It might be that I’m still sick today (and have been for almost a week now), but I found Maureen Dowd’s column today to be wonderfully savage. The object of her derision is no surprise: Hillary.

Another reporter joked: “That crying really seemed genuine. I’ll bet she spent hours thinking about it beforehand.” He added dryly: “Crying doesn’t usually work in campaigns. Only in relationships.”

…

She became emotional because she feared that she had reached her political midnight, when she would suddenly revert to the school girl with geeky glasses and frizzy hair, smart but not the favorite. All those years in the shadow of one Natural, only to face the prospect of being eclipsed by another Natural?

Yeah, I have no love for Clinton either. But another detail in the piece did make me prick up my ears:

When Hillary hecklers yelled “Iron my shirt!” at her in Salem on Monday, it stirred sisterhood.

Not just sisterhood—that kind of shit gets even my cynical back up. Can you imagine hecklers at an Obama rally yelling “pick my cotton!” at him while he tries to speak? The truth of the matter is that nasty public sexism like that is tolerated whereas public displays of racism, at least at an Obama rally, would probably get the perpetrators properly beat up.

Though I’m not making an argument for electing Clinton based on her gender, I certainly can see more clearly why she might have seen an uptick in support in the last moments of the New Hampshire race.