Sunday, October 26, 2008

"What Sarah Palin Taught Us" and Hillary in 2012

Many of us seem to be on a roll these days - the roll being calling out the degrading treatment of women by the Democratic Party. Yet, those loyal female Democrats are all too willing to accept this treatment, and vote for The One who stole this nomination from Hillary Clinton, aided and abetted by the DNC. I urge you to read Uppity Woman's OUTSTANDING piece, "Sisters! Remember Then And Do Not Forget Now. Or Pay The Price," at both her site and No Quarter. Uppity Woman tells it like it is, and in this post, beseeches women to open our eyes. I could not agree more.

It seems that others are noticing the rampant sexism/misogyny, and the hypocrisy of the "liberal elite" when it comes to who can be a feminist or not. Victor David Hanson would be one such person in his article,
An Instructive Candidacy
: What Sarah Palin taught us about ourselves. In his excellent piece, parts of which are excerpted here, Mr. Hanson takes on not just the Feminist Police, but the journalists who have been "reporting" during this campaign season:
Soon this depressing campaign will be over, and we can reflect on what we learned from our two-month introduction to Sarah Palin.

Clearly, it is more than we would have ever wished to know about ourselves.

First, there turns out to be no standard of objectivity in contemporary journalism. Palin’s career as a city councilwoman, mayor, and governor of Alaska was never seen as comparable to, or — indeed, in terms of executive experience — more extensive than, Barack Obama’s own legislative background in Illinois and Washington. Somehow we forgot that a mother of five taking on the Alaskan oil industry and the entrenched male hierarchy was somewhat more challenging than Barack Obama navigating the sympathetic left-wing identity politics of Chicago.

Well, true that. Everyone seems to have convenient amnesia when it comes to the accomplishments of the Governor of Alaska. Far too often, I have seen letters to the editor or comments at blogs claiming she is "just a mother of five." No, she is that, which is no small thing, by the way, to which my mother can attest, but she is One of FIFTY governors in the entire United States, with the highest approval rating of any governor, as well as one who has taken on her own party, and WON, thank you so much.

But I digress:
So we seem to have forgotten that the standards of censure of her vice-presidential candidacy were not applied equally to the presidential campaign of Barack Obama. The media at times seems unaware of this embarrassment, namely that their condemnation of Sarah Palin as inexperienced equally might apply to Barack Obama — and to such a degree that by default we were offered the lame apology (reiterated by Colin Powell himself) that Obama’s current impressive campaigning, not his meager political accomplishments, was already an indication of a successful tenure as president. The result is that we now know more about the Palin pregnancies — both of mother and daughter — that we do the relationships of Tony Rezko, Bill Ayers, Reverend Wright, and Father Pfleger with our possible next president.

No FREAKIN' KIDDING! Obama hasn't had a tenth of the vetting in eighteen months that Palin has had in two months - nice that some people are keeping score here. Hanson continues:
Indeed, the media itself — in private, I think — would admit that while (we? they?) have learned almost everything about Tasergate and the Bridge to Nowhere, we assume that at some future date a publicity-starved, megalomaniac Rev. Wright will soon offer his post-election memoirs, detailing just how close he and a President Obama were. Or we will learn Barack Obama and Bill Ayers, as long-time friends, in fact, did communicate via phone and e-mail well after Ayers had told the world, about the time of 9/11, that he, like our present-terrorist enemies, likewise wished he had engaged in more bombing attacks against the United States government. And the media never wondered whether a Palin’s falling out with those who ran Alaska might have been more of a touchstone to character than Obama’s own falling in with those who ran Chicago.

Uh, yeah. For some reason, while still in the Primary season, the MSM were all too happy to do their level best to ignore anything to do with Wright. They downplayed the videos, believed Obama when he claimed he certainly didn't hold the same beliefs that Wright does even though his butt was in the pew in that church for over twenty years, and even though he called Wright his "uncle." Oh, no - we must take him at his word that he would NEVER believe in that hate mongering theology. Just like we are supposed to take him at his word about Bill Ayers, Domestic Terrorist-Who-Wishes-He-Had-Been-More-Successful! Never you mind that they have been hanging around with each other for the past 13 years, working together, living near each other, and handing out hundreds of thousands of dollars to promote Ayers' "unique" ideology to the youth of Chicago, through Wright, of course. Obama is such a straight shooter, naturally we must believe every word that escapes his lips, right?? Evidently.

And now is when we get to the issue of feminism:
Second, there does not seem to be much left of feminism any more. Of course, feminists once gave liberal pro-choice Bill Clinton a pass for his serial womanizing of vulnerable subordinates, and Oval Office antics with a young female intern. But they gave the game away entirely when they went after Gov. Palin for her looks, accent, pregnancies, and religion, culminating in assessments of her from being no real woman at all to an ingrate — piggy-backing on the pioneer work of self-acclaimed mavericks like themselves.

Feminism, it turns out, is no longer about equal opportunity and equal compensation, but, in fact, little more than a strain of contemporary elitist identity politics, and support for unquestioned abortion. Had Gov. Sarah Palin just been a mother of a single child at Vassar rather than of five in Alaska, married to a novelist rather than a snow-machiner, an advocate of pro-choice, who shot pictures of Alaskan ferns rather than shot moose — feminists would have hailed her as a principled kindred soul, and trumpeted her struggles against Alaskan male grandees.

So there was something creepy about droves of irate women, in lock-step blasting Sarah Palin from the corridors of New York and Washington, when most of them were the recipients of the traditional spoils of either family connections, inherited money, or the advantages that accrue from insider power marriages. Indeed, very few of Palin’s critics on their own could have emerged from a small-town in Alaska, with an intact marriage and five children, to run the state of Alaska.

We have come to understand that — for a TV anchorwoman, op-ed columnist, or professor — it would be a nightmare to birth a Down Syndrome child in her mid-forties, or to have had her pregnant unwed teen actually deliver her baby. In the world outside Sarah Palin’s Wasilla, these are career-ending blunders that abort the next job promotion or book tour— or the future career of a prepped young daughter on her way to the Ivy League.

Right? I've known people who couldn't endure the stress of their partner getting a PhD., for cryin' out loud, much less the stress of moving from one level of government to another with five kids, one of whom is a Special Needs child. Add to that the lack of support from her own party in doing these things, and you got yourself some stress. Which Sarah Palin has handled with seeming ease, a feat that should have been CELEBRATED by feminists, not ridiculed.

Hanson then takes on the whole Biden v. Palin contest:
Third, from the match-up of Joe Biden and Sarah Palin, we discovered that our media does not know anything about the nature of wisdom — how it is found or how it is to be adjudicated. For the last eight weeks, Palin has been demonized as a dunce because she did not, in the fashion of the class toady with his hand constantly up in the first row, impress in flash-card recall, the glasses-on-his-nose Charlie Gibson, or clinched-toothed Katie Couric.

Meanwhile Joe Biden has just been Ol’ Joe Biden — which means not that he can get away with the occasional gaffe, but that can say things so outrageous, so silly, and so empty that, had they come out of the mouth of Sarah Palin, she would have long ago been forced to have stepped aside from the ticket.

Factual knowledge? Biden, in the midst of a financial meltdown on Wall Street, apparently thinks that the last time it happened in 1929, we heard FDR rally us on television. And such made-up nonsense came in the form, as many of Biden’s gaffes do, of a rebuke to the supposedly obtuse George W. Bush...

Amazingly, very, very little is made of either Biden's OR Obama's gaffes, though BOTH of them have PLENTY. Had Clinton, or McCain, or Palin, or anyone else made the factual inaccuracies or flat out lies that either of these men have made, they would be running across the bottom of your screen for days on end. But Biden and Obama? Hahaha, they made a mistake, move along, nothing to see here. Sheesh. Here are just a few for you:
Silliness? Imagine the following outbursts, mutatis mutandis, from the mouth of a Sarah Palin — “John McAmerica,” “a Palin-McCain administration,” “Senator George Obama,” “Congressman Joe Biden,” who is both “good looking,” and “drop-dead gorgeous.” Or “I guarantee you, John McCain ain’t taking my shotguns. . . . If he tries to fool with my Beretta, he’s got a problem. I like that little over and under, you know? I’m not bad with it. So give me a break.”

Or “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” Or “Mitt Romney is as qualified or more qualified than I am to be vice president of the United States of America. Quite frankly he might have been a better pick than me.”

Holy toledo. Reversing the positions helps to highlight just how absurd all of this has been...I agree with the following assessment:
The list could go on ad nauseam. But we got the picture. Biden has devolved from the ridiculous to the unhinged, confident that in-house journalism would understand that the law graduate with 36 years in the Senate was simply being Joe, while a Sarah Palin, who flinched when asked to parse the Bush Doctrine, was a Neanderthal creationist. I thought by now the You-tubed exchange of a Congressional Finance Committee hearing between the pompous Harvard Law School graduate Barney Frank and the conniving Harvard Law School graduate Franklin Raines — at the proverbial moment of conception of the financial meltdown — would have put to rest the notion that graduation from law school was any proof of either wisdom or morality.

I don’t know whether Sarah Palin would make a great vice president. But I did learn that by the standard of John Kerry’s pick of John Edwards, and now Barack Obama’s choice of Joe Biden, as running mates, she is wise and ethical beyond their measure.

— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

He's got a point, don't you think?

And in conclusion, while looking for videos for something else, I stumbled upon the following video. From this person's lips to the powers-that-be in the universe:

2 comments:

Pat R said...

If Palin runs for President in 2012, at least she has name recognition going for her... but that may not work in her favor

Rabble Rouser Reverend Amy said...

Hey -

I guess it all depends on how she handles these post-election smears. People who briefed her are now coming out saying these anonymous sources are flat out lying, so maybe that will get traction, who knows?

The rumor mill has it that it's Romney trying to make sure HE is at the top of the ticket next time. Who knows? I just know it is blatantly misogynistic, especially if you look at the words that they use to describe her. Disgusting.

And if Hillary DOES run again in 2012, she already has my vote, so there's that. By then, the people who honestly think Obama is going to pay their mortgage and buy their gas may be a bit disillusioned...