Hey, Women! Can We Practice Some Civility?

Look, folks. I GET that I'm in the minority - especially around these parts - when it comes to admiring Sarah Palin. But I truly do not understand where the hatred and lack of respect towards her is coming from - especially among women.

I was reading a blog today that is managed by a group of women whom I respect and like very much. Here is the headline written about Sarah Palin:

You don't have to like Sarah Palin, and you certainly don't have to vote for her. But isn't it a slap to all women for a woman to call Sarah Palin a BITCH?

This is not an isolated case. Here's another example from one of my friends on Facebook - celebrating the fact that Sarah Palin has been turned into the subject of a porn video.

In all seriousness, is it disrespectful or demeaning to call a woman a bitch or to cast her image in a porn video ONLY if she's an Eastern Liberal elitist with a blueblood educational background? Do the same rules not apply to women who fall outside of that range?

It seems to me this is the equivalent of African-Americans saying it's OK to call each other "niggers", but it's not OK for non-blacks to use the word.

I'm not alone in feeling this way - Even Whoopi Goldberg, who is NO FAN of Sarah Palin, came out on "The View" yesterday and admitted the way other women have been treating Palin is disgraceful.

"Yeah, it’s horrible that she has gotten this much and- gotten this much rage in such a short amount of time. And I guess people don’t remember that when Hillary was running because maybe she ran- she had been out there longer and it was easier to take those same kind of ugly pot shots. You know, there’s something about strong women or women running that brings out the worst in people whether it’s on the Democratic side or the, or the Republican side, the point of the fact is, it’s crappy."

You all want to feel so morally superior in your disrespect, but all you are doing is shooting yourselves in the foot. This is a step backward for women... and not just the ones who know how to field dress a moose.

Screw Obama/McCain - Let's Talk About Palin!

I skipped last night's debate between Obama and McCain, and opted instead to catch a recap on Nightline, which apparently proved to be a good decision because all the reviews seem to indicate the Presidential candidates were pretty darn boring...


So instead, this morning, I choose to discuss my fascination with Sarah Palin, who is decidedly less boring than the other three candidates! I call your attention to an article by Camille Paglia on Salon.com. Paglia is a self-professed liberal columnist and devoted Barack Obama supporter, who also happens to share my feelings about the Alaska Governor. Paglia shares my view that Palin has been criminally misjudged and that she is, in fact, an "uber" rather than "anti" feminist. Here are a few choice passages for those of you who opt not to read the entire column...


Although nothing will sway my vote for Obama, I continue to enjoy Sarah Palin's performance on the national stage. During her vice-presidential debate last week with Joe Biden (whose conspiratorial smiles with moderator Gwen Ifill were outrageous and condescending toward his opponent), I laughed heartily at Palin's digs and slams and marveled at the way she slowly took over the entire event. I was sorry when it ended! But Biden wasn't -- judging by his Gore-like sighs and his slow sinking like a punctured blimp. Of course Biden won on points, but TV (a visual medium) never cares about that.


The mountain of rubbish poured out about Palin over the past month would rival Everest. What a disgrace for our jabbering army of liberal journalists and commentators, too many of whom behaved like snippy jackasses. The bourgeois conventionalism and rank snobbery of these alleged humanitarians stank up the place. As for Palin's brutally edited interviews with Charlie Gibson and that viper, Katie Couric, don't we all know that the best bits ended up on the cutting-room floor? Something has gone seriously wrong with Democratic ideology, which seems to have become a candied set of holier-than-thou bromides attached like tutti-frutti to a quivering green Jell-O mold of adolescent sentimentality.


One of the most idiotic allegations batting around out there among urban media insiders is that Palin is "dumb." Are they kidding? What level of stupidity is now par for the course in those musty circles? (The value of Ivy League degrees, like sub-prime mortgages, has certainly been plummeting. As a Yale Ph.D., I have a perfect right to my scorn.) People who can't see how smart Palin is are trapped in their own narrow parochialism -- the tedious, hackneyed forms of their upper-middle-class syntax and vocabulary.


Many others listening to Sarah Palin at her debate went into conniptions about what they assailed as her incoherence or incompetence. But I was never in doubt about what she intended at any given moment. On the contrary, I was admiring not only her always shapely and syncopated syllables but the innate structures of her discourse -- which did seem to fly by in fragments at times but are plainly ready to be filled with deeper policy knowledge, as she gains it (hopefully over the next eight years of the Obama presidencies). This is a tremendously talented politician whose moment has not yet come. That she holds views completely opposed to mine is irrelevant.


The hysterical emotionalism and eruptions of amoral malice at the arrival of Sarah Palin exposed the weaknesses and limitations of current feminism. But I am convinced that Palin's bracing mix of male and female voices, as well as her grounding in frontier grit and audacity, will prove to be a galvanizing influence on aspiring Democratic women politicians too, from the municipal level on up. Palin has shown a brand-new way of defining female ambition -- without losing femininity, spontaneity or humor. She's no pre-programmed wonk of the backstage Hillary Clinton school; she's pugnacious and self-created, the product of no educational or political elite -- which is why her outsider style has been so hard for media lemmings to comprehend. And by the way, I think Tina Fey's witty impersonations of Palin have been fabulous. But while Fey has nailed Palin's cadences and charm, she can't capture the energy, which is a force of nature.


I sometimes feel like I'm on a deserted island when it comes to my appreciation of Governor Palin, but then I look at the TV ratings for her debate with Joe Biden - 70 million people, the second largest televised debate of all time - and realize that a lot of you are, if not supportive, at least fascinated by her. And it makes me realize America's closets are jammed pretty tight with people!