Andrew Breitbart takes on the elitist media, specifically the three female “feminists” who have been on the trash Sarah bandwagon from the beginning, and he does it with gusto:
What a shock that Maureen Dowd devoted her New York Times column Sunday to attack Sarah Palin. It did not so much criticize Alaska’s governor for prematurely stepping down from her official duties as to finish off what sister snipers Katie Couric and Tina Fey began last fall.
The assassination of Sarah Palin – by media.
For those who didn’t pay attention, Mrs. Palin’s unexpected stratospheric rise as a national political figure threatened the media’s preordained presidency of Barack Obama.
In light of how the Obama machine took down Hillary Clinton, which unsettled many feminists who believed 2008 was their time, many who saw sexism at play – the destruction of an ascendant Republican female icon was an urgent imperative for the Democratic Party.
~~~Misses Dowd, Couric and Fey – Mr. Obama’s Angels (featuring Joy Behar in the role of “Bosley”) – used a potent mix of mockery, snobbery and vitriol to undermine Mrs. Palin’s feminist bona fides.
They are what my wife calls “pad throwers,” an allusion to the shower room scene in the Stephen King film “Carrie,” in which the popular girls throw sanitary napkins and tampons at the film’s namesake.
Simply put, they are bullies. And female bullies – “Mean Girls” as Miss Fey’s film calls them – are the cruelest kind.
Primarily motivated by a desire to keep abortion “safe, legal and rare,” female liberals in the media have carte blanche to do and say anything.
But since Mrs. Palin, a mother of five including a boy who was known to have Down syndrome before he was born, is a potent symbol of the pro-life movement, which means the female Alaska governor can’t have it.
Miss Dowd’s attempted takedown of Mrs. Palin is less skillful surgery than it is name calling using fun noun and adjective pairings. Think “Mad Libs.” And, that’s exactly what Misses Dowd, Couric and Fey are. Once the ladies did their job, liberal men like Jon Stewart and David Letterman had the cover to join the hate campaign.
While Mrs. Palin is at ease with her gender, as well as her place in the workplace and at home, Misses Dowd, Couric and Fey convey a base insecurity in their feminine skin. Their rage is fueled by liberalism’s false feminist dogma and they take it out on a woman who chose not to join their angry sorority.
The governor of Alaska’s compelling narrative – athlete, beauty queen, wife, mother, hunter, successful politician – shows adherents of narrow leftist dogma that, perhaps, women really can have it all. Most importantly: freedom of thought.
In calling Alaska’s governor “Caribou Barbie,” Miss Dowd used beauty as a weapon to diminish Mrs. Palin’s achievements. A man would be reprimanded for this, but Miss Dowd is a Pulitzer Prize-winning pad thrower and is licensed for such vindictive pettiness.
“Caribou,” of course, is a stab at Mrs. Palin’s backwater, Red State ways, attacks on which an Upper Westside liberal snob can never get enough. Miss Dowd goes on to ridicule “Sarah’s country-music melodramas.” This is her barely veiled attempt to call Mrs. Palin “white trash.” And this has been the loathsome subtext of all media criticism of the Palins. They even went after their children. Mercilessly.
And Mrs. Palin during the Letterman saga finally cried, “Enough!”
Exposed in the relentless Palin attacks is not just political bias, but unmitigated class bias.
I know the readers understand why I put feminists into quotations above because there is no way, no how, someone who is a real feminist would throw such insults at a female who is strong, independent, and successful. But the feminist movement has always been a leftist breeding ground, or has been as long as I’ve been alive. It’s not women rights they cherish, but the liberal ideology.
But there are still a few sane feminists out there and I happened upon one recently. Violet at The Reclusive Leftist (h/t Brutally Honest). I know her and I would disagree on much, but on this subject it appears we agree…or agree on having no answer why they hate Sarah so:
I don’t usually comment on other blogs; I have little enough time to keep my own gig in working order. But the other day I was over at I Blame The Patriarchy, where I was dismayed to find in the comment threads some of the same Palin-bashing that has become drearily familiar from the rest of the inner tubes. Now, IBTP is just about the best feminist blog going, with a genius proprietor and a thoughtful commentariat. Hence my dismay. Even here? I thought. Fortunately, some of the commenters there did try to set the record straight, though they got significant guff from others.
This is the comment I left, which I’m dragging back here to the smoking lounge for your perusal (the first bit in italics is a quote from Jill):
“Mang, when I wrote this post, I sure never expected it would result in blamer support for a skeevy antifeminist politician.”
It seems that some blamers know that the bullshit published about Palin (and unfortunately repeated here) was just that — bullshit. Palin considers herself a feminist, and except for the abortion thing, she’s more explicitly feminist than the average American. When a regular Jane with that kind of background proclaims her feminist sympathies, it doesn’t seem terribly productive to ridicule her or indulge in the misogynist slander put out by the political hacks running against her. I mean, sure, by the standards of pure feminism, she’s an enabling godbag. But so are most American women. On the other hand, by the standards of the Republican Party or evangelical Christianity, she’s Twisty Faster.
Pheenobarbidoll responded that abortion rights are a cornerstone too important to overlook, to which I replied:
Abortion rights are important. But it’s interesting that Hugo Schwyzer, a male “pro-life” feminist and former member of and financial contributor to Feminists For Life, is allowed into the feminist community. He even blogs at RH Reality Check, and has been befriended by Amanda Marcotte.
Schwyzer’s awkward pro-feminist/anti-abortion stance is the same as Sarah Palin’s, yet only Palin is reviled and ridiculed. How dare she call herself a feminist!
Someone else then loftily announced that Palin cannot be a feminist since she “believes in keeping children ignorant of the facts of their reproductive rights and responsibilities.” To which I replied:
She doesn’t believe that. She’s fully in favor of sex ed and contraception.
I imagine you consider yourself a feminist. What I’m wondering is why, if you’re a feminist, you don’t even give Palin the courtesy of finding out what she actually believes, rather than simply accepting the lies created by political hacks? This is bizarre to me. It’s really not difficult to google and discover that Sarah Palin is in favor of contraception and sex ed, that the whole “abstinence-only” thing is a smear spread by Obama supporters.
It’s a bit weird to drag all this back here to the lounge, but it’s the setup for the giant, rambling brain dump that’s about to follow. Sarah Palin’s surprise resignation has brought out the crazy again, and reading through the blogs I’m reminded of how much pure bullshit has been said and believed about her and continues to be said and believed. I’m reminded of how so many feminists seem possessed of a wholly irrational hatred for this woman.
Why?
This isn’t going to be the kind of post where I sketch out a pattern and then give you The Key To Understanding It All. This is going to be more like a stream-of-consciousness tiptoe through the violets of my reclusive thought processes. I’ve been puzzling over this stuff since last August. One reason I’ve written as many posts as I have about Palin is because I’m so baffled by the reaction to her. I can’t figure it out. It’s like quantum entanglement or dark energy: I make myself sick trying to understand it and worry that I’ll die before I get it sorted. (I know: Xanax.)
Of course, the first answer you’ll get if you ask feminists why they hate Sarah Palin is that “it’s because she ____” — and then fill in the blank with the lie of choice: made rape victims pay for their own kits, is against contraception or sex ed, believes in abstinence-only, thinks the dinosaurs were here 4000 years ago, doesn’t believe in global warming, doesn’t believe in evolution, is stupid and can’t read, etc., etc., etc., etc.
But none of those things is true. None of them.
Which brings me to my first puzzlement: why don’t people bother to find out what Sarah Palin really believes? I don’t mean people as in the usual sexist freaks; I mean feminists.
Sarah Palin is only the second woman in the history of this country to run on a major party’s presidential ticket. That alone makes her, to me, a fascinating figure worthy of serious investigation. When McCain announced Palin as his choice for VP, I immediately tried to find out as much about her as I could. I wanted to know who she was, what she believed, what her politics were. It never occurred to me that this interest would make me in any way unusual among feminists, but apparently it did. Apparently most feminists — at least the ones online — are content to just take the word of the frat boys at DailyKos or the psycho-sexists at Huffington Post. That amazes me. Aren’t you even interested in who she really is? I want to ask. She’s only the second woman on a presidential ticket in our whole fricking history!
But even weirder is what happens when you try to replace the myths with the truth. If you explain, “no, she didn’t charge rape victims,” your feminist interlocutor will come back with something else: “she’s abstinence-only!” No, you say, she’s not; and then the person comes back with, “she’s a creationist!” and so on. “She’s an uneducated moron!” Actually, Sarah Palin is not dumb at all, and based on her interviews and comments, I’d say she has a greater knowledge of evolution, global warming, and the Wisconsin glaciation in Alaska than the average citizen.
But after you’ve had a few of these myth-dispelling conversations, you start to realize that it doesn’t matter. These people don’t hate Palin because of the lies; the lies exist to justify the hate. That’s why they keep reaching and reaching for something else, until they finally get to “she winked on TV!” (And by the way: I’ve been winked at my whole life by my grandmother, aunts, and great-aunts. Who knew it was such a despicable act?)
It’s much longer then I have quoted above, so read the whole thing. Violet may be horrified that a conservative blog would quote her approvingly seeing as how we are on the opposite political spectrum (her fans can be assured we still disagree on much), but I am just as confused as she is about why a true feminist like Sarah Palin can be drawn and quartered by those who purport to be feminists.
One last quote from Violet:
it has not escaped my attention that many of the things Palin is accused of, falsely, are actually true of Obama. This is a guy who, as a U.S. senator from Illinois, didn’t even know which Senate committees he was on or which states bordered his own. (And don’t even get me started on Joe “The Talking Donkey” Biden, who thinks FDR was president during the stock market crash and that people watched TV in those days.) I’m not saying Obama’s a moron, but he’s sure as hell no genius. People say Sarah Palin rambles; excuse me, but have you actually heard Obama speak extemporaneously? As for being a diva, surely we all remember the Possomus sign and the special embroidered pillow on the Obama campaign plane. The fact is, Obama is an intellectually mediocre narcissist with a thin resume who’s lost without a teleprompter and whose entire campaign had all the substance and gravity of a Pepsi commercial. Yet people say Sarah Palin is a fluffy bunny diva.
Hit the nail on the freakin head there.
Myself, I believe it comes down to the liberal, leftist, ideology trumping feminism. Because any honest feminist would be proud of Sarah…..it appears there are very few honest feminists unfortunately.
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