Following Iowa, voters were pummeled with the word "change." Following New Hampshire, will we be soaked with weeping candidates?

What drives me nuts about the Crying Hillary meme:

• Senator Clinton did not, in fact, cry. She got a little misty. She was verklempft.
• The woman who asked the question that everyone attributes to Clinton's New Hampshire victory did not, in fact, vote for Clinton. She voted for Obama. As she told Hear & Now this morning, Obama's passion made her cry.
• How utterly stupid it is to make a voting choice based on a candidate's perceived tear duct expression.
  
• According to the meme, women voted in huge numbers for Clinton, not because of her positions on the war or health care or something substantive, but because she "cried," evoking sisterly solidarity against Senators Obama and Edwards, who were perceived to "gang up" on her once again during Saturday's debate.

This last point seems to confirm Gloria Steinem's contention that Clinton has "no masculinity to prove" - that she has broken through the "Muskie/Shroeder" barrier inhibiting expressions of "soft" emotions. Yet Maureen Dowd has an apt rejoinder to that notion:

But Hillary did feel she needed to prove her masculinity. That was why she voted to enable W. to invade Iraq without even reading the National Intelligence Estimate and backed the White House’s bellicosity on Iran.

One could argue that Dowd is conflating "masculinity" with national security "toughness," but I think she's acknowledging a conflation that has troubled Democrats since the war in Viet Nam, to the benefit of Republicans who indulge braying machismo. John Kerry and John Edwards voted for the war, too, making the same mistakes and with the same presidential ambitions.

Which brings me to the more substantive reason to oppose Clinton's candidacy: the needle of her moral compass points wherever political expediency attracts it.

Do I then apply a double standard, letting Edwards off the hook? No. Edwards has repeatedly acknowledged that he was wrong, blames no one else for "misleading" him, maintains a consistent criticism of the war in Iraq and advocates a foreign policy that reflects the lessons learned from this gigantic mistake (e.g., no "bellicosity on Iran.")

Tom Tomorrow's "The Trouble With Hillary" neatly summarizes my feelings towards her candidacy.

However, I do like the meme that suggests that, as Rebecca Traister put it, "New Hampshire voters served up a major 'Fuck you'" to the coronation of Obama by the news media and right wing pundits.

A 54-year-old British school teacher could receive 40 lashes and 6 months in jail for allowing her Sudanese pupils to name a class Teddy bear "Mohammed," reports CNN. Perhaps not as egregious as the punishment sentenced to a Saudi gang rape victim for "embarrassing" the Saudi judges who had let her rapists off the hook, it is still a ridiculously disproportionate punishment to the crime, if there really is one at all. To me it is one more instance of religious stupidity compounded by warped concepts of "honor."

The irony is that Sudanese officials have charged the school teacher with "insulting" Islam, even though the Koran does not prohibit engraved images, people name their children after the prophet all the time, and, um, hello - it's a teddy bear! The name was chosen by school children, many of whom are probably named after the prophet, too, and have several family members who share the name. It wasn't meant as an insult, it was supposed to be an honor.

I acknowledge that there is a lot about the role of "honor" in other cultures that I do not understand. It could be my own limitations as a Westerner, as a neurotic self-denigrating humorist, as a post-modern ironist, or as a simple crank. Yet I find it horrific and sick that the concept of "honor" is used to justify a lot of brutality and killing, often in so-called "honor killings" against women who have somehow transgressed social expectations regarding their "proper place" as wives and daughters or have caused men to feel insulted. While much of the reporting on this phenomenon is concentrated on the Middle East and Central Asia, it would be unfair to disregard similar instances in Western culture - notably, "gay panic" or the more murderous instances of transphobia.

I don't get it, and honestly, I don't want to "get" it, because it seems more a disease than a point of cultural competency, a plague of the male psyche borne on carriers of religion, myth, historic oppression and warped definitions of sexual and gender identity.