timeimmortal

At least, I think that’s the gist of what George Jonas is getting at in his latest article. And not just establishment feminists either, who are obviously threatened that a woman who has risen as high, and as quickly, as Sarah Palin has could possibly have had five kids along the way, and who are disgusted and vexed by the thought that any woman of achievement could possibly espouse a pro-life viewpoint.

The word “insult” recurs, and not only on my phone messages. As noted by The Weekly Standard’s Noemie Emery, “insulting” is the word of choice for The New Republic’s Michelle Cottle, the Newsweek/Washington Post blog’s Sally Quinn, as well as for The Baltimore Sun’s Susan Reimer and The Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus. Why “insulting”? Here’s one obvious reason. The sickening speed with which the moose-hunting ex-mayor of Wasilla passed everyone in the queue for Queen Bee made a mockery of any woman who wore out her contact lenses reading books that essentially bored her; or who gave up a sweet guy who wasn’t going places for a nerd or a windbag who was; or who planned her parenthood because a person couldn’t have it all; or one who had it all and could no longer fit into her Dolce & Gabbana.

“Why did I plan all those hideous dinner parties?” cry the subtext of my phone messages. “Why did I read all that Proust and Joyce? Why did I pretend that I had an interest in the Seychelles? Does she even know where the Seychelles are? I bet she doesn’t.

“Why did I make nice to that wet noodle from Yale? Why was I nasty to that great guy from Alaska? From Alaska, no less! Look where it got me. Three diplomas on the wall, and I’m not even on the A-list. No children — she has five — five! — and can still fit into her Ermenegildo Zegna, even if she can’t pronounce it.”

Dear ladies, thanks for calling. What can I say to ease your hurt? Not much. Remember, you can only prepare yourself for small things. Big ones are usually gifts. You can study business, but not how to be a captain of industry. Resign yourselves to the next inhabitant of the White House having an atrocious hairdo.

There is something in all this “she’s not the right kind of woman” commentary being levelled at Palin that, I think, is quite revealing. It is revealing of the inherent insecurities of many women who have, to one degree or another, bought into modern feminist myths. It is also revealing of just how empty a life modern feminism proposes to reward women with, and the way it has distorted the perceptions of many people about even something so normal and so essential as the propagation of the species to the next generation.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Just a quick question. If in a 2005 poll, it was discovered that more women than men — in the United States, Canada, and Britain — supported stricter abortion laws, and if modern leftist feminists argue that any measures to limit or tighten abortion laws are against the interests of women and “not what women want,” can it really be said that modern feminism speaks for modern women?

Responding to this article, reader Bob Devine sends in his thoughts on my (very low) opinion of Britain’s implementation of Sharia courts.

Short and to the point. Except for Margaret Thatcher and a couple more (only a couple) the rest of those left wing kooks over there deserve exactly what they are doing to themselves.

I’m not so sure I’m ready to write off the United Kingdom just yet, but I will agree whole-heartedly that affording Islamic law any kind of legal recognition, especially binding legal authority can only lead to trouble, and then a lot of it. Britain stands upon the edge of a knife.

As I noted then: the Left has been having a spastic fit over Sarah Palin’s nomination as John McCain’s running mate, and more than a few commentators have said — apparently without irony — that the nomination of Palin will set women back X number of years or downgrade their social status to that of “uterus with feet.”

Meanwhile, over in Britain, the social status of women is now actively being degraded in just that way with the implementation of these sharia courts. And do you think Heather Mallick and her ilk have uttered so much as a peep about this issue?

[cue crickets chirping]

Anyhow, Bob also offers his comments on this article, concerning the cultural emasculation of men that has become so very prominent in many Western societies.

Feminism has affected more than the men in our society. Here is a link to ProWomanProLife that shows how it can affect women also. http://www.prowomanprolife.org/?p=654

I am glad I grew up in the time period I did (born 1939) I really do not care for the direction society today seems to be heading.

I find I agree. Modern feminism — as evidenced in the very harsh treatment the daughter of feminist icon Alice Walker received from her own mother, after deciding to marry and have a child — has parted ways with the ideals that began the feminist movement, which were genuinely concerned with equality and equitability. What remains is a truly horrifying thing indeed, infused as it is with eugenic and censurious sentiments.

The little guy is still an infant still, but he has become the focal point for a lot of seething rage and hatred from various quarters of the Left. I just learned that Bill Maher — supposedly a funny man — has taken to referring to Trig as “it,” a rather hateful polemic. And then, of course, there is this cretinous website.

Why is this? Why all this rage and animosity directed toward a simple infant?

I think, at some level, seeing Trig Palin up there, loved by his siblings and celebrated simply for the fact of his being alive, fills many on the Left with shame. After all, the Left is caught up in a contradiction. While they obviously support the rights of the disabled, and cheer things like the Special Olympics, they also support a woman’s right to on-demand abortion for any reason whatsoever. And one very common reason for abortion is the discovery that the unborn baby is less than perfect, thanks to some manner of genetic defect .

90% of Down’s babies get aborted. Ninety percent! As Michael Gerson notes:

This is properly called eugenic abortion — the ending of “imperfect” lives to remove the social, economic and emotional costs of their existence. And this practice cannot be separated from the broader social treatment of people who have disabilities. By eliminating less perfect humans, deformity and disability become more pronounced and less acceptable. Those who escape the net of screening are often viewed as mistakes or burdens. A tragic choice becomes a presumption — “Didn’t you get an amnio?” — and then a prejudice. And this feeds a social Darwinism in which the stronger are regarded as better, the dependent are viewed as less valuable, and the weak must occasionally be culled.

Most pro-abortion/pro-choice sorts tend to shy away from the reality of that which they support, but it’s the ugly reality of abortion. In other countries around the world (and in North America to a certain extent as well), abortion is being used for a different, but no less ugly, eugenic purpose: the elimination of female children because of social pressures which give preference to male children. In India, Pakistan, China, and many other nations, the birth rate for boys is unnaturally higher than that of girls…and it’s not hard to fathom the reason why.

Indeed, only a handful of dedicatedly pro-choice people can honestly admit the ethical dilemma that supporting abortion presents. Camille Paglia is one of these, and her summary of the issue is at once revealing and damning:

But the pro-life position, whether or not it is based on religious orthodoxy, is more ethically highly evolved than my own tenet of unconstrained access to abortion on demand. My argument (as in my first book, “Sexual Personae,”) has always been that nature has a master plan pushing every species toward procreation and that it is our right and even obligation as rational human beings to defy nature’s fascism. Nature herself is a mass murderer, making casual, cruel experiments and condemning 10,000 to die so that one more fit will live and thrive.

Hence I have always frankly admitted that abortion is murder, the extermination of the powerless by the powerful. Liberals for the most part have shrunk from facing the ethical consequences of their embrace of abortion, which results in the annihilation of concrete individuals and not just clumps of insensate tissue. The state in my view has no authority whatever to intervene in the biological processes of any woman’s body, which nature has implanted there before birth and hence before that woman’s entrance into society and citizenship.

On the other hand, I support the death penalty for atrocious crimes (such as rape-murder or the murder of children). I have never understood the standard Democratic combo of support for abortion and yet opposition to the death penalty. Surely it is the guilty rather than the innocent who deserve execution?

Paglia also notes that there is both room, and a need, in modern feminism for the pro-life perspective, contrary to all the naysayers who are busily crucifying Sarah Palin — Trig’s mother — simply because she is unabashedly pro-life, in word and in action.

To which, Vox Day adds this analysis:

This was my position before I became a Christian. I always believed abortion was murder, but then, murder is the way of the world. This is why the feminist position has to hide behind a whole host of specious reasons that aren’t capable of standing up to even the most cursory examination — there is, for example, no such thing as a right to one’s body or the government would not collect DNA evidence — and why Democrats consistently lose on this issue. Nearly every left-liberal blog I’ve read since Palin was nominated has blathered on about how her pro-life stance politically dooms her, despite the fact that she has 80 percent approval ratings in Alaska. Since her pro-life position is presumably well known to Alaskans [and since we can probably assume, in safety, that Alaskans have a fairly normal distribution of political opinions, and that they are not abnormally right-leaning -- Ken], we can safely conclude that, as usual, these left-liberals have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about.

It is their guilty knowledge of their immorality when judged by traditional and historical standards that lies behind the drive of the Enlightenment 2.0 crowd to attempt creating a new and better moral system.

And it’s that same guilt that drives this fanatical hatred not only of Sarah Palin, but of baby Trig as well, and then perhaps even more viciously.

I think this also explains why 17-year old Bristol Palin took so much flack from the Left when it was revealed that she was pregnant and would a) be keeping the baby, and b) would be marrying the father, Levi Johnston. The Left expected Palin to “reveal her true colours” and to act as they themselves would; they expected Palin to be mortified. They hoped that she would either cave in and insist that Bristol abort the pregnancy, or else that she would withdraw herself and her family from the spotlight until the “mistake” had been born and its mother duly married off.

In other words, the Left hoped to expose Palin as either a hypocrite or a narrow-minded bigot where women’s sexuality was concerned (a little bit of projection there, methinks?).

But Palin didn’t do that, nor did her family. Nor did the Republicans — instead, they applauded Bristol’s decisions, applauded Bristol herself, and applauded her husband-to-be who had summoned the courage to “man up” and accept his responsibility for the child he fathered.

And the Left ended up looking like the misogynistic troglodytes that they have spent the last umpteen years warning us all that the Right is comprised of.

…when one considers that most of them seem to be concerned only about control of the vagina and uterus (and not zippers or skirts) as the fundamental rights of womyn. Someone who may potentially become the ideal of classical feminism — breaking barriers, opening new options, heck, I bet she’d even push for equity laws on pay, parenting and other issues, in a conservative way (say, equal pay for equally valued work, no tax penalty for the married or for families that choose to have a single breadwinner etc.) — is not welcome because she does not ‘fight for womyn’s rights’ but wants to curtail them. They also fear that a smaller nanny state will have fewer dollars available for their pet projects, thus putting them on an equal playing field with their intrinsically stronger opponents (who never received the nanny state money in the first place. See: the outrage when Harper cancelled funding for some lefty-feminist groups as a Canadian example).

The Palin/McCain campaign needs to encounter the frothy anger with calm, reasoned responses, and their ticket will be punched into the White House.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

But not in a way that implies that the end of the piece is drawing nigh, mind you. It’s a crescendo in that sense of that two-chord sequence that percolates through the soundtrack for The Dark Knight; it swells and gets ever more grandiose each time it is heard, but it never resolves (there’s no third chord to close the sequence off)…it just leaves you hanging in this emotional limbo until the next time it thunders by (Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard are messing with us).

And it’s not just Heather Mallick, although her hit piece on Palin is a good example of what I’m getting at here. She’s not doing any better with her follow-up commentary about her “lunatic screed” (thanks to BCF for that turn of phrase), it should be noted…indeed, if nothing else, she is giving ample reinforcement to the notion that the last acceptable bigotries are those which are directed against earnest Christians and “hillbillys.”

But anyhow, no, it’s not just Mallick. Salon.com, known to be partisan but also known to be…well…at least somewhat reasonable, is running a screed against Palin penned by one Cintra Wilson.

I confess, it was pretty riveting when John McCain trotted out Sarah Palin for the first time. Like many people, I thought, “Damn, a hyperconservative, fuckable, Type A, antiabortion, Christian Stepford wife in a ’sexy librarian’ costume — as a vice president? That’s a brilliant stroke of horrifyingly cynical pandering to the Christian right. Karl Rove must be behind it.”

And as though that weren’t a doozy of an opener, Wilson is just getting warmed up:

Palin may have been a boost of political Viagra for the limp, bloodless GOP (and according to an ABC/Washington Post poll she has created a boost in McCain’s standing among white women to a 53 over Obama’s 41). But ideologically, she is their hardcore pornographic centerfold spread, revealing the ugliest underside of Republican ambitions — their insanely zealous and cynical drive to win power by any means necessary, even at the cost of actual leadership.

Sarah Palin is a bit comical, like one of those cutthroat Texas cheerleader stage moms. What her Down syndrome baby and pregnant teenage daughter unequivocally prove, however, is that her most beloved child is the antiabortion platform that ensures her own political ambitions with the conservative right. The throat she’s so hot to cut is that of all American women.

I don’t want Sarah Palin being the representative leader and custodian of my rights, my Constitution and my country any more than I want polygamist compound leader Warren Jeffs baby-sitting for my preteen goddaughters.

As a woman who does not believe what Palin believes, the thought of such an opportunistic anti-female in the White House — in the Cheney chair, no less — is akin to ideological brain rape. What this Republican blowup doll does with her own insides in accord with her own faith is her business. But, like the worst and most terrifying of religious extremists, she seems very comfortable with the idea of imposing her own views on everyone else.

…

I did not think that women being downgraded to second-class, three-holed chattel would be a pressing concern in my lifetime. I thought it was like polio, or witch burning — an inhumane error that had already been corrected. But after eight years of Republican hegemony, and now the potential ascendance of this sheep in ewe’s clothing, I am so mortally offended I feel like it is really time for women to be angry, hardcore and disgusted again.

Let’s quickly review. Palin — a working mother of five who was elected governor of an American state (Alaska) — is “an opportunistic anti-female.” She is a (willing?) participant in her party’s “brain rape” of American women. She is a “blowup doll.” She’s no better than a Mormon fundamentalist, really. She doesn’t actually care about her kids (clearly, if she did care, she’d have aborted that little defect Trig the moment the amnio screening came back positive)…her only concern is her stance against abortion.

Wilson covers almost every smear imaginable, but then adds a particularly excreable comment as well: “I did not think that women being downgraded to second-class, three-holed chattel would be a pressing concern in my lifetime.”

Exactly how is Palin going to be the overseer of such a downgrade, being that she is, herself, a woman…and then one who has rocketed to the heights of political (and actual) power? Exactly how is Palin — whose career has consisted, it seems, of shooting through one “glass ceiling” after another purely on the merits of her leadership and character, rather than by riding the coattails of any kind of enforced “equal opportunity” policy — the instrument by which women will again be reduced to mere chattel in the U.S.? EXPLAIN TO ME HOW ELECTING A WOMAN TO THE VICE PRESIDENCY SERVES TO UNDERMINE THE RIGHTS OF WOMEN, YOU BLITHERING IDIOT! Especially when the woman in question seems to be living the ideal of feminism!

Oh, right…Palin opposes abortion. Clearly, then, she’s not really a woman.

See, this is why modern feminism is losing credibility. Palin should be the feminist ideal, the wet-dream “this is the one we’ve been waiting for!” icon of women’s lib. Instead, she is hated with a level of vitriol one has never seen deployed before by the Left; even Bush hatred never went this far. As Jonathan Kay notes, “[t]he brachuckers of 1968 would have been shocked and gratified to know that a woman would change the face of U. S. politics (and perhaps turn an election result) just 40 years after their Atlantic City street theatre — even if today’s feminists have the luxury of tilting their noses at the likes of Palin because she doesn’t toe the left-wing line.”

(This isn’t the first hit-piece that Salon has gotten roasted for, by the way. Juan Cole ran an article that has been repeatedly slammed by commentators for its comparison of Palin — who is openly Christian — to Islamic fundamentalists, of the sort that fill out the ranks of Hamas or govern Saudi Arabia.)

Ace nails, I think, the reason why all of these various hate-pieces are getting published. In the end, he says, it comes down to simply hatred, and the fact that the Left is not at all embarrassed to hide its hate; it is hate as a form of virtue, a substitute ideology to hold up in place of a vacuous one (e.g. “hope and change”).

And the kicker in all of this? For as much as the feminist/Leftist commentators insist that Palin. Is. The. Enemy. Of. Women. Everywhere!, normal, rational people are beginning to distance themselves from the screeching…and, in doing so, are shifting their support from