Katha Pollitt is out with a response to my response to her review of My Turn. Once again, it’s largely free of any engagement with Hillary Clinton’s political history. It’s a short book, but there is a healthy amount of detail about some rather terrible things she’s done over her four decades in public life. Katha touches briefly on a few, but the blows are merely glancing.

I understand why she might not want to engage, since those terrible things undermine some of Clinton supporters’ most cherished claims about her, notably all the work she’s done on behalf of women. She did give that famous and frequently quoted speech in Beijing in 1995 in which she said that “women’s rights are human rights.” I thoroughly agree that they are. But it’s not clear how Clinton put that assertion into actual practice.

Clinton’s material actions have often been decidedly less woman-friendly, starting with the war on teachers — disproportionately black women — she conducted in Arkansas; running through her service on the board of Walmart, a notoriously sexist operation, about which she said nothing; and continuing through her support of welfare reform, an abomination that deserves more than a grudging sentence of concession for having driven millions of women and children into poverty. (She called welfare recipients “deadbeats,” for God’s sake. See here for that and several other luscious quotes on the topic.)