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Home Front: Politix

Dupe entry: Palin: wrong woman, wrong message Sarah Palin shares nothing but a chromosome with Hillary

2008-09-04

Here's the good news: Women have become so politically powerful that even the anti-feminist right wing -- the folks with a headlock on the Republican Party -- are trying to appease the gender gap with a first-ever female vice president. We owe this to women -- and to many men too -- who have picketed, gone on hunger strikes or confronted violence at the polls so women can vote. We owe it to Shirley Chisholm, who first took the "white-male-only" sign off the White House, and to Hillary Rodham Clinton, who hung in there through ridicule and misogyny to win 18 million votes.

But here is even better news: It won't work. This isn't the first time a boss has picked an unqualified woman just because she agrees with him and opposes everything most other women want and need. Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It's about making life more fair for women everywhere. It's not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It's about baking a new pie.
That's your outdated, 20th century vision of feminism. What makes you so sure feminism has not passed you by?

Feminism isn't allowed to change. Women are all about diversity so long as they're all the same.

Selecting Sarah Palin, who was touted all summer by Rush Limbaugh, is no way to attract most women, including die-hard Clinton supporters. Palin shares nothing but a chromosome with Clinton. Her down-home, divisive and deceptive speech did nothing to cosmeticize a Republican convention that has more than twice as many male delegates as female, a presidential candidate who is owned and operated by the right wing Hello?? Maverik McCain is only the most liberal candidate Republicans could offer! and a platform that opposes pretty much everything Clinton's candidacy stood for -- and that Barack Obama's still does. To vote in protest for McCain/Palin would be like saying, "Somebody stole my shoes, so I'll amputate my legs."
She has no clue who Sarah Palin is, and what she stands for other than her than what she has been told by here apparatchik operatives.

I think Steinem knows precisely who Sarah Palin is, and that's why she's frightened. Sarah Palin is the new feminist: she doesn't whine for respect, she earns it.

This is not to beat up on Palin.

No, no, certainly not.

I defend her right to be wrong, even on issues that matter most to me. I regret that people say she can't do the job because she has children in need of care, especially if they wouldn't say the same about a father. I get no pleasure from imagining her in the spotlight on national and foreign policy issues about which she has zero background, She was the governor of a state that's right next to RUSSIA. with one month to learn to compete with Sen. Joe Biden's 37 years' experience.
You freakin Liberal hypocrite.

This argument is too easy to flip. Sure, Joe has 37 years experience: how many times has he been wrong? Just in recent history, he was wrong about the surge, wrong about the war on terrorism, wrong about surveillance, and wrong on Gitmo. Page through Joe's statements over the years and you'll find a lightweight who isn't taken seriously by most foreign policy experts, even in his own party.

Palin has been honest about what she doesn't know. When asked last month about the vice presidency, she said, "I still can't answer that question until someone answers for me: What is it exactly that the VP does every day?" When asked about Iraq, she said, "I haven't really focused much on the war in Iraq."

She was elected governor largely because the incumbent was unpopular, ...

Why was that, Gloria? Why was Frank Murkowski unpopular? Could it be because he saw political office the way so many in the the elite class does, as a way to enrich himself, his family and his friends? Where 'the people' were thought of as secondary when they were thought of at all? Frank Murkowski appointed his own daughter to the U.S. Senate and then wondered why Sarah Palin went after him. He didn't have a clue, and neither does Gloria.

...and she's won over Alaskans mostly by using unprecedented oil wealth to give a $1,200 rebate to every resident. Now she is being praised by McCain's campaign as a tax cutter, despite the fact that Alaska has no state income or sales tax. Perhaps McCain has opposed affirmative action for so long that he doesn't know it's about inviting more people to meet standards, not lowering them.

That's just rich coming from Gloria Steinem. Affirmative action has been all about the surreptitious lowering of standards. Ask any college admissions officer.

Or perhaps McCain is following the Bush administration habit, as in the Justice Department, of putting a job candidate's views on "God, guns and gays" ahead of competence. The difference is that McCain is filling a job one 72-year-old heartbeat away from the presidency.
Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter, you hypocrite.

Once again, a liberal dares to call Palin 'unqualified' without explaining how that label can't apply to Barack Obama.

So let's be clear: The culprit is John McCain. He may have chosen Palin out of change-envy, or a belief that women can't tell the difference between form and content, but the main motive was to please right-wing ideologues; the same ones who nixed anyone who is now or ever has been a supporter of reproductive freedom. If that were not the case, McCain could have chosen a woman who knows what a vice president does and who has thought about Iraq; someone like Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison or Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine. McCain could have taken a baby step away from right-wing patriarchs who determine his actions, right down to opposing the Violence Against Women Act.
So let's be clear, if she was a lesbian, atheist, anti-gun, eco-nazi Code-Pink veggan, you would like her, huh?

Hutchison wouldn't have energized the party. Snowe would have caused a revolt. And to be clear, had McCain chosen either Ms. Steinem's message today would be the same.

Palin's value to those patriarchs is clear: She opposes just about every issue that women support by a majority or plurality. She believes that creationism should be taught in public schools but disbelieves global warming; she opposes gun control but supports government control of women's wombs; she opposes stem cell research but approves "abstinence-only" programs, which increase unwanted births, sexually transmitted diseases and abortions; she tried to use taxpayers' millions for a state program to shoot wolves from the air but didn't spend enough money to fix a state school system with the lowest high-school graduation rate in the nation; she runs with a candidate who opposes the Fair Pay Act but supports $500 million in subsidies for a natural gas pipeline across Alaska; she supports drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, though even McCain has opted for the lesser evil of offshore drilling. She is Phyllis Schlafly, only younger.
You don't even know where ANWR is let alone where and how much they propose to drill, you arrogant tool.
I don't doubt her sincerity. As a lifetime member of the National Rifle Assn., she doesn't just support killing animals from helicopters, she does it herself. She doesn't just talk about increasing the use of fossil fuels but puts a coal-burning power plant in her own small town. She doesn't just echo McCain's pledge to criminalize abortion by overturning Roe vs. Wade, she says that if one of her daughters were impregnated by rape or incest, she should bear the child. She not only opposes reproductive freedom as a human right but implies that it dictates abortion, without saying that it also protects the right to have a child.

So far, the major new McCain supporter that Palin has attracted is James Dobson of Focus on the Family. Of course, for Dobson, "women are merely waiting for their husbands to assume leadership," so he may be voting for Palin's husband.

Being a hope-a-holic, however, I can see two long-term bipartisan gains from this contest.

Republicans may learn they can't appeal to right-wing patriarchs and most women at the same time. A loss in November could cause the centrist majority of Republicans to take back their party, which was the first to support the Equal Rights Amendment and should be the last to want to invite government into the wombs of women.

And American women, who suffer more because of having two full-time jobs than from any other single injustice, finally have support on a national stage from male leaders who know that women can't be equal outside the home until men are equal in it. Barack Obama and Joe Biden are campaigning on their belief that men should be, can be and want to be at home for their children.

This could be huge.
Not as huge as your ego, and what you do not know about Palin and Alaska.

Posted by:anymouse

#8 Ummm - didn't she run against a Democrat to win the governorship?

Posted by: anonymous2u 2008-09-04 20:51

#7 I think it's still an open question whether she shares a chromosome with Hillary.

Posted by: JohnQC 2008-09-04 17:25

#6 She was elected governor largely because the incumbent was unpopular,

Umm, yeah, isn't that how challengers usually beat incumbents?

Damn that democratic process!

Posted by: charger 2008-09-04 15:10

#5 I can do it for you, Aris.

An unborn baby, even one concieved in an act of violence, is a unique and totally innocent human life. It is always and everywhere immoral to directly and deliberately kill an innocent person.

I'm all for hanging the rapist, and for providing the lady every aid and comfort. However, killing the baby does not punish the guilty, nor comfort the victim.

There's an article in a back issue of Envoy Magazine which I don't have time to drill down to, written by a nun in Bosnia who was raped and impregnated, which explains this better than I eevr will. Suggest you go read it.

Posted by: Mike 2008-09-04 14:17

#4 Actually, it's quite easy, Aris: why murder a baby because it's father committed a crime? Two wrongs don't make a right.

Posted by: Spot 2008-09-04 14:06

#3 In case of Greek too.

Posted by: .5MT 2008-09-04 14:01

#2 Perhaps Sarah will be able to explain her views on Roe v. Wade better than other speakers.

Posted by: Bobby 2008-09-04 13:39

#1 Sarah Palin shares nothing but a chromosome with Hillary

Poor Hillary.

Posted by: Mike 2008-09-04 13:14

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