LENA AND HILLARY'S #MEMEME MOVEMENT
THIS has been a rough week for women on the left.
It began with Hillary Clinton, the zombie candidate who just won’t die, giving an interview to “CBS Sunday Morning” for a story about the post-#MeToo “pink wave” of younger women running for political office, many for the first time. Guess who became the star? Yes — as usual, Hillary herself, who spent a good part of that interview defending her husband’s sexual predation while disavowing her key role in what Clinton aides, back in the ’90s, cheerfully called the “nuts-and-sluts” shaming of any and all of Bill’s female accusers. One of those women, Juanita Broaddrick, credibly accused Bill Clinton of raping her in 1978 and has never wavered.
Yet during the CBS interview Hillary would hear none of it, deploying the old scoundrel’s defense: Yousay-he-is-but-what-about-Trump?
The party that demanded a thorough accounting of Brett Kavanaugh’s sexual history, that insisted Kavanaugh’s accuser be heard and, by the way, forced Al Franken from the Senate for far less is finally reckoning with the Clintons. And the feminists, progressives and party loyalists who have spent decades making excuses for their hypocrisies and profiteering while sympathizing with Hillary’s self-created mythology as the Greatest Victim of Sexism in History have had it. They have come to realize that Hillary and her “slithery rhetoric,” as the late Christopher Hitchens so perfectly put it, are dead weight.
So have the left-leaning institutions that long championed her.
“Dear God, Hillary Clinton. Just Go,” said The Daily Beast.
“Why Hillary Clinton’s comments were more painful than Trump’s,” said The Washington Post.
CNN: “For Women, Clinton is a Bigger Disappointment than Trump.”
“This is the sort of moral arrogance and self-justification that has long troubled even many Democrats about Mrs. Clinton,” wrote editorial-board member Michelle Cottle in The New York Times.
“Tragic and . . . wrong,” said #MeToo founder Tarana Burke.
Today, Hillary’s approval rating remains where it was post-2016 loss, hovering between 36 and 38 percent. She has not been forgiven for losing the most winnable election in American history — and given her continued panhandling and limelight-stealing across the country, nor should she be. Hillary couldn’t put away a reality-television star caught on tape bragging about grabbing women “by the p- - -y,” but has spent the past two
years blaming everything from Russian hacks to the FBI to President Barack Obama’s lack of support to Bernie Sanders for daring to mount a challenge to the mainstream media to institutionalized sexism for her mortifying loss. Her reaction to this most dismal week? Leak that she might run for president again. Of course! Who cares about the damage to the party or the country? Who cares about any of the other female senators or congresswomen so patiently waiting their turn? When it comes to Hillary and what she wants — and all she has ever wanted is to be the first female president — we’re all just collateral. IN terms of smug self-importance wholly incommensurate with public sentiment, Hillary has no greater heir than millennial soap-boxer Lena Dunham, herself on a karmic trajectory. On Friday, in an e-mail to subscribers headed, “The Work Is Not Done,” Dunham, a selfappointed voice of her generation, announced her 3-year-old newsletter, Lenny Letter, was, well, done. Once partnered with Hearst and then Condé Nast, the project began shedding subscribers rapidly last year, from 500,000 in July 2017.
The erosion was surely accelerated by Dunham’s vocal defense, months later, of one of her employees, a writer on “Girls” who had been credibly accused of rape.
In typically verbose and all-knowing fashion, Dunham and her producing partner, Jenni Konner, wrote: “During the windfall of deeply necessary accusations over the last few months in Hollywood, we have been thrilled to see so many women’s voices heard and dark experiences in this industry justified ... But during every time of change there are also incidences of the culture, in its enthusiasm and zeal, taking down the wrong targets. We believe, having worked closely with him for more than half a decade, that this is the case with Murray Miller. While our first instinct is to listen to every woman’s story, our insider knowledge of Murray’s situation makes us confident that sadly this accusation is one of the 3 percent of assault cases that are misreported every year.”
Dunham closed by saying she’d never speak of this again — until she was hit with a tsunami of outrage. Dunham reversed course the very next day, and Zinzi Clemmons, a Lenny contributor, announced she would never work with Dunham again. She wrote of knowing Lena and her circle — wealthy white children of famous artists — back in college, and accused them of what she called “hipster racism.”
“[It] typically uses sarcasm as a cover, and in the end, it looks a lot like gaslighting — ‘It’s just a joke. Why are you overreacting?’ is a common response to a lot of these statements. In Lena’s circle, there was a girl who was known to use the Nword in conversations in order to be provocative, and if she was ever called on it, she would say, ‘It’s just a joke’ . . . It’s time for women of color — black women in particular — to divest from Lena Dunham.”
Murray’s accuser was a black woman. Since then, Dunham and Konner, who worked together for eight years and described themselves as family, have parted ways. No reason was given, but Dunham’s other public gaffes — wishing she had an abortion, saying she can’t be racist because she wants to “f- -k” Drake, accusing Kanye West of promoting “rape culture” and Odell Beckham Jr. of looking at her as if she were “a dog” — couldn’t have helped.
Dunham’s image has never recovered from defending Murray, and the reaction to Lenny’s demise — in quarters that should house her most ardent defenders — has been slim. At the feminist site Jezebel, commenters were unsparing. “Hey!” wrote one. “Remember Lena both claimed to be a feminist on the side of all women and then defended an accused rapist and then threw shade on his alleged black woman victim? Good times, good times.”
“I think you meant to say that readership fell precipitously when people figured out that Lena Dunham is pure garbage,” wrote another.
Like Hillary, Dunham has revealed herself to be nothing but a pseudofeminist and public scold who herself holds no core values. Like Hillary, Dunham is most interested in power and popularity and is completely unaware of her privilege while claiming the opposite. She hears only what she wants. When her new HBO show, “Camping,” premiered to scathing reviews and a Hillary-level fresh ranking on Rotten Tomatoes — 32 percent — Dunham said everyone else was wrong.
“I know this isn’t true,” she said on “Watch What Happens Live” last week. “It’s really good.”
When asked why one of her “Girls” castmates quit the show, she said, in all seriousness: “I was amazing at my job, and he couldn’t handle it.” Dunham overshares wildly, this week tweeting a photo of herself half-naked in a hospital bed, pus seeming to ooze from her lower abdomen after surgery — but don’t you dare comment on her body!
“Body-shaming vigilante,” she has called herself. “Raging hottie.” HILLARY and Lena, both heroes and victims of their own confused narratives. They rapidly shed supporters, readers, viewers. They have been stripped of their feminist bona fides yet are thoroughly unashamed, generational bookends who both firmly believe in their greatness. The only fun to be had is in watching them negotiate their alternate, increasingly demented realities.
When “CBS Sunday Morning” reporter Tony Kopoupil dared to suggest that any of the women running in the midterms could someday become the first female president, Hillary said, “Well, I hope we get there sooner, I really do.”
Then the truth came out. “Maybe [they] could be the second, third or fourth female president — how about that?” In other words, Hillary still believes that she’ll be the first.