reading through the blogs... I’m reminded of how so many feminists seem possessed of a wholly irrational hatred for this woman.
Why?
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Of course, the first answer you’ll get if you ask feminists why they hate Sarah Palin is that “it’s because she ____” — and then fill in the blank with the lie of choice: made rape victims pay for their own kits, is against contraception or sex ed, believes in abstinence-only, thinks the dinosaurs were here 4000 years ago, doesn’t believe in global warming, doesn’t believe in evolution, is stupid and can’t read, etc., etc., etc., etc.
But none of those things is true. None of them.
Which brings me to my first puzzlement: why don’t people bother to find out what Sarah Palin really believes? I don’t mean people as in the usual sexist freaks; I mean feminists.
[...]
But even weirder is what happens when you try to replace the myths with the truth. If you explain, “no, she didn’t charge rape victims,” your feminist interlocutor will come back with something else: “she’s abstinence-only!” No, you say, she’s not; and then the person comes back with, “she’s a creationist!” and so on. “She’s an uneducated moron!” Actually, Sarah Palin is not dumb at all, and based on her interviews and comments, I’d say she has a greater knowledge of evolution, global warming, and the Wisconsin glaciation in Alaska than the average citizen.
But after you’ve had a few of these myth-dispelling conversations, you start to realize that it doesn’t matter. These people don’t hate Palin because of the lies; the lies exist to justify the hate. That’s why they keep reaching and reaching for something else, until they finally get to “she winked on TV!” (And by the way: I’ve been winked at my whole life by my grandmother, aunts, and great-aunts. Who knew it was such a despicable act?)
The language is rough. Very rough. So is the absolute garbage that has been thrown on Sarah Palin by women who profess to be something very different from what they obviously are. and the author claims she knows for a fact that some of these feminists were knowingly spreading lies about the woman. She won't say who because that would be talking out of school. I think that's deeply regrettable. Nobody should be given a free pass for this kind of horrific filth, and certainly not because they are feminists.
And all this from feminists. Forget the NAACP sponsoring a lynching; this is like the NAACP ripping off their masks to reveal that they’ve been replaced by white supremacist pod people.
There's a rich mine of irony in the frothing at the mouth, sputtering, spewing hatred many on the left have professed for Palin:
Her speech also delivered some welcome punctures to the national gasbag known as Obama. And that’s another thing: it has not escaped my attention that many of the things Palin is accused of, falsely, are actually true of Obama. This is a guy who, as a U.S. senator from Illinois, didn’t even know which Senate committees he was on or which states bordered his own. (And don’t even get me started on Joe “The Talking Donkey” Biden, who thinks FDR was president during the stock market crash and that people watched TV in those days.) I’m not saying Obama’s a moron, but he’s sure as hell no genius. People say Sarah Palin rambles; excuse me, but have you actually heard Obama speak extemporaneously? As for being a diva, surely we all remember the Possomus sign and the special embroidered pillow on the Obama campaign plane. The fact is, Obama is an intellectually mediocre narcissist with a thin resume who’s lost without a teleprompter and whose entire campaign had all the substance and gravity of a Pepsi commercial. Yet people say Sarah Palin is a fluffy bunny diva.
Most of the comments are thoughtful, and thought-provoking. Then there's this very telling one, comment 120 by one 'Apostate':
My dislike of conservatives and of anti-choicers is really quite strong, enough that I’ve banned people on my blog who have expressed the mildest of reservations about choice, and I refuse to sign up for a bone marrow registry because I might accidentally end up helping an anti-choicer, a Christian, or a Republican. Really!
Reminds me of Barbara Ehrenreich's desire to give E Coli to somebody who was a complete stranger to her simply because she didn't like the books they had on their bookshelves.
Some are saying things were just as bad against Hilary. It doesn't seem that way to me, although it's no secret that I didn't much care for her (for the record, I actually have a bit more respect for her now than I did then, but I still find the Tammy Wynnette bit and the vast rightwing conspiracy and if he lied that would be serious stuff contemptible), so I may not be the best judge.
But.... the comments against Palin are so violent, and so specifically sexualized in a way that the hostility towards Hilary wasn't/isn't/doesn't seem to be to me. For another, it's absolutely mind boggling how often somebody wills criticize Palin on the basis of A, and when you point out A is a lie, they say never mind, it's B, and when you point out B is completely false, they say who cares, because of C, and when you say, well, YOUR candidate also believes C, then they insist that it doesn't matter because their candidate believes C with more credibility than Palin, who, after all, said D, and of course, Palin didn't say D, their candidate did, and that doesn't matter either.
And all the while, no matter how false their reasons are shown to be, they merely get angrier, more vitriolic, more hateful and more personal in their attacks. Pin It
