The twits who have seized the Washington Post and the revival Little Rascals’ Wimmin Haters Club at MSNBC have thought to separate themselves from the media herd this political season by embracing misogyny.

I’ll wait here if you need to go look it up.

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The psychiatric name for it is pudendaphobia — a clinical disorder that regards half the population as inferior because it has hooters and lacks doodles; that invites discrimination, disparagement and ridicule based strictly on gender, usually expressed in the b-word when you’re trying to appear couth and the c-word when you’re not.

The Post misogynists seem to think the pathology is a droll thing, while the numnutz aspiration at MSNBC seems to be to show that they’re such hip guys they can dance on the edge of nappy-headed hoery and get away with it. In short, a-holes are going to be a-holes, even in the MSM.

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What perplexes me isn’t the inanity of neo-misogyny so much as it is the inaccuracy of it, as women are clearly the superior sex, in practical as well as esthetic terms. Men are better at baling hay and at passing louder wind, but what else? OK, men are better at rodomontade and televangelism. At pedophilia. At shooting one another after having mistaken one another for deer.

But women have better judgment, especially political judgment. Their intellect is not so hormonally clouded or clogged. They are adults where men are eternally juveniles. They are kinder people. They will tolerate the phony and the boor but have no trouble recognizing them for what they are. A million men were taken in by swift-boating, but only 17 women were. Of the scores of insane high-profile talk-radio blowhards, only two are women. Women don’t rape, and women serial killers are invariably “black widow” types who prey on geezers who have precious little excuse anyway for continuing to take up space.

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If it were left to women, no one would ever have been waterboarded.

An American woman would not have thought of starting a war unprovoked that would kill thousands of her countrymen and ruin the economy for no good reason.

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There is no female equivalent of machismo, so the sex has produced no such ridiculous posturing characters as Hemingway or Mussolini, though it can parody them nicely, as Sheena Tarzan, Xena Hercules, Wonder Woman Superman. A woman will watch football but not play it, and couldn’t coach it credibly for having to sneak off regularly for a big, hearty laugh at the pompous, ponderous brainlessness of it all. Women live longer. They drive better. They are so plainly superior in so many respects that continuing to make the case for them becomes tedious.

That said, I should admit that there are airheads in the distaff population — and skanks, and convict groupies, and country music screechers, and gun molls, and harridans, and glommers, and Stepford wives, and bluenoses, and ball-breakers, and succubi, and others — and that I’m not ashamed of feeling superior to some of them. You can feel superior to some men without being misanthropic, and to some women without being misogynistic.

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One is Dana Perino, who is currently in charge of lying to the press for the Bush administration.

Either D.P. believes the preposterous things she’s called upon to say in President Igmo’s behalf, or most of them, or some of them, or a few of them, in which case I know she’s a dumber person than I am, or she doesn’t believe them, she knows she’s prevaricating in the service of the worst scoundrel ever to hold the nation’s highest elective office, in which case I’m a giant moral step ahead of her insofar as voluntary adherence to the Ninth Commandment.

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Another is poor Britney Spears. I don’t feel superior to her because she’s a woman and I’m not, any more than I feel superior to O.J. Simpson because he has darker skin. Britney Spears is an imbecile and O.J. Simpson is a killer, and, mired as I might be in mediocrity, sunk as I might be in idiosyncrasy, lost as I might be in the damfool generality, I hold myself, even if wrongly, in higher esteem than I do imbeciles and murderers.

I feel superior to Phyllis Schlafly for a number of reasons that seem to me self-evident and inarguable.

I feel superior to Gennifer Flowers, not because of any of Precious’ storied indiscretions with Willard Clinton, or out of any residual schoolyard disdain for squealers, or because there’s just something about the woman that makes my skin crawl, or makes my ass want a dip of snuff, but rather because, for all of my thrice-diagnosed paucity of self-esteem, I simply cannot jack myself down to a dignity-indifference level at which I could urinate copiously and resoundingly into a brass bowl in the middle of a radio interview in which I was the interviewee. I know that isn’t a good reason for feeling superior to somebody, but what’s a body to do?

I feel superior to Marilyn Monroe because she stank and had no excuse for it, and to Condoleezza Rice because her solitary idea of diplomacy is making repeat “surprise” visits to people who obviously would rather she stay the hell away and let them do their jobs.

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