As soon as I tried to make anyone else live according to them, I would be wrong.

Stupak and Pitts deserve disgrace for trying to take away our rights. It has nothing to do with morals, Stupak’s, mine, or the man in the moon’s. Rights. The right to control our own medical procedures. The right to control our bodies. Rights. Get it?

So, no, “different people, acting in good faith” may not judge a law about rights in different ways. Not even when it’s a law about women’s medical rights.

What is so hard to understand about this? Even with the handicap of a Y chromosome?

Stupak, rights, human rights, politics

The Stupak amendment, the greatest rollback of rights for women in decades is now in that thing the House has been calling a “Health Care” bill. (Links from Reclusive Leftist, The Confluence, WiredLeft.)

But women are just, as always, the expendable canaries in the coal mine. Their rights are toast, which means so are everyone else’s.

I’m going to shout that: WOMEN’S RIGHTS ARE TOAST WHICH MEANS SO ARE EVERYONE ELSE’S.

Rights are for all. When only some people have them, they’re just privileges. And privileges can be taken away.

Think through the consequences of what equal rights for all really means, and you wind up with a system that doesn’t look much like what we have now. There’s lots more about it here, but this is the bit (paraphrased) that concerns us right now:

The right to control one’s own person is fundamental. Even the right not to be murdered is secondary, since killing is allowed in self-defence.

Abortion muddies the argument only because some people believe the fetus is a person with legal rights greater than those of the mother since it can require her life support. There is nothing to stop women from believing this and living accordingly because there is a right to control one’s own body. Depending on beliefs, an individual’s dilemma about abortion may be very complex.

But fair social policies are simple. Either everyone can live according to their beliefs, or nobody can. And personhood is necessarily a belief, a social or religious category. It’s not possible for it to be a matter of objective fact. Biology can only determine who belongs in the species Homo sapiens, but no cellular marker lights up when someone is due to get legal rights.

I’ll repeat: personhood is necessarily a matter of belief, whether that’s based on religion or social consensus.

Therefore those who oppose abortion because they believe the fetus is a person with special status have to hope they are never successful in legislating how others handle their pregnancies. If they are, it means that exceptions could be made to the right to control one’s own person.

Once that principle is admitted, then there is nothing to stop a majority with different beliefs from legislating forced abortions.

Over-population is, after all, the source of the environmental problems killing the planet.

There is nothing to stop an aging population from requisitioning a kidney from healthy people walking around with a spare.

There is nothing to stop doctors from performing medical experiments on you for the public good.

There is nothing to stop the majority from deciding all those old folks are too expensive to live.

Really. Nothing. Once you take away the right to control your own body.

Extreme? Sure. So why is it okay when applied to women?

Stupak, abortion, Health Care Reform Act, HRCA

With the continuing flap over Caster Semenya, it may be interesting to get some background on the biology involved. A recent article I saw mentions testosterone levels, and that made me think that perhaps (yet another) post on the biology might be useful. So this isn’t about social gender, athletics, Caster Semenya herself, or anything but biology. Modal concepts of gender see it as a binary, either-or matter, but in reality it’s way fuzzier than that.

The good old X and Y chromosomes themselves don’t always come in pairs, to start with. You can have XXX, XXY, XXXXY, XYY, and the like. This is possible for two reasons. One is that even in a typical XX situation, one of the X chromosomes is silenced early in development. With more than one X, the extras are also silenced, so it doesn’t wreak the havoc of having, say, an extra chromosome 13 or 21. The second X is needed early on to develop functional ovaries, which is why XO (Turner’s Syndrome) people are infertile. The Y chromosome has very little information on it, and an extra copy or so therefore doesn’t do much damage.

So the X has its “ovary determining factor,” and there’s a sex-determining region on the Y (SRY). This is where things get even more interesting. All our chromosomes come in pairs, and despite their vast difference in size, the X and the Y are a pair. That means they can exchange bits of material in crossovers. It’s a bit like an elephant dancing with a hamster, but they manage. So you have a couple of unexpected possibilities, both of which would look quite ordinary on a regular count, i.e. 46 chromosomes, of which two are sex chromosomes.

1) XY, but the Y is missing the SRY. In this case, the person is anatomically female, but sterile. Since there’s a lack of testis determining factor (TDF), there’s also female levels of testosterone. That has particular relevance in the case of an athlete.

2) XX, but the SRY has translocated onto one of the Xs. In this case the person is anatomically male, and probably infertile unless the Y regions that code for sperm production also translocated. Testosterone is produced at male levels.

3) There are also genetic factors that alter the sensitivity of cells to circulating testosterone. Ordinary amounts of the hormone might be produced, but the rest of the body’s cells can over- or under-react (e.g. androgen-insensitivity syndrome, AIS).

The real point here is that the only valid concern is testosterone. That will give you an advantage in sports like sprinting, and that’s why doping yourself up with it is considered cheating. (When they talk about “steroids” in sports, they don’t mean any old steroids. Corticosteroids, for instance, wouldn’t do any good.) That’s also why there’s a concern about the femaleness of athletes, but not the maleness, in those sports where testosterone helps. (Just for the record, it’s not a huge advantage in all sports. Look at the early history of English Channel swimmers, for instance. Even against a tide of social disbelief, a number of early record holders were female.)

What the committee is really worrying about is that Semenya might have a testosterone advantage and be unfairly matched against other women who produce less and/or react less to it. They don’t need to know whether she’s a “girl.” They need to be measuring long term circulating testosterone and androgen sensitivity. To do it right, that could take years.

But there are implications far beyond that. The point that an athlete like Semenya brings home is that there are variations in testosterone among people. This has always been true. So, if the Committee really wants to be fair, they should be doing long term testosterone tests for everyone, male and female. Then, to continue being fair, they have to accommodate our non-binary reality properly and have different testosterone-based classes, like boxers do for weight. We could have quintiles 1 through 5, for instance, from the barely-measurable class up to the watch-for-eventual-heart-problems class.

That would involve acknowledging differences. Real differences as opposed to “vive la difference” differences. What do you think? Conceptually feasible? I mean, I realize I’m suggesting that a committee consider more than two categories at the same time.

athletics, gender verification, Semenya

So now it’s Sotomayor. According to Jeffrey Rosen, who spoke to some law clerk, she’s not fit to be a judge on the Supreme Court because she has opinions, she expresses those opinions, she expresses those opinions forcefully and at length.

(Shows you how much I know about the law. I thought that was practically the description of the Supremes.)

Greenwald does one of his usual masterful takedowns, and adds a very interesting update at the end:

Jeffrey Rosen’s brother-in-law is Neal Katyal, the current Deputy Solicitor General in the Obama administration. If Sotomayor’s prospects are torpedoed, that could clear the way for one of the other leading candidates to be named to the Court: current Solicitor General Elena Kagan. The selection of Kagan (rather than Sotomayor) would almost certainly result in Rosen’s brother-in-law (Katyal) becoming Solicitor General. Additionally, Katyal himself was once a clerk for a Second Circuit judge, obviously raising the question of whether he was one of the anonymous sources for his brother-in-law’s hit piece disparaging Sotomayor’s intellect and character.

One can question whether this Rosen/Katyal relationship should have been disclosed by TNR (on balance, it was probably unnecessary), but at the very least, these are illustrative of the types of problems that inevitably arise when anonymous sources are used so casually in a political culture rife with incestuous relationships and conflicts of interest.

However, what’s a boring potential conflict of interest? Let’s talk about Sotomayor. She talks! She’s forceful! How awful!

And apparently that’s been enough to get the “keepers of conventional wisdom” (to use Greenwald’s words) riled up about the potential horrors of affirmative action. “Good God. You can’t waste such a vital job on some politically correct nonsense. The only criterion should be the best, um, person for the job. Why should a woman get it?”

As I said, button up. Your sexism is showing.

There isn’t one shred of evidence that women have inferior mental capacity to men. (Insofar as there is evidence, it’s actually on the other side. On average girls show earlier verbalization in infancy, better school grades, and higher test scores until, for some reason — possibly they talk too much and they’re too loud — they hit the job world and start getting paid less and promoted less.) So, in a reality-based context it’s safe to assume that women are at least the equals of men in ability. And yet the overwhelming preponderance of powerful positions are filled by men.

Yes, there’s affirmative action. And, yes, it does lead to less competent people being given jobs that are beyond them. It’s time to end that. We should find the best person for the job. Why should it be given to a man?

I’ve been thinking a lot about rights lately, and that took me to Wikipedia’s page on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Here’s Article 1

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

What is wrong with this picture?

Yes, the very next Article goes on to say, “Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, . . .” and so on through the usual list. But still. Language and thought shape each other. It’s not an either/or proposition.

And man (ahem) am I tired of the language. To say nothing of the thoughts. This primary and election season have sensitized me to the point where my reaction is about what it would be to poison ivy.

That first Article is proof I really didn’t need of the truth of Portly Dyke’s earlier post.

[Equality] between men and women would wreak the most profound level of change in humanity . . . . It’s the revolution that would have to take place everywhere – it’s the revolution that would strike at the heart, hearth, and home of human society, regardless of geography, culture, race, religion, or creed.

As she says, what’s important is not whether it’s the worst oppression. What’s important is that it’s the one we love the most.

That’s all. I had to vent. Carry on.

With this election, that is. Kate’s post brought it boiling back up, but so does practically everything right now. Just so you know we’re really out there: I’m mad as hell, and I’m not taking it any more. Not only can the Democrats not take my vote for granted, they’ve lost it. It doesn’t matter that with mindboggling generosity Hillary Clinton urges her supporters to vote in November. She’s not the one who caused the problem. The problem is the fauxgressives who think sexist bullying is okay, and the audiences who giggle nervously at best, and the candidates who ignore it. I don’t know how big a mea culpa it would take from all those people to bring me back in. I just know for sure that I’m not going to get it.

For some background to this rant, I want to tell you about something that happened in the high and far off times, when we were helping defend abortion clinics from fundie loonies down in the Deep South. Read more »

(BBC)

That’s all. Just thought you might want to know.

I’ve decided Joel Stein said something interesting. No, wait, hear me out. The LA Times’ so-called standup comedian in print may have so little depth that you wouldn’t get your feet wet if you walked through his soul in flipflops, but as a card-carrying jerk he can give us a chance to understand the mindset.

At first I just laughed. It didn’t seem blogworthy. But it continues to make me chuckle quietly to myself, so I thought I’d share it with you.

On March 14th, Mr. J. commented on the Spitzer fiasco. He did this by calling a high-end LA escort to find out what goes on. The very first thing he points out in the article is that he, Mr. J., doesn’t need to buy it.

The roughly $1,000 an hour that Spitzer paid for … was not … to guarantee secrecy. … And the exorbitant rate wasn’t a premium for weird or talented sex. … What Spitzer was really buying, she said, was [that] Emperors’ Club VIP … makes you feel very emperor-y.

“It’s like a five-star hotel,” she said. “If you call someone from the Yellow Pages, it’s very businesslike. It’s not a ‘girlfriend experience.’ ”

Men, she explained, don’t just want sex. They want a girlfriend experience. Or at least the part of the girlfriend experience in which she pretends to be fascinated while you talk about yourself. So more like a first-date experience.

The thing that’s funny is if they were talking about women they’d say, “Women want love.” Can’t say that about men, though. Not allowed. It has to be about sex. And, obviously, if you can’t even admit what you want, there’s no way to get it.

That’s the other thing that struck me as funny: That Joel Stein should be the one providing proof of what Portly Dyke) and I) and others have been saying forever: men are damaged by sexism at least as much as women.

eriposte at The Left Coaster has a gut-wrenching list of some of the ways sexism is slathered on Clinton’s campaign. I knew it was bad, but I’ve been trying to maintain my sanity. I didn’t realize it was this bad. Go read the whole thing. Go read it even if you already know we’re nowhere near a post-feminist society. There are some things which have to be repeated until we’re finally so cured we don’t know what they mean.

This was my comment to the post:

Thanks, eriposte. You’ve written the post I haven’t had the stomach to write myself. Carefully collecting all the evidence of hate just hurts too much.

The thing that hurts worst of all: the folks on supposedly “our” side, the “progressives,” who can always find a more “important” battle to fight than sexism.

We’re not supposed to get into an Olympics of -isms. Nobody’s suffering trumps someone else’s.

That’s true. Totally, entirely, completely true.

It’s true all ways. You have to care as much about my suffering as I do about yours.

If my suffering doesn’t matter to you, you’re just fighting for privilege.

Crossposted to Shakesville

Technorati tags: politics, sexism, Hillary, Clinton

We have a year to go, and already I’m tired of noticing how diseased some people are when it comes to women. Something about having to take a woman seriously as candidate for president seems to make these people break out.

Well, fine. I’m a big advocate of letting people do whatever they like in the privacy of their own homes. But when you’re in public, do cover up all the pus-filled boils.

The thing that really gets to me is all the jerks in the public eye — the talking heads, even the candidates themselves — who let the crap come out as if it was something perfectly normal. It means that to them it is perfectly normal. And that’s the most tiring, depressing, and soul-destroying thing of all. It’s not the knowledge that there are all kinds of bigots out there. I know there are. What’s so awful is that sexism is not something they have to hide. What’s so awful is what that means about everybody’s attitudes, not just theirs.

One recent example is the McCain staffer talking about “how to beat the bitch.” Once it got out, did McCain have to fire the person? No, he turned it into a fundraising event.

Imagine the reaction if Obama was the frontrunner, and the staffer had said, “How do we beat the nigger?”

That’s the difference I’m talking about. These days, racism has to be covered up, at least in public. It is Not Okay. But sexism is frivolous to worry about when we have “real problems.” Any women who are offended should lighten up and “get over it.” Or they should “have a sense of humor.”
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Talking Points Memo is one of the best sources for US political news. I’m not aware of anything that even comes close (but then again there are rafts of things I’m unaware of).

They generally do a fine job of avoiding bias … and yet when it come to Hillary Clinton there’s an undertow, all the more noticeable for its absence otherwise.

Commenting on how the news media couldn’t stop criticizing her laugh, and then began criticizing the lack of it:

Yes, we’ve apparently reached a point in the media’s coverage of the campaign in which news outlets find it noteworthy when they don’t notice anything unusual about Sen. Clinton’s laugh.

As Greg Sargent put it, “We’ve come full circle: Damned if you do cackle; damned if you don’t.”

Indeed. That’s the normal operating procedure for discrimination: you’re never good enough, you’re too fat, too thin, too dumb, too smart, too soft, too bitchy, etc. etc. etc. It’s refreshing that they recognize it and expose it to daylight.

And then they make fun of how ridiculous the media focus is:

In related news, Rudy Giuliani delivered a speech yesterday in which he didn’t answer his cell phone; Mitt Romney answered questions without abandoning a position he held five minutes prior; John McCain hosted a town-hall forum in which he did not refer to anyone as a “little jerk”; and Fred Thompson went the whole day without responding to a reporter’s question with, “I don’t know anything about that.”

They’re right that the media are making drooling fools of themselves. However, note the examples. Clinton’s laugh is being compared to evidence of manipulative boorishness, pandering, lack of impulse control, and stupidity. But a laugh is like a person’s gait or breathing. It can be consciously controlled, but it doesn’t say anything about one’s morals, maturity, or intelligence.

What’s going on with Clinton is even worse than what TPM realizes. The real parallels would be to say, “In other news, Rudy Giuliani delivered a speech yesterday during which he was still bald; Mitt Romney answered questions without wrinkling his forehead; John McCain hosted a town-hall forum in which he gestured sometimes; and Fred Thompson went the whole day with bags under his eyes.”

That’s so bad, it’s not funny. That’s what Clinton is putting up with.

Due to anatomical constraints, humans (and mammals generally) can really only have sex with one partner at a time. And if two people are having sex, then the fact that person A is having sex necessarily means person B is too.

We know all this.

So how is it that we’re so ready to believe research which says men have more sex partners than women? How could the scientists who did the research not notice that little flaw in their project?

Gina Kolata highlighted the issue with respect to heterosexuals in a recent NY Times article. She cites David Gale, an emeritus mathematician from UC-Berkeley, who pointed out the logical impossibility.

Although she doesn’t state it explicitly, note that a few promiscuous women can’t explain the survey results. In one study, for instance, men claim 12.7 heterosexual partners, on average, and women 6.4. That’s about a hundred percent difference. At least a few of these highly promiscuous women would be in the sample, and you’d see a skewed bimodal distribution. There’d be a large number of women with numbers of partners in the low single digits, a trough with very few having, say six to twenty partners, and then a spike showing that a few women had dozens or hundreds of partners. The overall average would still have to be the same for both sexes.

Nor can the results be explained by assuming men are having all that sex when traveling to places outside the survey population. Some men would be traveling to the survey population, and the women who are having sex with them should show up as more promiscuous than the men in the population.

But the surveys don’t show any group of women, however small, who are more promiscuous. If you want to believe the surveys, then somehow men are having sex with phantoms.
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It’s gone by other names, primarily female circumscision, as if it was nothing more than the male equivalent of removing the foreskin. It’s supposedly another one of those awful things that “can’t happen here.” Read the CNN report about the British, who may finally get serious about stopping the practice, and you’d never guess that tens of thousands of children suffer through the mutilation and its lifelong consequences right here in the good old U. S. of A.

Why the bizarre silence? Because it’s a “cultural issue,” you know. The approved term is now female genital cutting. Some people felt that the term “mutilation” was culturally insensitive.

For those occasions when somebody starts suggesting that this is a “cultural” matter, consider the facts.

First, an anatomy lesson, developmental anatomy, to be precise. The tissues in males and females come from the same embryonic structures. They just follow a different path of development. The biologists’ term for that is homologous structures. The types of nerves and arousal present in the different male and female structures are much the same, with some differences I’ll note below.
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… is for Melinda “Clueless” Henneberger to speak for herself.

She has a jaw-dropping opinion piece in the NY Times: Why Pro-Choice is a bad choice for Democrats. (Where do they find these female mouthpieces? Like those tented “women” in the Iraqi parliament who dutifully said whatever The Man told them to. She also wrote something subtitled, with not inconsiderable arrogance, “What Women Voters Want Politicians to Hear.”)

Her point seems to be that because some women are virulently anti-abortion, the Democrats should keep quiet on the subject to get their votes.

The mind reels. This isn’t about what color hat to wear. This is about the fundamental right to live according to your own beliefs rather than someone else’s. This is about the bedrock of this country.

But Ms. Clueless doesn’t see a problem with trading that away for a few votes.

You know what, Henneberger? Forced pregnancy is a crime against humanity equal to forced abortion. Just because the only human beings who can suffer from it are female, doesn’t make it less of a crime.

Another point: nobody is suggesting that anti-abortion women have abortions. They can live their lives exactly as they wish according to their beliefs. What they cannot do, at least not in a free country, is tell anyone else how to live. It’s too bad if that upsets them. Human rights are not negotiable.

And it cuts no ice whatsoever to say that opinions differ on when human life begins. It doesn’t matter, except to the woman involved, when she believes human life begins. She has to handle her pregnancy according to her own lights. However — and this is the essential point — nobody can order somebody else to provide life support against her will.

Whether you think a fetus is a person or a developing mass of tissue, a pregnant woman is providing the life support. It is up to her whether she does that or not. If you think otherwise, then you must also believe healthy people should be strapped onto gurneys and forced to give up a kidney because a patient will die without it.

It is simply breathtaking how little women count. In no other situation, none, not one, has anyone ever dreamt of pretending it’s okay to use one human being as parts for another. Yet that is exactly how women are treated. We’re so far from thinking of women as human beings that the point needs to be explained . . . and when it’s explained it sounds odd.

The fact that women are adapted by nature to provide life support, and the fact that they are happy to do it often enough to overpopulate the planet, doesn’t change the ethics of forcing a woman to be pregnant.

So, Melinda Henneberger, get a clue. You don’t know what women want. Nobody does. They don’t come off an assembly line down at the female factory. Nor do men come off an assembly line. That’s exactly why it’s so important for everyone to live their own lives and not somebody else’s.

Technorati tags: human rights, abortion, choice, politics, current events, Democrats, Henneberger

Via Carolyn Kay at Make Them Accountable comes this brilliant article by David Podvin: Always the lesser priority.

The cynical calculations of political movements… the burning ambition of leaders…the multiculturalism that emphasizes respecting misogynistic societies over defending females. From the liberal perspective, there is an extended litany of priorities more important than women’s rights. And for conservatives, every priority is more important.

Even feminist activists have a higher priority than advocating the rights of women. Increasingly, feminists have argued that women share an immutable common cause with “people of color”. That multicultural convolution explains the vulgar silence on the Left when Third World females are being tortured and murdered.

And, I might add, there is a peculiar blindness to First World crimes too. Somewhere between one in ten and one in six women between the ages of 15 and 40 are raped every year. Every goddamn year. This is a holocaust of sexual torture. It scars people for life. The fact that they find the strength to carry on and even heal does not make it less of a crime. The fact that I even feel the need to explain that, tells you everything you need to know about how low a priority these atrocities are.

So where is the outrage? And where is the pushback?

Nowhere, mon frère. There has long been an all-out war pitting a multicultural coalition of misogynists against women, but only one side has been fighting. Until that battle is joined the savagery visited upon females will not end. Feeble Feminism must be replaced by Kick Ass Feminism. The time has come to stop turning the other cheek and start turning the cheeks of the reprobates.

That vigilance begins where all vigilance begins… at home.

…

The endless assault upon females constitutes a crime against every person who values women. Integrity demands that the criminals be vanquished, but most people – even most good people – are just too busy worrying about higher priorities.

There can be no higher priority. At stake is the liberty of more than half the human population.

It’s what I’ve been trying to say in Are Women Human?, Lipstick is not liberation, The Cure for terrorism? Islamic law for women, Iran, yellow stars, and dress codes, as well as here, here, and here, and practically everywhere throughout this whole damn blog. It feels like water in the desert to find someone who gets it.

The 2008 US presidential elections have been called off. We will be having a male beauty contest instead.

I first heard about it when there was all that media time devoted to John Edwards’ hair. Expensive. Pretty. Shiny. Combed in front of a mirror. (They’d found camera footage proving it.) This was all way too much like a g-i-r-r-r-l. Not good.

Then, Howard Fineman, certified Washington DC pundit, and Chris Matthews, top flight TV political talk show host, on the subject of Guiliani and his looks.

FINEMAN: He doesn‘t—he looks like a guy who, if he had had the opportunity to grow up as a hunter, would have been a great one.
MATTHEWS: Yes.
FINEMAN: He just gives off the aura of a guy who wouldn‘t be afraid to use a gun, you know?

Via Talkingpointsmemo, intelligence from the Republican camp concerning the Presidential qualities of Fred Thompson:

“the actor/senator/lobbyist would make a good president, in part because of his speaking voice. … He has a commanding voice,” Wamp said. “He has a commanding presence.”

However, we’re past the days of radio, unfortunately. It has to be admitted that for television he is, well, a bit jowly. This causes others to cheer for Mitt Romney, the Mormon Without Minoxidil.

Politico’s Roger Simon:

Romney has chiseled-out-of-granite features, a full, dark head of hair going a distinguished gray at the temples, and a barrel chest (ref).
[Romney] has shoulders you could land a 737 on (ref).

Via Media Matters, transcripts of Bill O’Reilly’s trenchant analysis of what it takes to be President.

“[Romney’s] got the jaw going on, the little gray thing in there. … I think that means a lot in America.”

Where, you might ask, does all this leave Hillary? She does have a bit of a “jaw going on” herself, but even the cleverest tailor with access to Texas-sized shoulder pads couldn’t make her look like the runway for a 737.

You see, this is where we plodding types were all wrong. We knew there was going to be a contest, but we thought it was about stuff like knowing we need national health insurance, and being able to deal with the awful truth of the Iraq War.

Of course, the Republicans would have been at a disadvantage in a contest like that. So instead, the contest will now be about who looks like The Man.

Technorati tags: election, 2008, politics