Well, I am about to snap that anybody would write an article like this about this pantsuit or any of Hillary’s pantsuits, or about Hillary’s signature style. This article by Anne Bratskeir appeared in an online Newsday blog today: Hillary Clinton pantsuit saga continues .
First and foremost let me make it clear that pantsuits should be the least of our issues when Hillary is on her longest trip, has visited incredibly dangerous places, made audacious and courageous statements, and signed agreements of great importance for development in Africa and the evolution of democracy there. Having said that, I must object strongly to this uninformed article by someone who has not bothered to investigate what Hillary is doing and prefers to critique her attire.
Hillary prefers pants for the same reason many women who are photographed seated at times or must sit in front of people do. She often does wear separates, your novel suggestion – or that of one of your consultants. But she goes monochromatic often because it lengthens her appearance. I, personally think she looks smashing in her pantsuits. She is gorgeous in this.
Apparently lost on you is the fact that Hillary often USES the “jelly bean” colors you refer to as a code. This is something SHE can do that men cannot, and it is VERY effective diplomatically. THE WHOLE COUNTRY OF EL SALVADOR loved this:
ALL OF CANADA celebrated the Centennial Anniversary of the Border Waters Treaty (um, with the United States – Oh right! You would never know since she was shown talking about North Korea and Iran that Saturday, but the TV news never SAID she was in Canada or why). When she crossed the Rainbow Bridge, Canadians tweeted joyfully, “Here’s HRC in red for Canada!”
At the U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue July 28, 2009, her red pantsuit was not lost on THE ENTIRE CHINESE DELEGATION.
In short, Anne, the color-coded pantsuits are more than her signature item, they speak a language of foreign relations that is very powerful to the people in countries she visits. They may not understand English, and she may not speak their tongue, but people are always impressed when a diplomat wears their national colors. Hillary knows this. It is a very powerful image. Hillary knows the significance of color, and, in fact, she looks beautiful in these colors – why do you want to drab her up? She sparkles, and the world LOVES it!
As for the suit you refer to as “mango,” that one, too, has some special significance to the Homegirls here. I don’t expect you to know that, but please respect it and do not criticize a pantsuit that we hold dear for many reasons that would be lost on you. Leave THIS one alone, Anne. Step AWAY FROM THE PANTSUIT! The Homegirls love it!
Homegirls wishing to voice their opinions directly to Anne can email her here: anne.bratskeir@newsday.com
Excellent. And you know, some would take issue with what she wore regardless of what it was.
It’s particularly interesting that she takes issue eith how Hillary looks during a particularly gruelling trip through a third world country where on many of her stops, the cost of one of her staff’s handbags could fed a village for a month- in other words, while Hillary looks great, her trip ain’t about fasion. But as you pointed out, even if it were, the author of that article still wouldn’t get it.
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Well now everybody is commenting on Hillary and what she looks like. This is what Tina Brown said this morning on “Morning Joe”:
āDoes This Pantsuit Make Me Look Fat?ā (Newsbusters) Tina Brown suggests Hillary āfatā, says she ought to get into a gym
JOE SCARBOROUGH: Tina Brown, whatās wrong with my former, ex-girlfriend Hillary Clinton?
TINA BROWN: Whatās wrong with Hillary is one week too long on this African hellish tour that sheās on. Think of it from the human point of view: she is in her second week. Sheās hot. She is feeling fat. She had this horrible business where she suddenly lost it a bit over the whole Bill thing. Frankly, I want to get her home now. I want to get her home. Otherwise, by the time she hits Liberia, sheās going to be saying: āwhat can I tell you? We had an idiot for the president!ā Sheās letting it hang out.
A bit later, Brown returned to her notion that Hillary had encountered a . . . weighty problem.
SCARBOROUGH: Take the microphone away, get her on a ā maybe Bill ought to leave Vegas ā
BROWN: I agree with that. She ought to get back to the gym!
BRZEZINSKI: Did she just say that? Tina?
SCARBOROUGH: I didnāt say that. Iām suggesting that Bill Clinton get on a plane, on another mission of mercy, fly to Africa, get his wife, bring her home now!
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/mark-fiā¦s-get-back-gym
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Jill- I saw that and emailed it to Still4Hill this afternoon and posted it in the comments to the previous post here- I almost had a stroke when I saw Tina Brown’s comment- talk about dismissive, idiotic, sexist and just stupid- Get to the GYM? Somebody at the Daily Beast needs to kick Tina Brown to the curb, professionally speaking.
Talk about minimizing what Hillary has been doing, tirelessly, for the last 10+ days! I noticed that Tina didn’t touch the substance of THAT. Idiot.
And I am sick of people brandishing their prior pro-Hillary bonafides as some sort of justification for their current nonsense- Tina Brown, case in point. Also Bonnie Erbe and Amy Suskind. I’m tired of them.
Oh, and sorry about all the typos in my first comment. And probably this one too. I type faster than I think. Or something like that…
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I would love to see if Tina, Dowd, or any of the other woman who attack Hillary have the guts to say it to her face. I bet they wouldn’t and would be kissing up to her and saying Hillary we love.
Back on topic, I love Hillary’s pantsuits.
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I finally had the chance to read the original article that Still4Hill’s blog post is referring to. What I immediately noticed — apart from the cattiness that is apparently required in any article that deals with Hillary — is that the author called upon two men — Robert Verdi and Clinton Kelly — to give us the usual “men know better than women about ladies’ fashion” critique of Hillary’s wardrobe. How tired can you get? And yet THEY are the ones who are calling Hillary’s pantsuits “dated”, “tedious”, and from Verdi “painful”.
Note to article author Anne Bratskeir: The only thing more tired, tedious and painful than dragging out two fashion queens to critique a powerful woman’s wardrobe is YOU — the dreary hack who had nothing better to do than to write that shallow and demeaning article.
Still4Hill, thank you for this post. I don’t think that most people are aware that Hillary color-codes her outfits to match the host country’s national colors. Did you email this blog link to Bratskeir at Newsday? I sure hope she reads your blog post and all of the comments.
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Yes, I did send it to her. And I also posted a response to the Tina Brown comment over at Still4Hill but I will copy it here since my DSL is down and I could not mount a proper defense of this last night as I wanted to. And I’ll say it one more time here: HILLARY IS NOT FAT! SHE’S SLENDER AND VERY CURVY. GET A LIFE, LADIES & DRAG QUEENS! You WISH you had that body. She’s BUILT!
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Hereās the link: http://www.taylormarsh.com/2009/08/13/hillary-serves-up-jeb-tina-serves-up-hillary/
Who cares what Tina is up to? Since my DSL is down I could not address this properly where it should have been addressed, but briefly here I will. This is Tina Brown:
āTINA BROWN: Whatās wrong with Hillary is one week too long on this African hellish tour that sheās on. Think of it from the human point of view: she is in her second week. Sheās hot. She is feeling fat. She had this horrible business where she suddenly lost it a bit over the whole Bill thing.ā
1. Tina has no way to know how Hillary was feeling. Hillary does not look fat. She looks beautiful. If you are not going to say something nice, Tina, get off Hillaryās body!
2. What āhorrible business?ā It turns out the translation might have been correct (I cannot listen till my DSL comes back). If so, she was asked a male chauvinist question, by a male chauvinist student (I speak from experience having done grad work in a country just like that one), in a male chauvinist country. Her reaction was spot on!
3. The only accurate statement above is this one: āSheās hot.ā Yes she is. I know thatās not what you meant, Tina, but again, if you meant she was feeling the heat, I doubt it. Hillary is always cold. She wore sweaters under jackets on the Senate floor. She had heavy socks on against the South African winter, and she needed a shawl over her jacket in Goma. She feels the cold and bundles up, so I doubt she was feeling the heat. She IS hot, though. Very!
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What I would like to address is this:
What difference does Tina Brown’s or Anne Bratskeir’s opinion of Hillary’s weight, looks, wardrobe make in the overall mission that Hillary is on? Is their opinion of what Hillary looks like or does not look like relevant to her mission to promote democracy and women’s rights in Africa? Why do these hacks think anyone in the world wants to read about their viewpoint, or, worse yet, about some male fashion expert’s catty putdown of Hillary and her clothing? Are these writers so self-absorbed that they really believe the world gives a damn about what they think of our Secretary of State? And are they actually getting paid to write this irrelevant, self-centered garbage?
I mean really — Who are these writers??
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Yes- the fact that these people are getting PAID to write this garbage while Hillary is touring those desolate IDP camps is outrageous. It is an attempt to marginalize her (which then gives them something to write about – Hillary being marginalized – their BIG STORY – emphasis on “story”)- and BTW – that ultimate put-down – something about having “a celebrity” as Secretary of State? WHAT?????????
This is outright viciousness!
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That’s the problem- Tina Brown and the others have a mighty big pulpit from which to preach their nonsense and as Still4Hill said, they actually get *paid* for this tripe.
What I find very interesting is of all the people who Scarborough could have had on, why Tina Brown? He could have had Eve Ensler on to talk about the significance of Hillary’s trip to Goma (I say Ensler because she is personally spending more and more time in the DRC trying to combat the systematic rape of women, children, etc) and they even could have asked her what she thought about Hillary’s “outburst” and I’m guessing Eve probably would have made short work of that, preferring instead to discuss substantive issues. And THAT is why they didn’t ask someone like Eve (or anyone else more interested in the *work* Hillary is doing)- the media want to continue to push this cat-fighting meme- they prefer to discuss the significance of her losing her temper, her wardrobe, her weight, whether her husband is over-shadowing her (he’s not) because quite frankly, they and their shows are not real news- they are infotainment and self serving infotainment at that.
Tina Brown is one of their own and that’s how they continue to feed the beast- this media cycle perpetuates itself endlessly and it’s very tough to break it & as we were saying, about the only way to make a dent in it is to go to a website like Foreign Policy (if you’re looking for more substantive media analysis) or blogs like ours- but how many average people do that? I’m a political junkie and a Hillary fan so I do constantly but my father (for example) doesn’t and he brought up the outburst to me and I damn near handed him his head on a platter for him viewing the incident in the MSM-promoted, one-sided way. Then I felt bad when I realized, “oh yeah, my Dad can’t even open a link in his email without a flurry of phone calls to me” so he has no context from which to view Hillary’s trip to Africa, other than what the TV tells him (of course, he could read my blog, but he doesn’t even get what blogs are).
So that brings us back full circle to NYC girl’s question/idea/goal- how do we get the info. out there to people who for whatever reason, aren’t hanging out on the internet?
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Stacy,
I threw out some thoughts about this in the previous blog entry here where you were asking about how we could get our message through to the MSM. That’s where the viewers/listeners are, and that will be true for many years to come, although I think that one day the internet will take over as the primary news source.
Meanwhile, as I said in the previous comments section, we might try to get people like Greta or even Lou to report more on what Hillary is doing. Of course, right now we are facing nonstop carpet-bomb saturation reporting on the health care reform insanity, so good luck trying to get anyone out there to report on Hillary’s Africa trip (apart from her response to that one sexist question, or the fact that her pantsuits have wrinkles in them sometimes after she’s been stuck in an airplane flying all over Africa for days on end …)
We can do things the old-fashioned way, as I have also suggested previously: Cable access programming is free to us as producers, and it is available to all cable subscribers. The disadvantage is that it is time-consuming to put together a TV show, and you will only reach a very small number of viewers for your efforts. OTOH, it’s better than not having that message out there at all. We can also do old-school hard copy pen-and-paper newsletters. Many people still subscribe to flyer-style newsletters, and that’s a good way of reaching the non-computer-using public.
And nothing for nothing, but the State Dept. has to help their own cause by selling themselves to the public. Americans are notoriously DISINTERESTED in foreign policy until a war breaks out! So, trying to get the public’s attention for diplomatic issues is something State has to work at if they want to get on the nightly news at all. I don’t know what kind of PR apparatus they have in place over there, but they need to make our SOS more visible to the people she serves. If anyone has the means and the capability, it’s her own Department!
Meanwhile, we volunteer bloggers will try as best we can to get the truth to the masses! š
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“Stacy,
I threw out some thoughts about this in the previous blog entry here where you were asking about how we could get our message through to the MSM. Thatās where the viewers/listeners are, and that will be true for many years to come, although I think that one day the internet will take over as the primary news source.”
Yes, I did see your responses in that regard. Clearly, the information has to get out across a variety of media- news print, tv, radio and internet. I incorrectly forget about the power of those first three because I watch very little TV news, I have never listened to talk radio and can’t remember the last time I picked up a newspaper. I guess that makes me a latte-sipping elitist ;).
I’ll have to think on this some more…but you’ve made me think about all the things I’ve overlooked, at my own peril
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Here’s a link to a pro-Hillary article in the NY Times that someone referred to earlier by Judith Warner on Aug. 12, 2009:
Hillary Fights A Tide of Trivialization
http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/12/hillary-fights-a-tide-of-trivialization/
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Good post up at No Quarter today re: shamefully poor coverage of Hillary’s Africa tour by MSM:
Sec’y Clinton’s Accomplishments In Africa Blunted By Junk Politics
http://www.noquarterusa.net/blog/2009/08/16/secretary-clinton%e2%80%99s-accomplishments-in-africa-blunted-by-junk-politics/
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In case anyone missed this piece of kool-aid-saturated Obot spin courtesy of Sue Pleming of Reuters News. From Aug. 14, 2009:
Clinton Leans On Obama’s Celebrity In Africa
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE57D1MI20090814
[h/t to one of the commenters at No Quarter for this lead.]
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I’m sorry, I am at work and don’t have time to read this yet (I hope my DSL works when I get home or there’ll be hell to pay! Hear that, Verizon?), but the headline alone gave me hives.
Hillary makes her own splash wherever she goes. She does not need to depend on anyone else paving the way for her. She is a pioneer. She, in fact, is inventing her own diplomatic style which I intend to address in a later post. Hillary is an original. She shines on her own – always has. She stands in no one’s shadow, and she reflects no one’s light. Hillary generates her own light. She’s a Super Nova!
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Get a load of this nonsense:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/meredith-c-carroll/always-a-bridesmaid_b_260899.html
Why can’t the media just report on what she’s doing instead of always trying to create a side-show story about her marriage, her perceived ulterior motives or her having a diminished role for no other reason than she’s currently not POTUS?
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You know the more they do this, the more devout and defensive the Homegirls (and Homeboys) will become. You can’t expect better from HuffPo.
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Huffington compost sucks. Even the die-hard obama supporters don’t trust or like it that much and the same goes for politico and trash. HP is turning into a bad perez hiltion and gawker site.
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Huffington Post was very high on the BO-ass-kiss list during the primaries, so I am sure they are just loving their chance to sharpen their claws on the woman they have been insulting for well over a year. This is nothing new from the moronic Obots at HuffPo. And they have the nerve to try to prove that Bill is more popular than Hill by citing … an MSNBC poll?? Are they serious? Nothing beats asking a bunch of mindless Obama supporters which of their sworn enemies they like least! And then treating that as if it’s scientific evidence of some kind! Unbelievable!
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Ok, I’m completely inadequate. Why am I loving the tangerine, mango, kumquat or whatever fruit color that orange is?
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Totally adequate! She rocks fruit colors!
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I can’t sleep and my brain has ceased normal functioning. All I can think of is “Bill’s Fruit Snack.”
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LOLOL!!!! She does look like a mango in that orange.
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Maybe it’s his favorite flavor.
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I left the code in – cutest picture, but when I make it visible, Bill gets cut out.
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That orange suit made an appearance in Barbados.
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Yes, I saw. And her Barbadian counterpart like bright colors, too – a fuschia.
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Isn’t it a Mets color? Even so, if she wants to show her New York side, she could always go with Yankees blue.
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Mets colors are Orange and Blue for the Dutch flag. She’s a true Yank, however,
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[…] she knew what venues she would be in and wore colors that picked up those in the environment.Ā Remember her “flag diplomacy?”Ā (No one called it that except me, but I have plenty of […]
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[…] Cross-posted at The Department of Homegirl Security. […]
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