Everyone knows by now that Senator Mitch McConnell invoked a rarely used Rule 19 to silence Senator Elizabeth Warren as she was reading a letter that Coretta Scott King wrote years ago against Jeff Sessions. Warren was an immediate media sensation to the Democratic base. Women identified with her as she was told to shut up and sit down for being a naughty girl. Civil rights groups were outraged that the reading of a letter by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was cause for punishment.
But Salon points out that McConnell was throwing red meat to his base by telling an uppity left wing woman to shut up.
The Trumpistas hate Warren. They would like to punch her in the mouth. She is far and away the most outspoken, smartest, toughest woman in politics at the national level. She is articulate and fearless. She must be silenced, and McConnell won one for his base.
All of this reflects George Lakoff’s analysis of right-left thinking. The left is compassionate, empathetic, rational, and thinks that facts will win elections.
The right, says Lakoff, sees the world as a morality play, in which strict fathers make the rules and enforce them. Girls should not be outspoken. They should be polite and deferential. The strict father gives a warning. If the naughty girl persists in speaking up, she must be told to sit down and not allowed to speak again. Or leave the room.
Who won?
Of course, you can extend this line of thought to the field of education, which has a predominantly female work force. The legislate are mostly male. They make the rules. They believe they know what schools should do and how they should run, because they went to school. They think of the profession as a bunch of women who should stick to their classrooms and stay out of the serious business of decision making about policy. That’s for the men.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
When Jeff Sessions was being considered for the Supreme Court, was Mrs. King’s letter read or submitted for the record? If so, it is part of the Congressional Record and I wonder how the GOP would fare objecting to reading from the Congressional Record?
It is also interesting that two white, male senators were able to read Mrs. King’s letter without censure.
Gosh, do you think the GOP is afraid of Elizabeth Warren? They had better read Sun Tsu (What you oppose, you make stronger.) if so.
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Four white male Senators read it after she was silenced.
She was just too uppity.
Funny coming from McConnell, who is married to a hard-driving aggressive career woman, now in the cabinet
Maybe he was saying what he wishes he could say to his wife
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Unbelievably sick.
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McConnell’s wife is just fine because she is a plutocrat, so her uppity-ness is acceptable. She’s a business woman, for goodness sake.
Warren is far less a plutocrat thus far and really speaks up for working class people; she is therefore a bitch with a big mouth and far too bossy to be acceptably feminine . . . Maybe she should go home and bake some brownies and polish the furniture; she would be a lot happier from Mitch’s POV.
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My answer: yes, they are. It seems like hypocrisy and misogyny train is running underground that leads to the facade of US Congress. Wonder when it is running and how much it costs for ride. Maybe we should ask Mitch McConnell for schedule and price since he’s the boss on this business.
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Warren’s treatment by a white male cemented Warren’s warrior status among progressives. The hypocrisy of the right wing was watched by millions of Americans already weary of the regressive policies of the conservatives. Warren is their Achilles heel, a woman that is a force of nature, that won’t shut up and sit down. Other Democrats need to stand up and fight back like Warren, Kaine and Franken have done during the cabinet hearings.
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Now we have three outspoken warrior Dems in the Senate…Elizabeth Warren, Al Franken, and Kamala Harris. Each of them would be an Art of War-educated President. Warren and Franken both are from Harvard, Warren and Harris are both lawyers. But Harris is a street fighter from UC Berkeley and Hastings Law. Public schools all the way…and she was California’s Attorney General. Can you imagine an America with either of these three as our leader? Harris and Franken are only in their 50s, another plus.
Adding to the mix of newer and younger Dem fighters, is another Harvard guy, soft spoken and tough Congressman Adam Schiff.
It would have been a big help for the Dems if Schumer had not played hardball sponsored Murphy to win in Florida and kept out Alan Grayson, another Harvard lawyer…with a good brain and a loud focused mouth.
So we need not despair of Dem talent who can run in 2020.
However….
The old political hacks won’t open the door for new STRONG leadership…and that is part of why we lost the election. If they do not change…we will have NO party to recover.
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Diane:
You didn’t answer your own question. The fact remains that 53% of white women voted for Trump, and unless different tactics are employed, Trump will win again in 4 years.
Please reread your own comment and see the implied slant.
Somehow we need to forge a new way to bind us together so that we can defeat this present day Fascist who goes by the name of Trump,
Democracy is a very fragile state. We must preserve it.
Mitch McConnell should be ashamed, but, he is not.
Its very hard to fight a fascist when the trains aren’t running on time.
Unfortunately, I believe the average American disrespects public schools.
Los Angeles does have some good public schools. Our boys went to public schools.
(This does take a little work.)
Please keep up the good fight.
arden
sari’s husband
Arden Rynew
>
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Arden,
Thanks for your thoughts. Personally, I don’t understand why anyone voted for this poseur other than the fact that he is a skilled demagogue. Demagogues lie with impunity. They ignore laws and traditions. He will end by destroying the Republican Party.
Our best tool against him is education. The 50 counties with the most college graduates voted for Hillary. Those with the fewest voted for him. That gives him a strong incentive to defund higher education and throw k-12 into chaos while funding evangelicals.
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Promoting far-and-wide the fact that Warren, a woman, was silenced, but four white male senators were allowed to read the letter sends a powerful message to the majority of Americans.
All the polls and even the election indicate that those who see the world as a morality play and women as chattel, the property of men, are in the minority, but this minority cheats and lies to gain and hold on to power. They subverted the vote, made Putin in Russia an ally, spread misinformation far and wide, subverted the FBI, resorted to extreme gerrymandering to keep control of the majority of states, allow corporations and billionaires to spend as much as they want to get more of their faction elected.
Who came first – Warren or the four white male senators?
Reason and facts will not stop these 18th-century moralists/racists. The courts might. If the courts fail, then there will be only one option left, and it will not be pretty.
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Agreed and we will not win that battle immediately but eventually we will .
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The courts will not fail. Even those appointed by Republican presidents know something that Trump doesn’t know: the US Constitution
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Then the courts may be our only option.
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The disturbing thing is as Berine pointed out during the election.The media likes to talk about the mechanics and not the issues or the substance . So we have another CNN panel where the discussion was that Warren was pandering to the base. Our talking heads discussing whether this will be a winning strategy.. Then the discussion moved on to moving Trumps agenda for the American forward .
At which point I turned off the TV went to the phone and called Schumer ,I explained that you lost this election to a circus clown because you lost the base. For 25 years you neglected their concerns. You had a President running around the country telling the American people to swallow another Trade agreement . The base in those critical states told you where to go.
I can live with 8 justices or 1 justice and I don’t care if you get nothing done for 2-4 years . Because nothing will be better than colluding with a fascist demagogue.
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Did you get him on the line?
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FLERP!
Funny you should ask . A few years back on a snow day like today,while driving (Standing for hours) home . I decided it was a good time to pressure one of my co workers to call Schumer about fast track trade authority. While his riding buddy is holding the phone
call with me open . I hear him say, hi my name is Harry can I speak to the Senator ?
Had I been moving i would have crashed.
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Oh, gosh, Joel, I saw that CNN show & I wholeheartedly agree with you. Brings to mind Bannon’s telling the media to “shut up,” because what that panel came up with was equivalent to doing exactly that. News w/o substance. Or, no, even worse than that–ALTERNATIVE news!! Does msm NEVER learn? (I would guess not, considering the Sanders-Cruz Debate–I didn’t get to see it all {I was attending an evening class, & planned to watch it rerun at 11 PM CT–which they didn’t, because of “breaking [Trump, again–just like MSNBC did during the Chris Hayes-Bernie Sanders Town Hall, stealing a chunk of time to broadcast a Trump speech] news.” They continued w/a Don Lemon (& he’s a real piece of work–he attacked Bernie by asking him–&, twice, even after Sanders had answered the first time–if he, Bernie, didn’t feel partially responsible for HRC;’s loss–Bernie answered,”What, because I ran? is it right that someone should just be ‘anointed’ for an office?”)news broadcast, & gave a very short “recap” of the debate, whereby they challenged Bernie’s %ages RE: healthcare coverage–which I will check later, after I watch the entire debate that’s available on OnDemand.)
Want to get REAL news? Watch Democracy Now! Amy Goodman deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.
And–she interviewed Diane, as you may remember.
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I am sure that Edward R. Murrow, and also Walter Cronkite, are rolling over in their graves about the state of American journalism now.
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But also read National Review and Weekly Standard for the old line Repub views…not the Trumpians views, but an eye opener. I am learning just how long and just how diligent Tea Party leaders watched Democracy Now and our other venerated progressive reporters…and they turned all their info back on us to get Trump..and it could have been Cruz, or Ryan, or any of the Repubs, to lead them.
They won, we lost. And it becomes ever more clear why we lost.
The question is whether Schumer and Pelosi will invite the younger and/or newer warriors like Franken, Harris, Schiff, and Warren to a seat at the inner table.
Every Dem in the Senate should have shouted out at McConnell when he deliberately shut down Warren, or at very least stood and turned their backs to him. And these newer strong warrior
voices should have a big vote as to who will run the DNC. Some
Dems are doing a big sell on Ellison…but IMO, he is the worst choice and panders to a group which has few realists.
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I wouldn’t be aware that Warren had read that letter aloud in the Senate if McConnell hadn’t invoked Rule 19.
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George Lakoff’s book Don’t Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate is an excellent and fun read.
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Certainly McConnell is playing to his base. That said, it is worth widely publicizing his abhorrent behavior because if he has no compunction silencing a white woman, he will certainly have no compunction going after African-Americans, Muslims, and other groups he fears.
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I have never understood right wing ideology. It makes no sense to me. But I did read an article stating that right leaning people come from families with a strong father figure and left leaning people come form families with strong mothers. It seems logical as far as what I have observed in my lifetime.
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I don’t know about that, NRN. I, and my four younger siblings, came from a family with a very strong father, and we are all pretty much to the left politically.
OTOH, our mother was strong, herself, she was nobody’s fading violet.
Maybe it’s because we are of Greek extraction, where the men are strong, but the women don’t take any sh!t, either.
Who knows? It’s probably a mistake to make sweeping generalizations about such things, although I can understand the original premise.
But also, too, Mr. Zorba is a strong father figure, but, at least I like to think, that I am a strong mother figure. Both of our kids are very much to the left, our son even more so than I am, and I am very much to the left, myself.
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I am smiling at your words, my Greek friend and colleague. Love Greece and spent much time there. Yes, the men seem to be the leaders of the family…but the mothers know how to manipulate the family with tradition…and with food. Great people. Not such good economists in the last decade however..
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Thank you, Ellen.
And you are certainly correct about the economics there.
They produce some of the best olive oil in the world, the production is strictly controlled and labelled (much like the French do with their wines) and I have often said, if the Greeks had paid half as much attention to their economy as they do to their olive oil, they wouldn’t be in so much financial trouble today.
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My Greek friends claim, the Italians flood the market with their expensive, inferior olives, and they can’t do anything against it. They claim, in particular, that Americans should buy Greek olive oil, it would cost half of what they pay for any olive oil now, and it would be muuuuuuch better.
I was not paid for this ad. But I do get a gallon of olive oil every summer from my Greek friends.
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Máté Wierdl, the biggest problem with Italian olive oil is not even necessarily the price and the inferior olives, but the fact that many of their olive oil producers adulterate their oil with cheaper olive oil imports and sell it as “Italian” olive oil, and even worse, that they are known to add non-extra virgin olive oil to their (supposedly “extra virgin”) and still sell it as “extra virgin.” Anathema!
This is well- known in the olive oil world.
I mainly get my olive oil at my Orthodox Church. We have an importer who provides, and we sell, the gallon extra virgin Kalamata olive oil. We also use it for our food festivals.
It’s very reasonably priced, and very, very good. (I use a lot of olive oil.)
I have heard that Australian olive oil is supposed to be very good, as well. It is not available locally, but if it becomes available, I’m willing to give it a try and see.
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We need to tweak the frames that Lakoff describes. Rather than go with the strict father model, we have a “addled, abusive, out-of-control parent” (father in this case), vs a “sober, clear-thinking responsible parent.”
Which frame would you prefer?
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Also–you all may have missed this–Sen. John Cornyn (TX, R) commented, “I sure hope that little lady feels chastened for talking out of turn.”
I see a 2-sided t-shirt, “She resisted,” front, “Nasty ‘little ladies’ ALWAYS ‘talk out of turn,'” back.
Texans–get Wendy Davis back!!! She is a most nasty “little lady.”
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On the front of the t-shirt, we need the whole thing: “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.”
The whole damned thing. I also like your suggestion for the back.
And John Cornyn- well he’s a Texas Republican.
I don’t want to say what I’m thinking about Senator Turtle-head McConnell or Cornyn, lest it gets deleted.
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You are right about McConnell. He looks like a turtle.
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McConnell- I have heard him referred to as “Yertle the Turtle.”
Apologies to Dr. Suess.
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I’ve worked for misogynist men time and again and when I tell them what sexist they are, they go on and on about having wives and daughters…so how can they be sexist…ahhhhhhh it is infuriating. I actually had one hire a man on the side to help me with my job and say “just think of it as me hiring someone smarter than you to help you”. It was a old buddy of his that he wanted to give a job to, to only made my job harder@!!!!
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Lakoff described the “Christian ” right’s view of women – subordinate and submissive.
They promote, to women, the idea of “sweetness”, to replace intelligence and power- poor role models for children.
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Zorba–apologize to turtles!!
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Hahahahaha!
Yes, it’s an insult to turtles to compare Mitch to one of them.
Sorry, turtles! 🐢
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Diane – Even worse was the fact that at least 4 men read from the same letter and were not rebuked!
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Sessions, said Warren, represents “radical hatred.” And if he makes “the tiniest attempt to bring his racism, sexism & bigotry” into the Department of Justice, “all of us” will pile on.
Now this is hate speech. And it validates Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s decision to use Senate rules to shut her down.
MLK’s niece has accused her of playing the race card.
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What part of her comment is “hate speech”? Looks accurate to me.
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Whichever part he hates.
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Bwahaha! Excellent comment, FLERP!
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“They should be polite and deferential. The strict father gives a warning. If the naughty girl persists in speaking up, she must be told to sit down and not allowed to speak again.”
This gives me the idea that perhaps DeVos let herself embarrassed with her nomination because she was told by all these father figures in her life “God and we want you to do this.”.
Her case may be similar to Palin’s. At least according to the film about Palin (I forgot the title), she really was embarrassed about all the criticism she got, she even got depressed, but she was told not to quit, so she didn’t.
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“She is far and away the most outspoken, smartest, toughest woman in politics at the national level. She is articulate and fearless. ”
Actually, for me the most catching is her passion. She almost always appears exited about what she is talking about. That this passion and excitement don’t affect her eloquence and amazing clarity are added bonuses.
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Were Republican women OK with that red card?
Diane, I agree with you. I certainly believe Mitch wishes he had the power to send his wife to the penalty box. Now that she’s in the cabinet, he’s feeling less secure than ever. Didn’t anyone tell him not to bring his personal life into the office?
Has higher learning sunk so low that it equates to never having to admit you failed to stand up for justice ALL the time?
Can I ask WHO made the decision to pull the Red Card on Nina Turner at the DNC? Was it a man? The enemy is within and every single person who comments about what happened to Elizabeth Warren should be shamed for not speaking up for the Turner when it was HER TURN. It’s absurd to think THAT was not worth raising hell over.
Geesh! Why is everyone shocked and frenzied about the White Boys in Office and their bad behavior? How long before the focus shifts and DEMS examine and admit their mistakes. Until they hold their own party accountable? It’s making me ill watching and listening to a mass of Dems who refuse to accept responsibility. If nothing shifts dramatically we’re sure to suffer 8 years instead of four.
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