Reader Ellen Lubic drew my attention to this excellent analysis of Congressman Paul Ryan’s rejection of Donald Trump’s lewd, crude remarks about women.
I must that that when I read his comments online in an instant bulletin from CNN, I found them offensive. I was driving with friends to the airport in Las Vegas on my way home from a National Parks vacation, and I read his remarks out loud. He said, “Women are to be championed and revered, not objectified.”
My reaction? What? I don’t want to be put on a pedestal, championed and revered like a fragile piece of pottery. I just want to be treated the same as everyone else.
But this writer said it much better, because she knows the lengths Paul Ryan and Gus party have gone to take away women’s rights.
Excuse me? Who are you, Paul Ryan? One of King Arthur’s men? A knight of the Round Table declaring fealty to the Code of Chivalry?
Let’s get one thing straight. You are not my knight in shining armor.
I don’t need to be “championed” by you. And I certainly don’t want to be “revered” by you. As to your assertion that women should not be “objectified”? GTFO. The entire modern Republican party does nothing but objectify women. You deny our humanity daily. You have made it your number one mission to reduce us down to our uteri and said you, and you alone, control what happens to our bodies.
You hold entire hearings about women’s issues without inviting a single woman. When you do deign to allow women to speak, you condescend to, brow beat and aggressively attempt to shame them. You have launched a single-minded assault on the ability of poor women in this country to obtain healthcare. Championed our employer’s rights over our own when it comes to our private healthcare decisions. You have legislated that our doctors lie to us and rape us with ultrasound wands. In Texas, you played God by keeping a dead woman artificially “alive” so that she could serve as an incubator. In Indiana, your new hero, Mike Pence, legislated that women had to deliver aborted or miscarried fetal blood and tissue to funeral homes for burial or cremation and crusaded to severely punish women for having miscarriages in the first place.
And what about you, Paul Ryan? How have you personally “championed” women? Was it in 1998 when you said that women should be criminally prosecuted for terminating pregnancies? When you tried to prevent women serving overseas in our military from having abortions in U.S. military hospitals even when they paid for it out of their own pockets? How about when you worked with Todd Akin to narrow the legal definition of rape to “forcible rape”? Or maybe it was in 2009 when you co-sponsored the “Sanctity of Life” Act which declared a fertilized egg a “person” and outlawed abortions, most forms of contraception and in-vitro fertilization? The numerous times you have voted to defund Planned Parenthood? In 2011 when you supported the “Let Women Die Bill” that allowed hospitals to refuse to terminate pregnancies even when the woman’s life was in danger?
Was it when you opposed the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act? Opposed paid family leave?
When. When have you ever “championed” women, Paul Ryan?
Donald Trump may be a crass misogynist who thinks women exist for his own pleasure but you, Paul Ryan, are just as bad if not worse. You don’t respect us. You seek to be master over us and I, for one, could do without your paternalistic brand of “championing”.
Read this great post and open the links. Hypocrisy through and through.

Oh my gosh, yes! So true!
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The whole GOP is not a “normal” political party it is a radicalized and far right wing movement determined to bring us back to some kind of dystopian gilded age in which social Darwinism and predatory capitalism rule the roost. Climate change denial, creationism, intelligent design, repeal of all our critical social programs, privatizing everything, cutting taxes on the rich, deregulating the fossil fuel polluters, repeal of legal abortions, trickle down nonsense and unleashing the greed of the financial sector. Any GOP president will stack the SCOTUS with wall to wall Scalias, not to mention the lower courts as well. Paul Ryan is a big fan of Ayn Rand and the free marketeers.
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Spot on!!
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Both the GOP and Democrats – most of both – are depraved and have no interest in the common man and woman here in America. Let’s be honest in a holistic way.
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The argument above is false equivalency.
If you care about preserving the right to abortion
If you care about preserving the right to contraception
If you care about equal pay for women, family leave, and women’s health
Then you will vote for Hillary Clinton in November. She has supported these causes all her life.
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Exactly what I thought when I first heard the quotes.
Hey, Paul, since I’m in a neighboring state, & I expect to be in WI real soon, if it rains & if you’re in town, could you please throw your jacket over the puddles for me?
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While Trump may be unique among Republicans for his mistreatment of women, his misogyny represents the tone of the entire party. Not only have they attacked women over their right to determine the fate of their own reproductive systems, Republicans have fought against equal rights for women. A friend sent me the following: A woman voting
for Trump is like chickens voting for Colonel Sanders.
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Both sides of the aisle have indulged in all sorts of dalliances with extra-marital affairs. They, unlike Trump, are simply hushed and hidden about it. Trump is practically an exhibitionist.
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BillClinton was ashamed when his infidelity became public. Trump brags about it. Guiiani says everyone does it
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“BillClinton was ashamed when his infidelity became public.”
Exactly. When it became public. Not when it happened. You’re essentially saying the same thing as NF. Neither one is ashamed of what they did. One is ashamed to be caught. Not sure which one is worse that way.
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There is a difference
Bill has a sense of shame
Trump has none
JFK was possibly the biggest womanizer ever to inhabit the White House
He didn’t boast about it
A reminder: Bill is not running for President
Don’t let Trump drag us all into his sewer
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Dr. Ravitch,
Shame or no shame, using one’s position of power to dominate women – or anyone – is not appropriate. But I agree with you that the focus must be on preventing Trump from entering office.
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Norwegian Filmmaker, to be clear, I certainly oppose any abuse of women or children, or for that matter, men. Sexual bullying is intolerable. I could go on with a long list of behaviors that should not be acceptable in a decent society. It is a measure of just how low our culture has sunk when someone as trashy and crude as Trump is a contender for the highest office in the land. It is embarrassing for all Americans, or should be.
No one seemed to care about JFK’s frequent dalliances, and the press kept them secret (as they did for previous presidents). Now, every candidate and elected official lives in a fishbowl and should have no expectation of privacy. Trump has brought moral standards to their lowest point yet, with his boasting about his sexual prowess and his magnetic appeal to women. He is disgusting. It is called satyriasis.
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Accusing both Bill Clinton and Trump is, again, false equivalency. The difference is that Bill Clinton is not running for office. The victim of his adultery is. And the fact that Trump wants to blame her for it makes her a victim twice over. Enough! It’s not her fault Bill was a jerk, nor is it Melania’s that Trump is too.
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I can’t say that I don’t gree with Diane and Janet.
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Paul Ryan and Trump?
Polly calling the kettle black and the kettle calling Polly black. Same when it comes to Trump and Hillary slinging mud at each other.
Was there really a debate last night or was this some b-grade sit-com on Nickelodeon? How utterly dreadful it all was: Ms. Clinton smirking every time Trump said something awful and truthful about her and her sordid past and Mr. Trump tailgating Ms. Clinton, as though he were literally stalking her. Both were so inappropriate, and it seems America is in a political abyss when it comes to presidents for now.
Trump’s comments to Billy Bush were just so juvenile. I know of 17 year old all American young men who have more civility and appropriate masculinity than Mr. Trump. What an awful model for young men! When it come to Trump, lock up your daughters and wives and stuff your son’s ears with ear plugs.
Still, one has no pragmatic choice but to vote for Hillary.
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I almost thought you had a sensible view of the two candidates. One of the coarsest elements in modern American life has been the liberal success in drawing the cloak of constitutionality over the practice of maternal chosen infanticide. When half of the population is freed from the penalty of baby murder because they are of the female gender, one can’t exactly be surprised by the decline of American civilization as a whole. The phrase ‘equal rights’ becomes meaningless in their mouths.
When a living child in the womb becomes a mere clump of cells, you have there the extreme objectification of life (in a slightly different sense). Compared to male objectivization of women, it is astronomically and exponentially worse ethically.
Your Norwegian sanctimony is leaking out from between your words like pus from multiple untreated wounds and it stinks. To prefer the dishonest, truthless champion of the baby killers undercuts whatever claim to political seriousness you at first seem to have had. In the U.S. of today the Democrats have become an extreme socialist party. That you prefer them to the Republican candidate says more about you than it does about the Republicans.
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Goodness, Sir Harlan. Unlike most enlightened readers of this blog, you sound like one of those other ignorant, God-fearing puritanical Americans we Europeans just don’t get. Not even the British would get the silly provincial likes of you.
But that doesn’t make you useless; it does, however, make you you.
I actually prefer neither candidate, and I am not allowed to vote here for obvious reasons. I was merely projecting what one might do if one were a voting citizen here.
As for my stinking pus oozing from multiple wounds, why don’t you go and rub your childish face in it? It might give you a chance at sobriety and lucidity.
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