Is it demeaning to refer to the Maine girls as "the Maine girls"? (I sure HOPE so)

Official 2002 Senate portrait of Margaret Chase Smith (1897-1995), U.S. senator from Maine, 1949-1973, by Maine artist Ronald Frontin -- it would never occur to me to refer to Senator Smith as a "Maine girl."

"Senator Margaret Chase Smith served our nation with dignity and honor, and her life was a testimony to the possibilities that exist for women in America. What she proved is that it isn’t necessarily gender which makes the difference in public service –- it’s dedication, energy, perseverance, competence, ability, and the will to get the job done."

-- Sen. Olympia Snowe in 1999, endorsing the commission of
a portrait of her Maine predecessor for the U.S. Senate Collection

by Ken

As I mentioned last night, in writing about the Senate majority's failure to win cloture to proceed with debate on the defense appropriations bill onto which DADT repeal has been tacked, I got into a spot of trouble yesterday in another forum when, in the course of a diatribe against make-believe-moderate Maine Republican Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susie Collins, I referred to them -- more than once! -- as "the Maine girls." A colleague, while sympathetic to my anger toward the Maine girls (oops, I did it again! and actually I would describe it as closer to "contempt" than "anger") wondered gently if I wasn't demeaning them with an unfortunate note of sexism.

In reply, I explained that I take his point, and he's absolutely right to read my remark the way he did in the absence of proper explanation, which I didn't provide. What I tried to explain was that I absolutely intended to demean Miss Olympia and Little Susie, but not as an issue of sexism. I meant to belittle them for behaving like girls, not in a gender-determined sense, but in an age-and-maturity sense. They truly do behave like children, and alas, female children are "girls."

If the Maine girls were chronological men, I would have referred to them as the "Maine boys." And to the extent that there's a difference in tone in referring to pols as "boys" vs. "girls," I'm okay with it. I have no doubt that Miss Olympia and Little Susie themselves play on that difference. They play the gender card, using it to pretend that they're somehow above politics.

I confess that the bogosity (to use the official Car Talk term) of the Maine girls' political posturing drives me nuts. Their voters really think they are "independent," which is especially indefensible in the case of Little Susie Echo. There's no question in my mind that they play on the lineage of their distinguished Maine Republican predecessor Margaret Chase Smith, who actually was frequently independent politically. I would never have dreamt of referring to Senator Smith as a "girl," but Miss Olympia and Little Susie -- well, yeah, absolutely.

I could even understand if Miss Olympia and Little Susie themselves are confused on the point, and actually imagine that they too are "independent." I'm prepared to believe that they both think "independent"-ish thoughts sometimes, and may not even have noticed themselves that they hardly ever do independent deeds.

I look at that idealistic tribute to Senator Smith that Miss Olympia penned in 1999, which I'm sure she meant to apply to herself as well, and I have to wonder if she was maybe just kidding. Of course in 1999 she hadn't been tested yet. It wasn't till the following year that the Supreme Court installed some crumb bum named George W. Bush as president. For the next eight years the Maine girls -- and their fellow chump, Rhode Island boy Lincoln Chafee -- ignored the example of their Vermont Republican colleague Jim Jeffords, who saw the graffiti handwriting on the wall of the Bush regime and said, "Uh-uh, I don't think so, not me, sweethearts." How much of the Bush-Cheney mayhem could have been forestalled if the kiddies had had a smidgeon of grown-up gumption?

To go back to the installation of Chimpy the Prez for a moment, I've always thought it ironic that the principal targets of the rightful wrath against the Supreme Court were the hard-core loons, Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas, instead of the people who actually made it possible, the so-called moderates, Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy. In my book the Maine girls have to answer in the same way. Chafee has more or less acknowledged as much, though of course that didn't happen until he'd paid the price by being dumped by his constituents.

Here is Miss Olympia's report card for those eight years:

Dignity: F
Honor: F
Dedication: F
Energy: F
Perseverance: F
Competence: F
Ability: F
Will to get the job done: F-minus

And here is the scorecard of her colleague, Little Susie Echo:

Dignity: F
Honor: F
Dedication: F
Energy: F
Perseverance: F
Competence: F
Ability: F
Will to get the job done: F-minus

And after their stellar performance as part of the Senate majority during the Bush regime, once Miss Olympia and Little Susie's party moved into the Senate minority, under both Presidents Bush and Obama, they continued to do nearly all their voting in lockstep with their party leadership, meaning now the egregious and indefensible Miss Mitch McConnell.

Oh, you could still hear murmurings about how the Maine girls might break ranks, but they rarely did. Just as during the majority years, you heard periodic reports that one or the other of them was privately shocked by her latest betrayal by Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott or his successor, Doctorbill Frist, who had hornswoggled her yet again into voting for the latest Bush regime legislative atrocity with the promise that after passage it would be possible to modify the atrocity to be microscopically less atrocious, a promise that could be considered vacated even before the words were out of the scumbag's mouth.

So no, I don't want to demean the Maine girls for their gender. Aren't the Maine girls doing quite enough to demean their gender?

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