Wicked Stepsisters = Nancy & Hillary

Ever since Glen Taylor bought the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the editorial pages have been littered with numerous non sequitur attacks against the Democratic party and its acting members.

Of course, they’re not above-board, thoughtful criticisms. They’re sneaky, indirect jabs at anyone who isn’t a Republican. Last Saturday’s op-ed section, however, hit a new low: scathing political commentary playfully disguised as an ersatz movie review.

Bad enough that a woman wrote the editorial and went after other women in such an underhanded way. That kind of non-support is always sad. What made her attempt even worse was the way her editorial was disguised as lightweight, just-plain-folks film criticism that pitted fairy tale heroine Cinderella against real-life Democrats, i.e., evil stepsisters.

And if they’re both Democrats and if they’re both wicked enough to be mentioned alongside Cinderella, do I really need to name names here? You already know who they are. Of course, the women getting slammed are Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton!

But the Strib had to get suspiciously cute about the way this op-ed was presented. Consider the deliberate misrepresentation.

If this op-ed is entitled “Cinderella’s one gal to look up to,” and it’s found under the heading The Movies, what would most readers think this opinion piece is going to be about?

Well, duh. They’d probably think it’s going to be about a movie. Maybe a movie review of “Cinderella.” If they were hip to the latest Hollywood hype, they’d probably think this movie review was going to be about the latest film adaptation from Walt Disney Studios. Not another computer-generated “Cinderella” but a live-action remake, inspired from the iconic animated feature. But then, this “movie critic” tosses out this curve ball in her opening sentence.

“For the record.” she begins,” I can’t believe I’m writing about Cinderella and feminists in the same article.”

Oh. Why not?

Stop right there. That comment doesn’t even make sense. No other character has provoked more feminist analysis than this fairy tale princess. Among feminists, sociologists, psychologists, and cultural scholars, Cinderella (and everything she represents) is still a hot topic. In fact, “The Cinderella Complex” — the mother of all self-help/feminist books — remains a staple in Women Studies to this day.

So how could a writer opinionated enough to hurl such unfair criticism miss the obvious mark?

My personal theory is that she’s trying to be a lackey for the Republican Party. She’s just writing what she thinks she’s supposed to be writing. In other words, the GOP is somehow giving her “suitable topics,” then directing her written expression. There’s no other way to explain how she came up with such a clumsy piece. Her disguised movie review doesn’t even discuss the movie.

Instead of giving film criticism, she criticizes others who don’t like the movie. As if disliking the stereotypical concept behind Cinderella or criticizing it is unreasonable.

So then, is this piece from March 28th really about dismissing the criticism of the latest “Cinderella” remake?

Nope.

It’s actually about bashing Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton.

In just a single paragraph, her true intent comes out — with all the inaccuracies, misquotes, and misleading narration that the GOP and its zealots have perfected in recent years.

“Why, then, the criticism of “Cinderella”? Maybe, just maybe, because Cinderella, following what her mother taught her, always acts with courage and kindness, which is a bit too much for women who have other fish to fry.”

Get ready. Look out, Nancy! Hold on, Hillary! Keep your heads down and stay away from the windows. Here it comes:

“Consider Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi’s comment about the Affordable Care Act, which affects every American: “We have to pass the bill to find out what’s in it.” Or former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton responding to the murder of Americans in Benghazi on her watch: “What difference does it make?” Are these the role models we want for our daughters? I don’t think so.”

Now let’s back up a minute. If you want to slam public servants the way this writer had intended, you’d better do it the right way. You need to include some factual information here and there. You need to cement your arguments with a little truth along the way. You need to employ a few basics from Editorial Writing 101.

That means NOT severing quotes and taking them out of context. More importantly, that means being straight with your readers.

Don’t pretend to be writing about The Movie when your real intention is to unfairly criticize Democrats in positions of power.

I use the word “unfairly” with conviction because I’ve done my research. I shouldn’t have to do that much work, but it was the only way to show how flawed her editorial/fake movie review really was. Both quotes were taken out of context. Both quotes were also uttered years ago. In Pelosi’s case, it was five years ago. With Clinton, it was just over two years ago. Yet in both cases, those intentional misquotes were respectively designed to attack their character and integrity.

“We have to pass the bill to find out what’s in it.”

Jonathan Capehart’s article from the Washington Post (posted at 5:53PM, ET, on 6/20/2012) sheds a lot of light on the circumstances surrounding her comment.

Nancy Pelosi actually made this remark — when she was still Speaker of the House — at the Legislative Conference for the National Association of Counties, way back in March, 2010, before Obamacare became law.

Five years ago, Congress was in a big turmoil, trying to get the Affordable Care Act enacted. Compromise, reconciliation, frustration, consternation — all these things were taking place on Capitol Hill as Democrats were trying to get the bill passed with no Republican support.

Amid urgings from Democrats to get the Senate to pass a bill, all kinds of misinformation began mushrooming about the Affordable Care Act.

During a lunch with opinion writers in the Capital, two years later on June 20, 2012, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi explained what had been going on and why she’d made her now infamous remark:

“In the fall of the year,” Pelosi said today, “the outside groups…were saying ‘it’s about abortion,’ which it never was. ‘It’s about ‘death panels,” which it never was. ‘It’s about a job-killer,’ which it creates four million. ‘It’s about increasing the deficit’; well, the main reason to pass it was to decrease the deficit.” According to Capehart, her contention was that the Senate “didn’t have a bill.” And until the Senate produced an actual piece of legislation that could be matched up and debated against what was passed by the House, no one truly knew what would be voted on. “They were still trying to woo the Republicans,” Pelosi said of the Senate leadership and the White House, trying to “get that 60th vote that never was coming. That’s why (there was a) reconciliation (vote)” that required only a simple majority.

“So, that’s why I was saying we have to pass a bill so we can see so that we can show you what it is and what it isn’t,” Pelosi continued. “It is none of these things. It’s not going to be any of these things.” She recognized that her comment was “a good statement to take out of context.” But the minority leader added, “But the fact is, until you have a bill, you can’t really, we can’t really debunk what they’re saying…”

So Pelosi was really commenting on the absurdity of the whole situation.

“What difference at this point does it make?”(note how “at this point” got deliberately deleted in the fake movie review)

As for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, she made her remark during a Congressional Hearing on January 23, 2013 that lasted five hours. The big bone of contention then was Benghazi. Did militant Islamists get so offended by a video that they set fire to the U.S. Embassy in Cairo? Or did they kill Americans in the Middle East for another reason? Did anybody really know why? Maybe the State Department and Hillary Clinton did know but decided to engineer a cover-up…

Senator Ron Johnson (from Wisconsin) seemed especially determined to hammer the then-Secretary of State Clinton into some admission of guilt about Benghazi. He didn’t succeed.

Allan Colmes, of Huffington Post, set things straight with “Hillary’s ‘What Difference Does It Make’ in Context” (posted on 1/27/2014 at 2:27 PM ET, UPDATED on 3/29/2014 at 5:59 AM ET) His article is longer and gives more detailed dialogue than what’s included here. But this excerpt will give you an idea of what Clinton really meant:

Clinton: “With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans. Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided that they’d they go kill some Americans? What difference at this point does it make? It is our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again, Senator. Now, honestly, I will do my best to answer your questions about this, but the fact is that people were trying in real time to get the best information. The IC has a process, I understand, going with the other committees to explain how these talking points came out. But you know, to be clear, it is, from my perspective, less important today looking backwards as to why these militants decided they did it than to find them and bring them to justice, and then maybe we’ll figure out what was going on in the meantime.”

So Clinton was really speaking the voice of reason to her interrogator.

Journalism 101, anyone?

Hard to believe that Republicans actually offer seminars and think-tanks on this kind of editorial writing. As though mastering a few techniques will make their folksy propaganda more believable. Or more digestible. Maybe before the writer in question starts misusing fairy tales and Disney movies to further her own political aspirations, she should do a little more reading and studying on her own. Or better yet, tell her GOP wordsmiths that the readers in the Twin Cities are on to her friendly kind of fascism.