Nidra Poller who has joined me in my Florida trek to convert the misled Jews on our Great Reverse Shlep has penned (and nailed it) oped on Palin. Fresh from Paris ...... an expat's perspective.
And btw, check out Team Sara's response to Obama's wink here.
Sarah Palin is not every woman’s Everywoman
Northern Virginia, Southern Florida October 25-29, 2008
Nidra Poller
[original English version of an article published in Hebrew translation by Makor Rishon]
John McCain’s vice presidential pick was a stroke of strategic genius.
The popular Alaska governor, Sarah Palin, looked like the queen that
would trump Obama’s knight. More sex appeal than Barack and Michelle
combined, more and cuter kids, more spring to her step, more charm
and…real executive experience. A track record you could believe in
because it is all up front, visible and documented. Obama was
attracting swoons from the idol worshippers. Sarah Palin inspired
whoops of joy. Go girl go!
Her presence on the ticket was a shot in the arm to McCain, who
suddenly began to show his impish smile. Her grace offset the wooden
gestures of the war hero and survivor of Vietcong prison camps whose
sacrifice earned him no credit in the opposing camp or in the
mainstream media, deeply settled in Obama’s pocket since day one of the
Democrat primaries. But Sarah Barracuda (her nickname on the basketball
court) and self-described hockey Mom announced from the get go that she
was not afraid of the media.
Her boldness was like blood to a shark. The media moved in immediately
and have been doing a hatchet job that would leave a lesser woman twice
dead. Governor Palin is subjected to relentless scrutiny, mockery,
sarcasm, and sleaze. It doesn’t faze her. She keeps on stumping,
drawing huge enthusiastic crowds at Republican rallies. She conveys the
campaign message with convincing candor. She makes TV appearances,
including a triumph of good sportsmanship on the Saturday Night Live
show, side by side with Tina Fey, the actress who imitates her on the
political comedy show. She is interviewed by hostile journalists who
frame their questions with the sole intention of showing her up. Palin
keeps smiling. Her enemies take this as confirmation of her stupidity.
On the—rather broad—lunatic fringes of Democratic fans, the attacks on
Sarah Palin have reached a new low in American politics…and in
misogyny, including disgraceful t-shirts reduce her to her sexual
organs “Sarah is a c___ .” A mockup of her baby was auctioned on e-bay
as a “prop” and, most recently, she was hung in effigy from the eaves
of a home in Californian as a Hallowe’en decoration. The first
anti-Palin rumor went straight to the womb, with allegations that she
was pretending to be the mother of the Down syndrome babe in arms who
really belonged to her 17 year-old daughter Bristol. That gossip was
rapidly replaced with a new scandal and much clucking over the
discovery that the daughter is in fact pregnant, out of wedlock, and
intending to marry the father of her child, 18 year-old Levi Johnston.
You would think the entire progressive camp had turned into 19th
century Puritans. But no, silly, her sin was not in having sexual
relations outside of marriage—everybody does that. Her sin was in not
having an abortion. There was no further need to look at Governor
Palin’s record as mayor of Wasilia and governor of Alaska. No need to
look at McCain’s platform. All you had to do was look at the
child-mother’s swelling belly to conclude that Governor Palin is
opposed to birth control and abortion. In short, she’s a witch! If the
girl had posed nude in a pornographic film or been caught driving while
high on drugs it would not have provoked such outrage as her precocious
maternity.
The fact that Barack Hussein Obama was born to an unwed seventeen and a
half year-old mother was not considered proof of anything. The fact
that his father already had a wife and two children in Kenya when he
brought his seed to Ann Dunham caused no retroactive scandal. And the
fact that if Ann had been as modern and enlightened as progressives
require, she would have aborted, and there would be no Obama to worship
and elect, seemed not to occur to anyone but me.
French media are more Obamophile and less fair and balanced than the
worst of the US brand. The nominally conservative Figaro newspaper is
just as one-sided as the leftwing Libération. One would think, from
French election coverage, that the U.S. was already an African style
dictatorship with one 90% sure-to-win candidate and a pygmy somewhere
out in the bush lucky to stay alive before the victory of the President
for Life is announced. McCain is virtually nonexistent…except to be
panned. The top NY Times slur of the day is picked up and recycled a
few days later in France, and so it was with the pro-life scandal of
the Palin family. However, a few days into that story, unwed Justice
Minister Rachida Dati announced that she is pregnant. I am ashamed to
say that I have no inside information about the father of Dati’s child.
It may be one of those well-disseminated French secrets that everyone
who is anyone knows… for awhile people were saying the father is former
Spanish president Aznar…they would make a handsome couple but the rumor
has been denied… Nonetheless, no one suggested that the Justice
Minister was a wimpess for not having an abortion. But then she is in
her forties, so her pregnancy can fall into the trendy category.
On the Left, Sarah Palin is seen as an affront to feminism. On the
Right she is held forth as a resounding denial of the doctrinaire
ideology of a liberation movement that, we should remember, originated
with closet lesbians like Kate Millett who rejected not only male
domination but males, threw off not only the chains of uncontrolled
fertility but maternity itself. As the movement broadened to include
heterosexual women these harsh positions were tempered but, as we see
from the hysterical reaction to Palin, it never disappeared. Women in
their forties inherited freedoms seized by the bra burners and at the
same time uncritically adopted the narrow definition of the Acceptably
Liberated Woman. Palin doesn’t make the grade!
