What will be her next act?

Hillary said goodbye to the State Department yesterday.  While there will be endless speculation of her running in 2016, I think it would be a mistake to table our anger and disappointment over what is happening now in order to focus on a savior in four years.  I’m going to continue to pay attention to what’s going on in the present and assume that she isn’t going to run.

What will she do now?  No clue but there are very few women with the authority mojo of Hillary Clinton.  What the country desperately needs right now is to see a woman who has the riveting attention grabbing power of a man.  Someone who can be linked to from multiple blogs and op/ed pages with regularity.  Someone who shows up in the Plumline all the fricking time based on what she says and knowing that what she says comes from a place of experience, knowledge and doing her homework.  We need a powerful voice that comes from a woman but does not come from a “feminine” point of view, if you get my drift.

So, if I were her and the New York Times offered me a gig on the op/ed page, I’d probably take it.  I mean, among all the other things I had planned before breakfast.

Just sayin’.

Here’s the State Department farewell:

What Women??

Atrios writes:

In the year 2013, misogyny and gender inequality persists in part because male editors pay women to write anti-feminist screeds, allowing men to continue feeling good about their misogyny.

Am I supposed to do a “George Bush looking for WMDs under the tablecloths” maneuver?

Where are these women of which you speak?

Do you mean the ones employed by Fox or the past-their-writing-prime variety like Maureen Dowd who graduated from Catholic school when women still wore doilies on their heads in church?

There are pitifully few women writing for major newspapers in the op/ed section and even more pitifully, a mere tincture of women bloggers cited by blog aggregators like Greg Sargent’s PlumLine.  It got so bad last year that we started a Plumline metric, a ratio of female to male blogger citations.  The numbers would have had to triple before they were even slightly significant.

I’ll be the first one to support the notion that women should stop bashing women.  But when the DNC threw all of its support behind Obama, bashing women became inevitable- because his main opponent and best qualified candidate was a woman. Since the DNC determined that he was going to be the nominee, women were forced to bash their own in order to keep the slender reproductive rights they had in 2008.  And how did that turn out?

This problem didn’t just spring out of nowhere.  It has always been there because our numbers in the op/ed world have always been few.  It’s just worse now because the graduating class of 2008 was almost exclusively male.

If Atrios had been paying attention, he would have noticed that there are plenty of female bloggers waiting for paying gigs who are not writing anti-feminist screeds.  Oh wait, he would have had to seek out those writers on his own.  They never get mentioned by the opinionmakers and they’re not bloody likely to get mentored by anyone.  Heck, WE can’t even get on his blogroll.

Nevermind.

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Hey, remember this little ditty?  I know *I’ll* never forget.