The above is Dr. Paul Song’s full statement from last night in response to the “Corporate Whore” incident yesterday.
Last night I posted a diary regarding the fascinating story about journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee being captured by North Korea in 2009 and later being released after some spy-thriller negotiations conducted by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her husband, among others.
The reason this story is back in the news today, of course, is because Laura Ling’s sister, Lisa, happens to be married to Song. Depending on your perspective, he was using the term to describe either Hillary Clinton or “certain members of Congress”.
I closed out the diary by pointing out that I have a somewhat awkward connection to Dr. Song. As I noted:
Dr. Song also happens to be one of the other three people (besides myself) on the Universal Healthcare panel I’m hoping will be included at this summer’s Netroots Nation.
You know, the same one I was vote-begging for here at dKos a few weeks back.
Full Disclosure: I met Dr. Song briefly at the 2014 Netroots Nation here in Detroit; he and I chatted about both Obamacare and Single Payer, we became Facebook and Twitter friends, and we most recently joined up with two other healthcare writers to put together our hoped-for NN panel. He seems like a nice enough guy and is obviously passionate about single payer and Sen. Sanders, but what he said earlier this evening was pretty far over the line in my book.
This is doubly awkward for me because I caught a lot of heat around these parts back in late January when I shocked people by “siding” with Hillary over Bernie on the subject of healthcare in spite of being a Single Payer advocate myself (although it really wasn’t nearly as simple as that). In fact, my own brouhaha about Obamacare vs Single Payer was, in many ways, the inspiration for our NN panel (that is to say, I wasn’t the one who proposed the panel, but the topic seemed appropriate given that both he and I are on it).
Beyond that, I’m not writing this diary to either praise or trash Dr. Song. He said what he said, and he apologized shortly thereafter as shown above, and people will either accept his apology or they won’t.
Anyway, Dr. Song claims that he wasn’t referring to Hillary herself, which is apparently supposed to put the matter to rest.
Unfortunately, even if he’s telling the truth about this (and that’s up to people to decide for themselves), I’m still troubled by his response for a number of reasons.
First: He doesn’t specify who those “members of Congress” are that he is referring to, but I’m assuming that at least some of them are female (there are 76 female Democrats in Congress). That means that instead of comparing one woman to a whore, he was comparing several women to whores. Not helpful. Second: All 240 Democratic members of Congress are SuperDelegates. That means that he just called at least some of the people that the Sanders campaign are supposedly hoping to win over at the DNC “whores”. Even if you agree that these folks deserve the insult, that’s not exactly the best way to Win Friends and Influence People. Third: Regardless of whether he really was referring to Hillary or not, here are 85 more reasons why it was a pretty horrible phrase to use even if the term “corporate whore” has been casually bandied about by progressives for many years by others:1. Bernie’s primary opponent is, you know, a woman, who…
2. Is the first truly viable female Presidential candidate in the country’s history, who…
3. Has already endured 25+ years of as many ugly, offensive, misogynistic/sexist attacks as anyone I can think of, while…
4. The Sanders campaign has already been having to deal with a lot of blatantly misogynistic actions by their supporters for months now (#BernTheWitch, etc), in a time where…
5. Planned Parenthood was the subject of a horrific, well-funded smear job, and…
6. Women’s rights are under stronger and more sustained attacks than in any time in recent memory, while…
7. The leading contender for the Republican nomination has a long history of making nasty, ugly, degrading comments about women in general.
Plenty of Sanders supporters are trying to play the “whore is gender neutral” card, which is pretty disingenuous to me. Yes, of course the technical definition could simply refer to “a venal or unscrupulous person”, male or female, but that would sound pretty lame even without the 2nd-7th points above being the case.
As for reasons #8 — 88, they can all be found here.
Basically, don’t call people whores unless a) they genuinely do perform sexual acts in return for money and b) the fact that they do so is relevant to the topic at hand. In any other context, it’s probably just an all-around bad idea, and nothing good can come of it.