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.

A Rasmussen poll ranks her popularity highter than that of Obama — but let’s remember what’s happening here. Barrack Hussein Obama is running for President, while Sarah Palin is not: if John McCain wins the election, she will be Vice President.

The Republican VP pick, then, is more popular than the Democrat front-runner. Politics is not my field, but it seems to me that for Obama, that’s not a good place to be. Hard-core lefties are beginning to realize this, and some are even, as is traditional, threatening to leave the country should McCain and Palin prevail in the election.

And let’s be honest: a week ago, most of us had no idea who this woman was, if we were even aware of her existence.

To say that this has inspired fear and rage among the Left would be a vast understatement. I can’t recall a time when I’ve seen such a broad spectrum of liberal-minded folk come So. Completely. UNHINGED. This website, a heartless mockery of Trig Palin’s Down’s syndrome is probably the most extreme example I’ve come across, but it’s hardly the only one.

Consider: Oprah Winfrey refuses to allow Palin on her show. The woman who introduced Obama to millions of American women, and who is ostensibly a champion of women’s rights and the advancement of women in all areas of the job market, including the political arena, will not allow the first woman on the Republican ticket to speak on her show. Even more egregiously, she will not allow the woman who will probably the first woman to hold the Vice Presidential (if not the Presidential) office in the U.S. on her show.

Indeed, supposed feminists have been forming ranks against Palin with a ferocity that makes no sense whatsoever. In an excellent column for the Wall Street Journal, Barbara Amiel (Lady Black) makes an excellent point (and not just when she compares Palin to Margaret Thatcher):

American feminists have always had a tough sell to make. To the rest of the world, no females on earth have ever had it as easy as middle-class American women. Cosseted, surrounded by labor-saving devices, easily available contraception and supermarkets groaning with food, their complaints have always seemed to have no relationship to reality.

Education was there for the taking. Marriages were not arranged. Going against social mores had no serious consequences. Postwar American women (excluding those mired in poverty or the odious restrictions of race) have always had the choice of what they wanted to be. They simply didn’t decide to exercise it until it became more fashionable to get out of the home than to run it.

Sarah Palin has put the flim-flam nature of America feminism sharply into focus, revealing the not-so-secret hypocrisy of its code and, whatever her future, this alone is an accomplishment. As she emerged into the nation’s consciousness, a shudder went through the feminist left — a political movement not restricted to females. She is a mother refusing to stay at home (good) who had made a success out in the workplace (excellent) whose marriage nevertheless is a rip-roaring success and whose views are unspeakable—those of a red-blooded, right-wing principled pragmatist.

The metaphorical hair stood up on the back of every licensed member of the feminist movement who could immediately see she was a monster out of a nightmare landscape by Hieronymus Bosch. Pro-life. Pro-oil exploration in Alaska, home of the nation’s polar bears for heaven’s sake. Smaller government. Lower taxes. And that family of hers: Next to the Clintons with their dysfunctional marriage, her fertility and sexually robust life could only emphasize the shriveled nature of the one-child family of the former Queen Bee of political female accomplishment.

Mrs. Palin’s emergence caused a spasm in American feminism. Caste and class have always been ammunition in the very Eastern seaboard women’s movement, and now they were (so to speak) loading for bear. Sally Quinn felt a mother of five had no business being vice president. Andrea Mitchell remarked that “only the uneducated” would vote for Mrs. Palin. “Choose a woman but this woman?” wrote Baltimore Sun columnist Susan Reimer, accusing Sen. McCain of using a Down’s syndrome child as qualification for the VP spot.

The hypocrisy was breathtaking. Only nanoseconds before the choice of Mrs. Palin as VP put her a geriatric heartbeat away from the presidency, a woman’s right to have a career and children was a shibboleth of feminism. One always knew that women with views that opposed those of official feminism were to be treated as nonwomen. To see it now out in the open was the real shocker.

Other left-wing commentators haven’t displayed even as little restraint in their open contempt as the likes of Sally Quinn have. Indeed, Mark Steyn correctly notes that based on their responses to Palin, feminists and progressives — supposed champions of working mothers and of shattering “glass ceilings” wherever they can be found — seem to have “as narrow and proscriptive a view of what women are permitted to be as any old 1950s sitcom dad,” and all because Palin is openly Christian and ardently pro-life.

And when those criticisms ring hollow, Palin’s detractors turn instead to her “downscale” appeal, noting that she’ll certainly make the Republicals more popular with “the lower class” voters, while simultaneously alienating “the upper class” voters.

Leave it to Mark Steyn to note that one would “be surprised how crowded it is down at the “downscale” end.”

And remember: all this rage and animosity has emerged within the last week, and then in response to a woman John McCain picked at his presidential running mate, who was — prior to that point — all but unknown to most Americans, and who was enjoying an 80+% approval rate with the Alaska electorate as their governor.

John who? That’s almost what this campaign has become. And the Left are soiling their pants over it.

After reading the text of Palin’s speech, I think it’s pretty clear that this could prove to be an interesting election after all…and something of a first. Well, obviously it’s a first, given that Palin stands a good chance of being the first woman to hold such a high office in America.

She’s Margaret Thatcher with five kids and a Klondike drawl.

But more than that, there’s something interesting emerging here, a trend of sorts. At least based on what we’ve seen so far, this could well be the first election in which a presidential candidate, in essence, ends up running against his opponent’s vice-presidential pick. The face-off that seems to be shaping up is not between John McCain and Barrack Hussein Obama, but between Sarah Palin and Obama.

Which is damned odd, to be sure. But also damned interesting.

Anyhow, the Anchoress has a roundup of reactions to Palin’s speech, which seems to have liberal-minded folks all in a panic…as well it should, given how sharp some of its observations were:

Before I became governor of the great state of Alaska, I was mayor of my hometown.

And since our opponents in this presidential election seem to look down on that experience, let me explain to them what the job involves.

I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a “community organizer,” [a position Obama held in Chicago, and which constitutes a large portion of his resumé — Ken] except that you have actual responsibilities. I might add that in small towns, we don’t quite know what to make of a candidate who lavishes praise on working people when they are listening, and then talks about how bitterly they cling to their religion and guns when those people aren’t listening.

We tend to prefer candidates who don’t talk about us one way in Scranton and another way in San Francisco.

Also, I suddenly find that I like Dr. Phil McGraw a bit more, after his excellent smackdown of David Letterman’s poo-pooing of Bristol Palin.

Guest “Dr. Phil” on Wednesday night chastised David Letterman’s misunderstanding of teenage sexual behavior and parental influence after Letterman sarcastically complained that if a President McCain “drops dead…don’t you want your President to have had the presence of mind to have chatted to her teenaged kids for five minutes about birth control?” (Letterman delivered the same belittling joke the night before too.)

Referring to Letterman’s almost five-year-old son, daytime TV host Phil McGraw, aka “Dr. Phil,” informed Letterman:

Let me tell you something, new dad. If you are under the misapprehension that when Harry is 17 that you are going to have even a remote influence on what he decides in the back seat of a Chevy on a Saturday night — I don’t think old Dave’s going to be popping in his mind at that point. It’s not a 15-minute conversation. It’s a dialogue that you need to have starting when he’s about eight or nine.

Undeterred from his contempt for Sarah Palin, Letterman asked: “Then why didn’t they have the dialogue?” McGraw suggested: “Maybe they did. But when children get that age, at 17 — see, here’s the thing. The body’s grown but the brain is not.” Letterman soon sneered: “They don’t sell Trojans in Alaska? Come on,” prompting McGraw to point out: “Wasn’t Barack’s mother like 18 when he was born?” Indeed she was.

And over at his blog, Vox Day observes that the (liberal) media has no clue how the heck they should respond to Palin:

First, they were all taken completely by surprise when McCain made the most obvious and effective choice for vice-president. Second, they actually thought conservatives and the religious right would somehow be turned off by a pregnant girl marrying the father of her child and having the baby! Here’s a little secret for the irreligious Left: religious people not only believe that sin exists, they believe that everyone engages in it. True, it’s best to avoid sin, but the far more important thing is how you attempt to amend for your errant actions when you, like everyone else, fall short of perfection.

Now they’re all surprised that a woman whose nickname is “Barracuda”, who compares her kind of woman to a pitbull, who took on and beat the corrupt old boys of Republican politics in Alaska, should turn out to be an effective attack dog. Whoever could have imagined it?

This is why I don’t read much political commentary except as a guide to what the clueless parrots will be repeating. With a few exceptions, it’s almost completely useless.

This was shaping up to be a boring election, an unstimulating contest between Tweedledum and Tweedlenotsodum. Indeed, I’d barely been paying attention to it. Now, though, it’s a whole new ballgame.

And I am loving — loving — watching the supposed champions of women’s rights and tolerance (a.k.a. “the Left”) soil their trousers and abandon all pretense in response to McCain’s running mate. I mean, when people openly admit their intent to lie their asses off in order to take Palin down by any means necessary, and when people openly opine about how tearing a family apart is a small price to pay to avert “a disaster” (e.g. a Republican victory in the coming election), you know they are scared.

As in: pants thrice-soaked, fight-or-run-for-your-damned-life-flight scared. The Left has come unhinged over this. Un. HINGED.

Not that that’s exactly news, of course — since he steered the economy of Zimbabwe into the ground and begain a racist program of driving white farmers off of their land, Robert Mugabe has earned himself a laundry-list of detractors and opponents around the world.

But Queen Elizabeth II seems to be especially displeased:

The Associated Press LONDON - The Queen has stripped Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe of his honorary knighthood.

The highly unusual move is meant to show Britain’s displeasure over alleged human rights abuses by Mugabe’s administration. The Queen acted Wednesday on the advice of British Foreign Secretary David Miliband.

Miliband says Mugabe should have the honour revoked because of widespread violence and intimidation of Zimbabwe’s opposition ahead of a presidential run-off vote scheduled for Friday.

I suppose one could ask the question of why this was not done sooner, but perhaps it can be taken as a signal that the British government has more or less given up hope on the Mugabe regime, whereas before they had been attempting to effect change in the nation by working with him. But since he appears to have stolen yet another election in order to retain power, perhaps now the British Foreign Office are throwing up their hands and saying “to hell with ‘im.”

(The Queen, though she has the power to revoke the knighthood of anybody without having to consult the government (at least as far as I understand the process), typically won’t make such an overtly political statement, or undertake such an overtly political action, absent the behest of the British government.)

Regardless, it’s a welcome development. One can only coddle dictators for so long — after a while, only de-legitimizing them, both in the eyes of the world and in the eyes of their people, will work against them, either to force them out of power or to force them to change their policies. The British know as much, for this was how — by way of Poland — Margaret Thatcher (along with the U.S. and especially the Pope) approached the issue of breaking up the Soviet Union.