Saturday, October 10, 2020

Rex Murphy says if Pence was "mansplaining", that means he won

Ed. has been pressing me for just over two days to say something about the snoozefest that passed for a debate between Vice-President Mike Pence and Vice-President-Wannabe Kamala Harris. Dear readers, I just haven't got anything. Nothing. Rien. Nada... So I hope the good folks at Canada's National Post, the only major Canuck medium whose owners still let Rex Murphy talk [write. Ed.] won't mind my recommending "'Mike Pence was mansplaining,' and other things said by sore losers", published yesterday.

Mr Murphy is a lovable old curmudgeon -- much like my goodself -- and a stickler for proper usage of the Queen's English -- ditto. He also refuses to drink the fashionable progressive koolaid, which makes him a pretty good judge of what passes for political discourse in the Excited States of America. Here are a few snippets from his review of the alleged debate.

As soon as it had ended, various commentators, the Twitter horde, the blogs and the panoply of our present-day communications services, were going on, in severely disparaging terms, about the gentlemanly Vice-President Mike Pence’s “mansplaining.” They clearly were not pleased with Pence’s decorous performance, and just as clearly thought that accusing him of “mansplaining” was a real winner of a rebuke.
["Mansplaining" is] what I'd call a "combat" word, whose purposes is not to describe an exchange, but to put down one of the parties to it. The definition for this application of the word is as follows:

Mansplaining. (n.) a derogatory term called up by feminist ideologues to vainly rebut the actual facts of any matter that, in those rare circumstances where a more intelligent man is debating a less intelligent woman, the man has indubitably presented the better argument. Or, any incontestably superior male response to any inferior female argument.

I hope I have demystified...mansplaining and shown that it is a verbalism of last resort used by sore losers and inadequate debaters. If any should be so mischievous as to colour this column as itself a model of mansplaining, I will simply offer prayers for her recovery.

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