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!
Hillary Clinton does. She has only one child, is not sexy, attended the right schools, speaks with the right accent and was perhaps the first publicly cuckolded First Lady in modern times. Bill Clinton’s womanizing was no secret to his fiancée Hillary Rodham before they married. Her own philandering is less openly documented and verified, so I will not go into the details or orientation here, except to say that kinky escapades never attracted the same scorn now being directed at Sarah Palin’s apparently happy family life. Hillary Clinton’s political action has earned her sincere bipartisan respect, but her rise to power as a serious contender for the Democratic nomination was undeniably boosted by the political machine she and her ex- president husband built. It seemed invincible until the populist juggernaut of Obama crushed her like Chinese tanks running over young protestors at Tiananmen Square.
Liberal women say, “Sarah Palin will set us back 100 years.” They have no doubts about what she will do if McCain wins: she will prohibit birth control, withdraw abortion rights, force schools to teach creationism, ban books, and, generally speaking, impose the whole bag of retrograde Evangelical theology. She will abuse power, fire people she doesn’t like, hire friends… things that other politicians never do! A Jewish woman said to me, “What would you think if a Lubavitch woman were running for VP?” In fact, Palin doesn’t look like a fanatic fundamentalist. She wears short skirts, sexy dark stockings, and high heel shoes. Come to think of it, she also wears glasses. I guess that means she is going to ban contact lenses.
The latest barrage of criticism was aimed at her wardrobe. The Republican Party allegedly spent $145,000 at Saks and Neiman Marcus to buy her classy clothes to campaign in. How sinful! Did anyone ever think to put a price tag on Madeline Albright’s wardrobe? No. The problem with Palin is that she is good looking, has a great figure (after giving birth to 5 children!), wears elegant clothes with easy grace, is bursting with good healthy energy and speaks with an uninhibited down home common people’s Midwest accent. How dare she! Here’s the joke—you’re not allowed to make fun of the way Barack Hussein Obama talks, walks, smiles, or dresses…because that would be racist. You can’t point out that he has less executive experience than Palin because political crooners don’t need experience. You can’t sneer when his daughters snuggle up to his image via satellite on a big screen at the Democratic convention and gurgle “I love you, Daddy,” because that too would be racist. You can’t dig up Obama’s past and expose his alliances with an uninterrupted string of unsavory Marxist, anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist anti-American radicals because that is character assassination, guilt by association, negative campaigning. In this upside down campaign featuring a junior senator whose official political itinerary is essentially empty while his hidden past would automatically disqualify him from seeking high office, Sarah Palin is the only one subject to intense scrutiny and vicious criticism. Moreover, she is used as a slingshot to hit at McCain’s biological vulnerability. The catch phrase is “This inexperienced woman is a heartbeat away from the Oval Office.” A nice way to push the 72 year-old McCain into the grave. Barack Hussein Obama is one giant step away from that Oval Office and the general public doesn’t know where he came from and where he is planning to take them.
However, the last stage of the campaign may still hold some surprises…thanks to Joe the Plumber [link to my article on www.atlasshrugs.com] a common man from Ohio who put Obama on the spot by asking the candidate, who was electioneering in his neighborhood, if the tax plan would clip his wings if and when he could run his own business instead of working for a boss. Obama blurted out his basic belief that spreading the wealth around is better for everyone. That means taking more from the rich and giving it to the poor. This has opened up the question of Obama’s Marxist leanings, and it won’t go away. Other equally damaging material may reach the mass media before Election Day. The Democrats fell upon Joe as if he were a dangerous bourgeois counter-revolutionary. They even dared to complain that the Republicans hadn’t vetted him! As if he were a McCain campaign official, or a plant.
Barack Hussein Obama has not been vetted by the mainstream media, and there is much to unearth. As a community organizer he raked in considerable public and private donations, which he redistributed to friends like terrorist Bill Ayers, anti-Zionist Rashid Khalidi, and Obama’s own fiery Afro-centrist preacher Jeremiah Wright whose hate-filled sermons were a major inspiration. This and more has been hidden under a thick coating of hype.
Because Sarah Palin is not of their world, liberals act as if she had been picked up at a 5 & dime store, further proof that McCain himself is incompetent and unfit for high office. They snicker about her stint as mayor of Wasilia, and guffaw about the governorship of Alaska. Did anyone ever call Bill Clinton an Arkansas hillbilly or Joe Biden a hick from Scranton and a senator from the half-pint state of Delaware? But Obama’s Kenyan origins (which are carried only in his blood because he never lived there… but the place makes Wasilia look like a great metropolis) it supposedly make him a nugget of automatic international understanding. His formative years in Indonesia, where he was registered as a Muslim, are out of bounds because of the danger of harboring Islamophobic thoughts.
Sarah Palin not a nobody from nowhere plucked out of a cheap hat. She is intelligent, thoughtful, quick-witted, and a bright politician with a sterling record of accomplishment. Serious journalists had an eye on her before McCain chose her as his running mate. In July, Mideast specialist Tom Gross suggested in his highly respected newsletter that Palin would be a good choice for VP because she is a Washington outsider, a genuine working mother, authentic, attractive, and articulate, and a woman. Unlike Obama in Chicago, said Gross, Palin had taken on the corrupt machine of her own party in Alaska. Unknown to Gross, William Kristol of the Weekly Standard had also suggested Palin as a choice VP candidate. While uninformed Obama fans who know nothing the mainstream media doesn’t tell them are parroting the stupid accusation that Sarah Palin is dumb, intelligent journalists with integrity are saying why they think she is smart. Byron York’s National Review article [link] that details her notable accomplishments as governor of Alaska was misused by a CNN journalist to confuse Palin by making her think that York, too, had discovered she is dumb, incompetent, etc. Former Ms. Editor in chief (and Democrat for McCain) Elaine Lafferty wrote eloquently of Palin’s intellectual and moral qualities after spending some time with her on the campaign trail [www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2008-10-27/sarah-pailins-a-brainac/1/] Lafferty writes: “But like many other Democrats, including Lynn Rothschild, I’m tired of the Democratic Party taking women for granted. I also happen to believe Sarah Palin supports women’s rights, deeply and passionately.”
Palin is on the campaign trail with her supportive husband, their 6 month-old Down syndrome baby, and 7 year-old Piper. Their older son is on active duty in Iraq. Palin is drawing huge enthusiastic crowds while media snipers whisper that she is an embarrassment to the McCain campaign, too headstrong, causing dissension in the ranks, won’t follow the script (simultaneously accusing her of mouthing talking points), can’t be trusted to go alone for interviews. Families with special needs children are reportedly moved by her acceptance of the handicapped child she could have eliminated by abortion after the pre-natal diagnosis. In a modern twist to the Scarlet Letter syndrome, Palin’s detractors use the child as a sign of her degenerate behavior. For this pro-choice crowd, the only choice is to follow feminist dogma. A liberated woman has to be a True Believer who toes the party line. Back in the 60s liberated women had to dress in drab shabby shapeless clothes, leave their homes messy and dirty, do no serious cooking, and neglect their children to concentrate on more noble pursuits. Simone de Beauvoir, the bisexual priestess of European feminism, was macho with her throwaway girlfriends and doormat with her unrequited crush, Nelson Algren.
Things have changed, but not that much. Sarah doesn’t qualify as liberated for Orthodox feminists but free wo
