Ever since Palin was chosen by McCain, I've been waiting for the women in the XX forum to wake up and quit discussing her nomination as if it meant anything positive for women. Palin is to women when Clarence Thomas was to blacks -- someone chosen by leaders who have opposed the aspirations of their cohort as hard as they can for years, for the cynical purpose of being able to pretend that they've seen the light when in fact what they've figured out is how to confuse the issue. As with Thomas, every attempt to find fault with her will be ascribed to her "minority" status. Y'all should have seen this coming, and now we know -- Palin is on the ticket to be McCain's pit bull. Her gender is utterly irrelevant to her candidacy. She's nothing more than a good-looking Pat Buchanan.
Palin's is a disaster for the issues that XX writers think are important for women. The right to choose abortion? No, she's agin it. Are you looking for subsidized day care? Shoot, a REAL woman can run an entire state without a nanny? And maternity leave is also out the window now, isn't it, since Wonder Woman went back to work three days after giving birth? What, you thought McCain picked her because she was the most qualified candidate?
Clarence Thomas won nomination to the Supreme Court because too many white liberals didn't know enough about what black people thought and believed they'd be offended if they voted against a man who everyone could see was going to vote against the political beliefs and interests of 95% of the black population. In the past week, I've watched the XX forum tip-toe along the same exact fault line, except you guys SHOULD BE in a much better position to judge the needs and feelings of your supporters than those white liberals were. Presumably, the coming out as Ann Coulter last night woke you up.
Well, maybe not all of y'all -- I note one assertion above that anyone who can raise five kids can run the government. Do you really believe that? Speaking as a man who actually has had the experience -- for several years -- of raising young children while working full-time, I think you're full of shit. You can only run a government if you have the time to familiarize yourself with the issues that arise and to network with the other players, which no one devoting any reasonable amount of time to their children can possibly do. A hockey mom cannot run a government, she can only front for men who will do it through her.
Nobody questions McCain's zero executive experience for a very sound reason -- he has had years to familiarize himself with the issues and with the people he's going to have to deal with in office. When he says he has his own ideas about how to proceed, we may disagree with those ideas but we do know that he has the means to identify the people who will best be able to promote them.
Palin does not, which means that she'll inherit people who will be running HER, and it is simply naive to assume that she has some sort of inherent wisdom which will guide her through a minefield of special interests. To be fair, Obama is in somewhat the same position -- the difference is that Obama DOES have a knowledge of the issues and has just completed an almost year-long process of testing his ideas in the primaries against other informed people.
Palin has never run for office outside of a state whose needs are totally different from every other in the country. Her only strong suit is energy and her policy there is drill-drill-drill, which is identical to the policy of the oil industry.
Trying to pretend that a hockey mom can run a government sounds remarkably like the famous observation that "any cook can run a government," which was made by Lenin. Please note that, once in power, he never let the cooks anywhere near the government he and his party fashioned. McCain will do the same -- any women's issues are dead for the duration of his term because Palin will stand as the counter-weight to it, prepared to denounce any feminist programs as unnecessary because she didn't need them.
And I repeat, y'all should have known this was coming. Sarah Palin is your enemy, and you've let her gender get in the way of perceiving that.
