Sarah Palin vs the Sexist and Racist Left

Ours is a culture obsessed with physical beauty. Media consultant Karen Northon writes that in politics, this obsession results in a diversion away from the real issues. While it has long been part of American politics, it has never been so prominent a factor in national elections as it was in 2008, when the American media obsessed over Sarah Palin's physical attractiveness and virtually ignored her accomplishments as a politician. Things were somewhat different nearly fifty years ago:

Not since the days of John F. Kennedy’s campaign has a candidate’s physical appeal played such a central role in the race for president. Even then, however, mainstream media did manage to avoid the easy, salacious diversion from the issues — primarily Cuba, the space program, and the economy. There were, in news coverage, occasional and brief allusions to his charm and good looks, and those of his wife Jacqueline. But it was never the central focus of coverage.

Flash forward to the 2008 race for the White House. Opinion coverage in mainstream media — as I hesitate to call it news coverage — was sounding more and more like conversations you’d hear at a frat party.

Although Palin's executive experience as both a mayor and a governor was a sharp contrast to Obama's mostly legislative experience, the press was loathe to mention it. Instead the media hammered away at Palin's rather brief time as a beauty queen and strongly implied that the Alaska governor was so blessed with beauty that she must have been short changed in the brains department. Feminists, argues Nortron, should have pounded the media on that score, but they remained silent:

Whether or not we women agree with her politics, we should all agree that rather than examining Palin as a political candidate, mainstream media morphed into a gaggle of horny frat boys and failed the American people in the 2008 election.

But instead of pounding the media for its sexism, the feminists pounded Sarah Palin for her conservatism. According to The Daley Gator, if Sarah Palin had espoused liberal views rather than conservative ones, liberals would have embraced her:

You see, Palin is the clearest example of the Left’s tactics, which I think should be called victim pimping. Sarah Palin could have, had she chosen a different path, a shining star of the Left. Young, charismatic, good looking, Sarah would be a valuable commodity to the Left. If only she had toed the Leftist lines of proper ideological conduct.

Instead, liberals have attacked Palin like no other conservative has been attacked since Ronald Reagan nearly thirty years ago:

Now, we see reports of how Leftist bloggers are making up stories about Palin’s impending divorce, an affair with Newt Gingrich, or how she is really Barry Goldwater brought back to life, by Dick Cheney, or whatever other BS story these pinheads want to dream up. Oh, yes, I know, they have “sources”, so they MUST be telling the truth! Again, truth? Who needs that! The goal is the destruction of Sarah Palin here.

All of this illustrates how it is the Left that is sexist, and racist. It is they who seek to compel group-think upon minorities. It is they who wish to enslave monorities to eternal victimhood. And it is the Left that loathes anyone who dares to think for themselves.

Tennessee Guerilla Women is one of the all-too-rare feminist websites that makes its leftist politics secondary to the battle to end sexism, for which we believe they deserve some credit. TGW recently slammed fellow liberal site Democratic Underground for reporting unsubstantiated gossip about alleged trouble in Palin's marriage and then treating it like it was a cause for celebration:

Women left DU in droves last year while the sexists droned on and on about the first ever viable bit*h candidate for the presidency. Now the misogyny directed at Hillary has been replaced by the misogyny directed at Sarah Palin, and DU continues to look like a good old lowlife sexist cowboy forum.

As Texans, we feel we must point out to the good Guerilla Women that cowboys don't refer to women as "bit*hes" or obsess about their private parts. Word must not have reached Tennessee yet that cowboys are still the good guys, and they treat women with a degree of respect that females have never seen from the beta male leftists that liberal women tend to associate with. TGW can't seem to tell the difference between cowboys and frat boys, but at least they got part of it right.

Wish we could say the same for Natalie Holder-Winfield, an employment lawyer who has an op-ed up at HuffPo whining about white women, whom she believes get breaks in the workplace that women of color do not. While she may have a point, she steps all over it with her strange reaction to creepy Denny Deutsch and his misogynistic treatment of Sarah Palin:

This morning, on MSNBC's Morning Joe, Donny Deutsch was a guest-anchor turned into mush. A man who just a month ago accused Palin of "manufactured outrage" during the Letterman debacle and criticized her for parading her family around during the 2008 presidential election, had a change of heart. No, Palin has not defected and become a Democrat, nor has she become more scholarly and well-reasoned in her discourse about government. Instead, it was a little rumor about Palin's pending divorce that turned Donny into a junior-high school boy with a crush. He expressed -- a number of times -- that he was going to cease with the aspersions and criticisms (despite how dead-on they are) because he would like a date with Palin.

No, it's not sexism that bothers Holder-Winfield. It's all about playing the race card on the first hand of the deal with her. We wonder if she would feel better about Donny Deutsch if he had hit on a married black women rather than a married white one? Would it have been okay with Holder-Winfield if Deutsch had said that he would like a date with Michelle Obama if she and the president ever decide to call it quits? We also wonder where in the dickens Arianna Huffington finds the clueless caliber of writers that are responsible for the majority of her website's material.

- JP