National Review Online editor Kathryn Jean Lopez is usually found mooning over dreamy, but married men such as Mitt (shoulders you can land a 747 on) Romney, and George W. (choked on a pretzel) Bush (or, when she really wants a challenge, confirmed bachelors like Pope Benedict), while telling other women to start having babies and stop having sex. But in her Townhall column this week, Ko-Lo blazes a trail through new and unexplored wastelands of rejection with a fawning, seductive tribute to Sarah Palin, in an apparent effort to stir up some hot prude-on-gal action.
When Sarah Palin speaks, liberal feminists go wild.
Really? I ask because recently I had drinks with several women who could be described as “liberal feminists,” and when Sarah Palin appeared on the television, and not a single one of them drizzled beer on her t-shirt, whipped her bra over her head like a lariat, or danced on the table, with or without underwear. Next time I should probably turn the sound up a little more.
The woman is like a stilettoed catalyst for backlash from the professional political sisterhood.
The simile is like a Mason jar for backwash from a woman who likes to rinse and spit.
Much of the bitterness that gushes forth from the lefty ladies has very little to do with Palin herself.
As seen in the latest release from National Review’s line of Porn for Conservatives: Socialist Squirters #4: Lefty Ladies Lugubriously Lap Laissez Faire Lubrication.
It’s about many of the things she represents:
Greed, rank opportunism, and a non-stick-to-itiveness that suggests she sprays on Pam as a sunblock.
She’s a happy mom, surrounded by a big family and husband; she’s pro-life, religious and conservative; and, lest we forget, a political powerhouse the likes of which has not been seen for decades.
You’d have to reach all the way back to Lonesome Rhodes. So let’s tally up her powerful political achievements: she was trounced in her one national campaign, and quit halfway through her term as governor of a remote, sparsely populated state. But her time as pageant royalty technically counts as executive experience under a constitutional monarchy, so if you throw that in, then she’s about ready for her diamond jubilee.
Palin talked about “a new revival of that original feminism of Susan B. Anthony.” She said, “Together, we’re showing young women that being pro-life is in keeping with the best traditions of the women’s movement.”
The tradition of spending decades struggling for a basic and hard-won right, so that subsequent generations of women can spend more decades chiseling away at it.
Palin talked about “empowering women,” and in her worldview that translates into making sure women know that they have options when they are pregnant in “less-than-ideal circumstances.”
Those options include “having the baby” and “having the baby,” unless the pregnancy threatens your life, in which case you have the option of “getting a nun excommunicated.”
In the rhetoric and reality of the liberal feminist movement from which a comment like that is born, freedom doesn’t extend to the unborn child. Increasingly, Americans are not tolerating this. In the tradition of the suffragettes, women, increasingly, will have none of it.
Well, they’ll have abortions, but they’ll pay for them with Susan B. Anthony dollar coins, which will heroically slow things down at check out, and make it a real pain in the ass for whoever has to go to the bank on Friday.
And so I understand why women of the left react early and often to Palin. It’s not about her, it’s about the threat to their power she represents. They’ve based so much of their political activism on the tenets of the sexual revolution, which have been such a disaster for women, men, children, and families.
Yeah, I love getting advice on my driving from someone who decided to ride in the trunk.
But the jig is up. It didn’t fly with the likes of Anthony and Stanton. And it’s increasingly not flying now. It’s not the pro-lifers who went rogue in the first place.
I thought going rogue was a good thing, something worth paying stylists, branding consultants and ghostwriters a lot of (your publisher’s) money. But then I read the asterisked disclaimer:
The two things which probably have surprised me most over the course of my life are 1) the fact that crappy, intelligence-insulting advertising continues to sell crappy, intelligence-insulting products fifty years after television first irradiated the nation’s living rooms with it for eight hours plus per day; and 2) that right-wing/High Church apologetics still take off from the utterly fabulous and then start lying. (Which, by the way, is more delusional: armies of feminists “embittered” by every Palin speaking engagement, or Sarah Palin, happy hausfrau and political juggernaut?) It’s the same shit I used to get every morning on the editorial pages of Gene Pulliam’s Indianapolis Birch Society Morning News in the Sixties: perpetual outrage that one’s political opponents were always being disagreeable.
As they worked to demonstrate that Anthony was indifferent on abortion, the Palin critics managed to conveniently skip over the other suffragettes and their writings in newspapers and letters.
Oh, yeah. Just like all the people complaining about BP never mention that none of Shell’s platforms is gushing oil. Beyond the nominative, I mean.
Left by Doghouse Riley on May 26th, 2010