Stop the Presses: Sotomayor “PMS” Watch Begins

Former Nixon associate says: "Let's hope that the key conferences aren't when she's menstruating or something, or just before she's going to menstruate. That would really be bad."

Call the wahmbulance. The right-wing moaning about Sonia Sotomayor has torn through every racist, sexist, and intertwined insult in the book so quickly that they have to go all the way back to junior high for the next round.

The Women’s Media Center alerted me this morning to the most juvenile and transparent complaint yet, thanks to former Watergate scoundrel G. Gordon Liddy, a moral exemplar par excellence. He said the following

Let’s hope that the key conferences aren’t when she’s
menstruating or something, or just before she’s going to menstruate.
That would really be bad. Lord knows what we would get then.

Not only does he repeat that time-honored trope that women get irrational when they have their periods, but I almost expected Liddy to beg someone to give him the magic series of circles and dots that constitute the fabled "cootie shot"– lest Sotomayor infect him with that female yuckiness just by existing.

As ridiculously insulting, absurd, and infuriating as such comments are, they reveal the whiny desperation to which the far right has sunk. Even though their campaign of racist, gendered fearmongering against Obama was decisively rejected by American voters, they haven’t been able to adjust their playbook yet. While the American public may not always be sophisticated enough to reject subtle racial and gendered insinuations, these schoolyard tactics are an excellent way of alerting the country to the real motivations behind this segment’s disapproval of the President and his chosen nominee. So I say, bring it on, Liddy.

For some deeper anaylsis of the gendered nature of the criticism levelled at Sotomayor, check out these pieces by Amanda and Erica Gonzales of the WMC.