And then there were 9739

The NYT’s Gail Collins explains the Lizard Queen’s victory in New Hampshire:

My own favorite theory is that this week, Hillary was a stand-in for every woman who’s overdosed on multitasking. They grabbed at the opportunity to have kids/go back to school/start a business/become a lawyer. But there are days when they can’t meet everybody’s needs and the men in their lives — loved ones and otherwise — make them feel like failures or towers of self-involvement. And the deal is that they can either suck it up or look like a baby.

The women whose heart went out to Hillary knew that it wasn’t rational. She asked for this race, and if she was exhausted, the other candidates were, too. (John McCain is 71 and tired and nobody felt sorry for him.) The front-runner always gets ganged up on in debates. If her campaign was in shambles, it was her job to fix it or take the consequences. But for one moment, women knew just how Hillary felt, and they gave her a sympathy vote

As the OC often points out, fiction can’t keep up with reality and not even my deep cynicism about female voting can manage to run with the self-parody. Have you ever noticed that those who defend women’s suffrage never see fit to mention the importance of things like the sympathy vote? Defenses of women’s suffrage, in the rare case that anyone even attempts to make one rather than simply throwing a hissy fit, are always a vague theoretical defense. This is mostly because there is ABSOLUTELY no evidence, not one iota, to support the idea that universal suffrage – or in the case of the USA, wide but non-universal suffrage – is either synonymous with human liberty or fosters freedom in any significant way.

Moreover, the modern suffrage position makes no sense. If the will of the people is paramount, then what is the grounds for banning direct democracy? And if limits on democracy are justifiable, then what is the rational basis for limiting it in one way but erupting in hysterical fury at the mere suggestion of limiting it in another? There is nothing inherently moral about democracy; more importantly, there is nothing intellectually coherent about the moral case for limited democracy.

As far as the New Hampshire primary goes, I’ve already stated my belief that the ballots were adjusted in favor of the Lizard Queen. This demonstration of the difference between verifiable hand ballots and unverifiable machine ones shows how the chicanery may have been accomplished. As both the ballot data and the media coverage tend to indicate, the Republican elites are far more worried about Huckabee than Paul.

But at the end of the day, the incomparable Aussie may have summed it up best: “A black man tried to take something from a white woman, so they all clutched their purses tighter and voted against this vote rapist.”