Hillary Clinton Plays the Sexism Card Against Bernie Sanders

Hillary Clinton suggests her gender played a role when Bernie Sanders suggested she stop “shouting”

Going into the first Democratic debate, pundits and left-wing commentators smugly praised the “civility” of the Democratic nominees for President as compared to their Republican counterparts. Whereas Donald Trump has been purposely divisive in taking shots at Lindsey Graham, Rick Perry, Scott Walker, and Rand Paul while taking plenty of rhetorical arrows to the chest himself, Democratic Presidential frontrunners Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders had been largely hesitant to demonize one another.

But no longer. Ever since the first debate, the civility has ceased.

Hillary Clinton has been attacking Bernie Sanders from the left on pretty much the only issue she can attack him on from the left: gun control. Sanders has sought so-called common sense “gun reforms” but does not offer up the usual red meat to the left-wing base. He has accordingly pushed back against Hillary Clinton’s attacks by saying in the last debate:

“As a Senator from a rural state, what I can tell Secretary Clinton, that all the shouting in the world is not going to do what I would hope all of us want, and that is keep guns out of the hands of people who should not have those guns and end this horrible violence that we are seeing.”

And in recent days, Hillary Clinton has sought to riposte these “shouting” comments, but her response has little to do with guns. No, her response has instead focused on another major difference she has with Senator Sanders: her gender.

The New York Times reports:

Hillary Rodham Clinton has seized on remarks Senator Bernie Sanders made in the first Democratic debate that “all the shouting in the world” would not keep guns out of the wrong hands, suggesting that Mr. Sanders used those words because of Mrs. Clinton’s gender.

“I haven’t been shouting, but sometimes when a woman speaks out, some people think it’s shouting,” she said at the Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Des Moines, Iowa, on Saturday.

In an interview Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” – which played a clip of Mrs. Clinton making a similar comment on Friday about Mr. Sanders’s word choice – the senator defended himself.

“All that I can say is I am very proud of my record on women’s issues,” Mr. Sanders said. “I certainly do not have a problem with women speaking out, and I think what the secretary is doing there is taking words and misapplying them.”

Ah yes, “taking words and misapplying them.” Welcome to the 2016 Presidential election, Bernie. Welcome to the petty politics of the social justice left.

Luckily, Hillary’s use of the gender card has not played out as well as she may have hoped, as MSNBC Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski called Hillary’s remarks “pathetic.”

From Mediaite:

“I know she’s the frontrunner, I’m sure she will win,” Brzezinski continued. “But that’s pathetic. That’s the sort of straight out of Veep. Except when Veep does it it’s hysterical, because it’s so ridiculous; that wasn’t funny, it was pathetic.”

“I know sexism. Hillary Clinton knows sexism. She should know better than let her staff make her do that,” Brzezinski said. “She needs to get out there and talk. Everyone stop writing lines for her. They’re bad, really bad.”

“And when we talk about sexism, we talk about women and equal pay and all these things that are important. Let’s not denigrate it with that stupidity, because we embarrass ourselves,” she concluded. “I’m like, cringing.”

Cringing, indeed.