The April issue of the women's magazine Elle is carrying a weird negative profile of White House Kellyanne Conway. The subhead to Tish Durkin's article reads "For many Kellyanne Conway was a shock, invented out of whole cloth (and the tweets of her client). But her mendacious, loquacious assault on liberalism has been more than 20 years in the making."
To trash Conway the hardest, Durkin (a self-described "insular east-coast feminista") turned to the liberal media for support:
More than anyone else in the administration, Conway has warmed to the task of championing the most brazen fictions ever spoken by an American president. In the words of James Fallows, a national correspondent for The Atlantic [and a former speechwriter for Jimmy Carter], "She has internalized Trump's sense that there's no reality other than what they choose to present minute by minute."
....Commentators struggle to make sense of her in real life. Muses Fallows, "Why is Sean Spicer simultaneously a more tortured figure (à la Melissa McCarthy) than Conway, and one easier to empathize with? Because his flop sweats at the podium suggest his inner awareness that he knows he's been given an impossible job. Precisely because he knows that so much of what he has to say is bullshit, he's going to say it all the more loudly.… You can laugh at that; you can also understand it…but Kellyanne Conway is the daily public face of a flat disregard for actual facts and truth. And that, in my experience, is something new."
Others put it even more bluntly. "The world is her spin room, and what she is doing is spinning straw into plutonium," says Bob Garfield, host of WNYC Radio's weekly show On the Media.
Garfield, who single-handedly ruins NPR's claim to "civil discourse," was last noticed exclaiming that Trump had a record of "racism, xenophobia, misogyny, incitement, breathtaking ignorance on issues, both foreign and domestic, and a nuclear recklessness, reminiscent of a raving meth head with a machete on an episode of Cops."
So maybe we can't expect his analysis to be sober.
But then there's abortion advocate Ilyse Hogue, who slams Conway as an "oppressor" of women:
Betsy Schuman Dodek, a sweet-faced woman whom Conway met during a law-school summer internship and who voted for Clinton, says of Conway: "I'm so incredibly proud of the glass ceiling she broke!"
That sound you hear is the sound of millions of Hillary Clinton supporters spitting out the shards. Ilyse Hogue, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, who views Conway as no less objectionable than the widely excoriated White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, has her own analogy: "Conway is to oppressing women what Bannon is to white supremacists."
The pull quotes online demonstrate some of the strongest accusations.
She's "a kind and gracious person," as she sometimes feels the need to point out, who had no problem casting Hillary Clinton as an irretrievably soulless crook.
Liberals can't imagine Hillary as a soulless crook. That's an "alternative fact" in their minds, and it's not kind or gracious. Durkin did allow Conway to throw her pro-life lines back at Hogue and her flock:
"What does the average woman in this country do each week?" she says in her office. "Does she fill up the grocery cart and the gas tank, or does she get an abortion?" It seems to be a favorite line; she dropped it word for word in a 2014 speech at the Leadership Institute, a leadership academy for young conservatives.
Durkin concluded the story by suggesting Conway demonstrates "girl power," but for all the wrong things:
Meanwhile, "alternative facts" settles in at around a million hits on Google, while on Twitter, the phrase "Propaganda Barbie"—coined to describe her inauguration outfit—continues to trend briskly.
Working and dreaming and plotting and polling since the days of Reagan, Conway now finds herself at the very center of American power. It's where she always wanted to be.
Propaganda? Absolutely. Barbie? Only a fool would think that.
