Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 09:28 pm
It is amusing to contemplate the spectacle of a mellow, or even happy, Donald Trump. The man is angry all the time. He shouts; he fumes; you expect smoke to come out of his wherever at any moment. Maybe it does and his pants are just that absorbent.
This doesn’t bother Republicans. They like an angry Trump. They think it makes him manly – the ultimate alpha male; the apex predator of minorities and women everywhere. But don’t let a woman come across as authoritative or assertive.
To prove that point, that maker of math Republicans do, Karl Rove, took to Fox News’ Fox & Friends this morning to complain that Hillary Clinton looked “hectoring” and “not appealing” as she responded to a Trump supporter at a rally in Florida last night who called Bill Clinton a rapist.
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BRIAN KILMEADE: So Karl, would you do me a favor and rank the most important things towards this trend? What do you think is the key to this closing? Is it [Donald] Trump’s performance, Hillary [Clinton’s] lack of performance? Is —
AINSLEY EARHARDT: Obamacare.
KILMEADE: Is it Obamacare? Where do you rank the importance?
KARL ROVE: Well, first of all, Trump has run a more disciplined campaign in the last couple of weeks, and he’s made it about big issues — Supreme Court, Obamacare, rebuilding the military. Particularly emphasizing Obamacare, which was helped by the fact that sort of there was a lot of news about how bad Obamacare was. And also, people had baked in sort of what they’d heard from Bill Clinton about how crazy the system was and how Hillary had defended it. So I think that was the quality of his campaign being more focused, more disciplined has been helping. Second of all, look, there’s a natural tendency as you get to the end for partisans to return home, and a lot more partisan Republicans were out there sort of thinking about what to do than partisan Democrats. And then finally, look, you just saw it. That video of her, that’s her, and that is not an appealing, you know, uplifting, positive — she looks angry. She looks upset. She comes across as hectoring. That’s not a good picture to paint as you come down the final stretch.
Back in 2014 Rove said of Clinton that “You want to be something fresh, you don’t want to be something that is old and stale.”
Now it’s not that she’s old and stale but that she’s feisty. A woman can’t win with the Fox News’ male-dominated news cycle.
According to Fox news, it is not okay for black men to look angry, nor is it okay for women to look angry. The only people who can be angry are white males.
Which in the end says a lot more about the men at Fox News than it does about Hillary Clinton.
Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.
