Time Immortal

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.

…it would appear that some daft twits in the British government have given the go-ahead to the implementation of Sharia courts.

And yes, it would appear to be as bad as it sounds.

Islamic law has been officially adopted in Britain, with sharia courts given powers to rule on Muslim civil cases.

The government has quietly sanctioned the powers for sharia judges to rule on cases ranging from divorce and financial disputes to those involving domestic violence.

Rulings issued by a network of five sharia courts are enforceable with the full power of the judicial system, through the county courts or High Court.

…

In the six cases of domestic violence…the judges ordered the husbands to take anger management classes and mentoring from community elders. There was no further punishment.

In each case, the women subsequently withdrew the complaints they had lodged with the police and the police stopped their investigations.

Well, isn’t that just not a surprise at all? Given that a surprising number of Muslim scholars and teachers world-wide support and endorse wife-beating, I can only imagine that there’s a fifty/fifty chance that the “anger management classes” and “mentoring” will be discussions about the radius and length of stick with which it is permissible to administer a beating.

You know, 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?

Don’t laugh too hard, dear Reader.

Leave it to Mr. Warren to find the silver lining in the cloud that is Mallick’s anti-Palin screed:

I think Ms Mallick expresses openly what many, quite possibly most of her MSM colleagues are actually thinking, and in my experience, actually saying in social gatherings and while working away from the microphones — though seldom with such ebullience. Ms Mallick is rare in being so refreshingly candid, on the record.

Where such prejudices as hers exist, it is an advantage to everyone to have them expressed openly, discussed openly, demolished openly. Far worse is the poison in people who think like Ms Mallick, but contain themselves within the shallow literary conventions of “journalistic objectivity.”

I actually enjoy reading Ms Mallick’s blow-outs. I laugh out loud at many of her phrases and juxtapositions — the more, the farther they go “over the top” — and wince only when I think she has missed a good chance to shoot even higher.

Moreover, her assertions are often so malignantly unreasonable that one may extract some truth by reversing them. And her half-truths must necessarily contain some modest corn seed of reality. Laughter is an excellent guide: for truth is near, wherever there is spontaneous laughter.

He raises a good point. As vitriolic and hateful as Mallick’s hit piece obviously was, it did serve to cast her in the role of our — by “our,” I mean normal, reasonable, rational folk — canary in the coal mine, our first indicator of the malice that lurks beneath the skin of almost everyone in the media, whose contempt for Sarah Palin and the wholesome values she represents can only be measured in job lots.

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 Barrack Hussein Obama to John McCain. Which has a lot of people rattled. And rattled people will do irrational things.

Good gravy, even Obama himself is so rattled by Palin that he can’t help himself. His statement that “[y]ou can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig,” may not have been directed at Palin specifically, but it’s a close thing, following a tad too closely on the heels of Palin making a joke about herself concerning pit bulls, hockey moms, and lipstick. As Mark Shea notes, by way of comparison:

The key to political humor is it has to be either self-deprecating or else genuinely funny. So when Palin asks “What’s the difference between a pit bull and a hockey mom?” and answers “Lipstick”, that’s funny.”

When the Son of the living God [Obama's supporters have attempted to deify the man -- Ken]makes a veiled reference to Palin as a pig in lipstick?: Not so funny. The era of Obama’s cool transcendence of nasty politics is over. The Hero of the Solar Myth turns out to be a Chicago Machine Pol. Team Obama is losing it, and with it, the votes of all those women who could not care less that Gloria Steinem and the NY Times thinks they are not women at all.

Palin’s the first person who ever laid a glove on the guy and he is now beginning to crack up as a result. His “pig in lipstick” remark is a sign of that. It’s also (whether he wants it to be or not) a signal to the Freakish Enemies of the Normal that the gloves are off. These people will go apesh*t on Palin and her family — and the mass migration away from the Lightworker will continue.

It’s over. He’s got nothin’. He’s so desperate he’s forgotten he’s running against McCain.

That last point is also significant. Look, the dynamics of a presidential race aren’t that hard to understand. The VP nominees are supposed to be the “attack dogs” for their respective presidential candidates, while the candidates themselves are supposed to talk about issues and policies in an attempt to win voters. The candidates take the high road, and the VP nominees deal with the mud-slinging and gutter politics. It’s not a pretty tradition, but there it is.

Obama has forgotten this, it seems. And more than a few people are (maybe prematurely) suggesting that, for “the Lightworker,” the race may now be over.

The kid’s acting like an amateur is basically why. You don’t let the *Veep* of the other party drive your campaign and *especially* you don’t let her sucker you into making the sort of personal attacks it is the job of your surrogates and lackeys to mount. The moment the Pig In Lipstick campaign comes from Obama himself, he loses one of the few precious resources he has as an Empty Suit: the illusion that he is the Lightworker, an ethereal being floating above the Old Political Paradigm. That’s almost all the guy has going for him and now he’s throwing it away because she’s gotten into his head. He showed real class when he told the Freakish Enemies of the Normal to knock off the Gynecological Inquisition and reminded people that he was the product of a out-of-wedlock tryst.

But the moment the guy starts giving into the Inner Misogynist, he’s toast. He himself may get his game back and realize what a catastrophically bad move that was. But I doubt the Freakish Enemies in the Normal will be so swift on the uptake. Up till now, the bizarre hatred of the Ordinary American that has made Palin its lightning rod has been conducted over the protests of Obama and some of the rest of the Team who can see how it’s all playing in Paducah (huge spikes in the polls for McWhatsisname/PALIN!!!!!!!). Now Obama’s chosen to give a loud and clear signal to the Palin-flesh eaters to do their worst. That’s just about the stupidest thing he could possibly have done.

McCain’s campaign team is already making sure that Obama’s slip is going viral. Meanwhile, FactCheck.org is going to town on the various false assertions being made about Palin’s record. And over in Britain, Palin’s record in office — and the reason it qualifies her for the VP slot — has not gone unnoticed:

The surprise is not that she has been in office for such a short time but that she has succeeded in each of her objectives. She has exposed corruption; given the state a bigger share in Alaska’s energy wealth; and negotiated a deal involving big corporate players, the US and Canadian governments, Canadian provincial governments, and native tribes — the result of which was a £13 billion deal to launch the pipeline and increase the amount of domestic energy available to consumers. This deal makes the charge of having “no international experience” particularly absurd.

In short, far from being a small-town mayor concerned with little more than traffic signs, she has been a major player in state politics for a decade, one who formulated an ambitious agenda and deftly implemented it against great odds.

Palin’s selection was a brilliant move by the McCain team, it seems, for two reasons. First, Palin herself will do well in office; she seems comfortable with fulfilling executive branch duties, and seems equally at ease setting out to do what needs to get done. Moreover, she’s no stranger to international dealings at a high-end, policy-making level, and her record of standing up to corruption — even at the expense of career — is fairly solid.

Secondly, though, and then more importantly, Palin’s selection has utter destabilized the Obama campaign team, and thrown his supporters into disarray. Seriously…apart from one mention of tax policy in the past two weeks, what have we heard concerning Obama’s platform since Palin made her debut speech?

On such things do elections turn.

P.S. by way of the Shaidle, I was alerted to James Lileks‘ epic-scale fisking of Mallick’s article. It should be read in full, as there is simply too much “good stuff” in it to excerpt here.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!