RUSH: You gotta hear this. Friday night, PBS, Bill Moyers Journal, talking with Kathleen Hall Jamieson, University of Pennsylvania. She’s a media and speech communications specialist, and I really like her. They did a report on this program once some years ago which got it dead on right about who the audience is, why we appeal to people and so forth. It was totally out of the conventional wisdom. What I said at the outset, I really like Kathleen — and, by the way, I did this in 2000 ’til I was corrected, I made a mistake. I mispronounced Puyallup, Washington, and I didn’t mean to offend anybody up there. I’ve not forgotten the experience, but I’ve been corrected here about a thousand times in the e-mail during the break, so I wanted to get that straight here. So, Bill Moyers talking to Kathleen Hall Jamieson about how the media portrays female candidates like Hillary Clinton, and remember, it’s PBS, portion of the exchange.
MOYERS: Limbaugh, he talks about Clinton’s ‘testicle lockbox.’
JAMIESON: Underlying this is a long-lived fear of women in politics. For example, we know that there’s language to condemn female speech that doesn’t exist for male speech. We call women’s speech shrill and strident and Hillary Clinton’s laugh was being described as a cackle. And why we’re looking at a laugh and whether it’s appropriate or not is of itself an interesting question. We also know that underlying many of these assertions is the assumption that any woman in power will, by necessity, entail emasculating men. And, as a result, a statement of fundamental threat. So why shouldn’t you vote for Hillary Clinton? Explicit statements that suggest castrating, testicles in lockboxes, she’s going to emasculate men. It’s a zero-sum game in which a woman in power necessarily means that men can’t be men.
RUSH: Hey, Bill, you forgot to also ask Kathleen Hall Jamieson to comment on my reference to Hillary Clinton’s Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Your researchers only did half their job. So the testicle lockbox is about emasculating — of course it is! I mean, look at the steely eyed stare. Where are the stories that have been all over the place this past year that Mrs. Clinton isn’t likable, that she is threatening to people, very demanding. Here’s another thing. If you stop and think about all of the grief that the Drive-By Media en masse have given Condoleezza Rice, my gosh, folks. They have cartooned her and caricatured her as an Aunt Jemima, as nothing more than a Bush lapdog. They have written things and drawn things of Condoleezza Rice that, had they been done by a conservative of a liberal black woman, we would still be hearing about it, and that conservative cartoonist would have been drummed out of the media.
So this is very selective and this is all about protecting Hillary and trying to rewrite this train of hers that’s gotten off track a little bit here and they’re trying to do it on the basis she’s really likable and it’s just a bunch of sexist white guys who have this inordinate fear of women. Kathleen, I have no fear of women. In Hillary’s case, I have a huge fear of her policies and her utter, total demand to control as much of American life as possible based on those policies. I would also suggest, Kathleen, and to you, Bill Moyers, to the extent that I believe that the testicle lockbox exists, in a figurative sense, look at whose testicles get snared in that box. Not mine, and nobody on my side. Well, there might be some elected Republicans afraid of her. But it’s lib testicles that get ensnared in the testicle lockbox. Moyers’, Tim Russert recently got his back at that debate. They took ’em back on the driver’s licenses for illegal aliens. So it’s you libs that have checked your testicles at the door and put ’em in the lockbox. There’s another sound bite here I don’t have time to get into before the break, but we’ll do that. One more from Bill Moyers and Kathleen Hall Jamieson. It’s also obvious that there’s just no sense of humor on the other side of the aisle. They just — hey, that’s pretty clever, pretty funny because it’s an accurate portrayal of the way a lot of people think of Mrs. Clinton, she’s got 49% negatives. That analysis would never occur to these people, would it?
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Here’s the second bite with Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Bill Moyers as it continues after the testicle lockbox portion.
MOYERS: And you can’t use your uterus and your brain. That’s the old argument, right? You can’t be caring and tough. That’s the old argument against women, right?
JAMIESON: At one time, there was actually an argument that if women became educated, they would become infertile. There was also, for a long period of time, serious penalties for women who tried to speak in public. And the residue of this is a language that suggests that women in power cannot be women and be in power. And, as a result, as Hillary Clinton certifies herself as being tough enough to be president, competent enough to be president, these attacks say then she can’t be president because she’s not actually a woman. One of the questions that I find interesting is this hypothetical. Let’s say if Elizabeth Dole was this far along in the polls for the Republican nomination. Would she be subject to the same kinds of attacks? And I think the answer is no.
RUSH: The same kinds of attacks? They’d be worse. I again call your attention to what they’ve done to Condoleezza Rice. They may not be testicle lockbox oriented; they’d be oriented towards something else. She’d be a puppet of her husband, but this notion that people like me and you have some fear or bias against women. I would have voted for Margaret Thatcher every chance I had, had I been a Brit. I would have voted for Jeane Kirkpatrick for president had she sought the office. We all have tremendous respect for Golda Meir, who ran Israel. This is such a straw dog argument, and it simply emanates from the clichés that these liberals have of conservatives and that is racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe. Moyers then asked Kathleen Hall Jamieson, ‘How does this make you feel as a woman?’
MOYERS: How does this make you feel as a woman?
JAMIESON: Professional women who see this happening have had enough professional experiences in their lives to realize that these sorts of sentiments are actually out there and have probably experienced some of these sorts of things, and the question it raises for me is, you know, as this happens nationally, and as moderate Republican women become more aware of it, do they increase their identification with Hillary Clinton or not? These kinds of characterizations of Hillary Clinton have been out there; look to other forms of media throughout the 1990s where we do indeed find them. Hillary Clinton is a dominatrix, for example, in one of the ongoing themes in one of the parodies on Rush Limbaugh.
RUSH: (laughing) Parodies! Parodies. It’s called laughter. But all great comedy, in order to be comedy, has to have an element of truth. This is what makes it funny. I know, nobody gets upset over the parodies of men. Look, you have to understand what’s happening here. Campaign’s in a free fall in a lot of places, or at least the perception is that it’s in a free fall, and they’re trying to build her back up. I’ll tell you, you go back to Oprah and Obama, you know what the biggest threat to Hillary from Oprah is, it’s white women, it’s white women that watch Oprah, white women that they’re concerned about in the Hillary camp now that the big O has gotten involved. Here’s Moyers to wrap it up.
MOYERS: And you couldn’t say, ‘How are we going to defeat the nigger?’ How are we going to — which is the word that was so common when I was growing up in the South: ‘How are you going to defeat the kike?’ referring to Jews — you wouldn’t do — that woman would not have done that, I don’t think.
RUSH: I have no idea what he’s talking about. I’m pretty sure he’s lost his mind. Meanwhile, they accuse us of saying those words and harboring those thoughts, and now look who’s out saying them on PBS.