Hitchens + Hillary = Hilarity

Don't blame sexism for Hillary Clinton's defeat - By Christopher Hitchens, Slate

Favorite passages:

"But now Sen. Clinton's partisans are crying foul and saying that the Democratic primary voters, incited by the media, only rejected her for something known as sexism. This indistinct and vague offense, portentously invoked in many recent articles and 'news analyses,' is supposed to be revealed (as a New York Times report on its own reporting so masochistically phrased it) in such outrageous ways as the following: 'The New York Times wrote about Mrs. Clinton's "cackle." ' "

"Replay some of Sen. Clinton's less spontaneous moments of laughter during the Democratic debates. How would you describe them? To refer to them as merely mirthful would be to do violence to language. The word cackle, which is really an onomatopoeia, is easily the best, because it conveys what her awkward noise sounded like."

"Going as far as it dared on the point, the same sternly disapproving New York Times report found the courage to say that the Washington Post, in mentioning Sen. Clinton, had also alluded to 'her cleavage.' Living as we do in an age of the easily offended and the aggressively innocent, we were not regarded as sufficiently adult to be informed whether this cleavage was in the front or the back. (Something in me makes me hope very devoutly that it was not the latter.) But I think I see the emerging pattern. People who favor Sen. Clinton are allowed to stress her gender and sex at all times and to make a gigantic point of it for its own sake. They are even allowed to proclaim that she should be the president of the United States in time of war only because she would be the first vagina-possessing person to hold the job. But—and here's the catch—people who do not favor her are not even allowed to allude to the fact that she is female and has feminine characteristics."

I think I might start using that as a pick-up line: "Hey, vagina-possessing person..." Or, alternately, "How 'bout you and me...cackle a little cleavage, yeah?"