Things are getting a bit heated over at the Huffington Post.
Yesterday, Erica Jong called out Rolling Stone‘s political correspondent Matt Taibbi for making a joke about Hillary Clinton’s (allegedly) flabby arms in an April 3 RS column. "Physical mockery ended in seventh grade, I thought—but apparently not where women pols are concerned," Ms. Jong wrote in a piece headlined Misogyny, Momism and Militarism. "I find it bizarre that a grown man would invoke a physical put-down in an opinion piece. It smacks of a complex of some sort."
Ms. Jong then went on to ask:
Today, Mr. Taibbi responds in kind (well, more like unkind):
Mr. Taibbi then offers a laundry list of insults he’s hurled at male politicians over the years, including saying that Mike Huckabee "has lost 100 pounds, [and] has the roundish, half-deflated physique of an ex-fatty," and calling Boris Yeltsin "a pig … A human appendage of a rotting, corrupt state, a crook who would emerge even from the hottest bath still stinking of booze, concrete and sausage." (Somehow he managed to forget the time he joked of ailing Pope John Paul II, that when he dies you can "throw a marble at the dead Pope’s head. Bonk!")
Mr. Taibbi concludes, "[A]ccording to Jong, the reason I decided to use the term ‘flabby’ when describing Hillary Clinton is because, deep down inside, I want to fuck my mother. ‘And love is the problem, of course,’ Jong-Freud writes. ‘You cannot fuck your mother so you must revile her.’… I mean, wow. And I thought I was a hack."
Ouch! But then, it’s no worse than the sorts of thing’s Jong’s probably heard within her own family recently.
