Keith Olbermann - worst person in the world
Last night Keith Olbermann and Howard Fineman decided to get together for a chit chat about Hillary Clinton. As you may know she hasn’t dropped out of the race and certain people are none to happy about it. In fact the recent tone of things can be best summed up as “how do we get the bitch to stop”.
So, after Olbmermann reads parts of a whiny, anti-democratic editorial from the NYT, Fineman started talking about how the adults were going to have to step in and “stop this thing”. In response to this Keith Olbermann casually suggested that this alleged adult would be “somebody who can take her into a room and only he comes out.”
Watch it for yourself:
This is some seriously fucked up shit.
If you fail to see the problem, consider for a moment what your response would be if these two white men were discussing how somebody needed to stop Barack Obama who is read as being a black man here in America. Suppose they suggested that that somebody would be “somebody who can take him out back and come back alone”.
The message would be clear, right? Everyone would realize that they were not only physically threatening Barack Obama, but by extension all black men. Know why? Because that’s how white men speak to one another when they decide that a black man isn’t following the rules they think he needs to be following.
And no, they are not talking about merely speaking to the man in question and convincing him to see things their way. They are talking about physically assaulting that man to such a degree that he won’t be walking away from the “discussion”. That’s why that “somebody” always comes back alone.
And for women - we get taken into a room where the man tasked with policing us reminds us - with his fists - about our proper place in the world. And when he’s done “discussing” things with us, he walks back out alone.
Both of these phrases are about white men asserting with violence their self-declared right to dominate everything and one. They do not “discuss” anything. They beat, maim and kill. And since that “somebody” is always faceless, we women of all colours and men of colour learn to fear saying/doing something that may cause “somebody” to take us out back or into a room for a “discussion”.
So I think it’s quite clear that Olbermann needs to declare himself to be “the worst person in the world” as he quite literally threatened every woman in America with physical violence.
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Comments
There’d be hell to pay and rightfully so. The racism and sexism that’s been thrown at Obama and Clinton is wrong and should not be tolerated by anyone regardless of which team one is personally rooting for.
It did sound like he threatened Hillary, and I was disappointed by his inappropriate comment because it perpetuates the pervasive sense in our culture that violence is an effective solution for all problems. But I’m still not sure how we get from there to “every woman in America.”
In all honesty, I don’t think a case can be made that Keith Olbmermann is a sexist. He treats what he views as immoral behavior of all politicians the same way … with suspicion, critique, ridicule, and disgust.
[...] Rachel Sklar wrote a piece about sexism at MSNBC including Keith Olberman’s remarks about having someone beat/kill Hillary Clinton in order to get her out the [...]
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Tsk tsk tsk.
And how much do you want to bet that if the same comment had been made in a racial context rather than a gender context, there would have been subsequent outrage on the part of black men and their friends and associates?