Loathing Sarah Palin
Good attempt to understand leftward leaning women's hatred of Sarah Palin. Much like this discussion of Arthur Miller, I think that he gets very close to the point. Liberals tend to believe that conservatives MUST be some sort of "narrow, unhappy, closed minded, brittle, inauthentic people". Much of what galls them in the case of Sarah and George Bush for that matter is "authenticity".
They hate it worst of all. They LOVE pointing out "hypocrisy", because it meets their expectations of "how everyone REALLY is". They assume that any moral or religious beliefs espoused are "fake", just like their stated positions on everything from poverty to the environment. They EXPECT that ALL people are willing to stand up and talk about the global warming CRISIS, yet fly in private jets, live in an energy hog home and buy a 100' houseboat like Al Gore.
Sarah Palin says she is against abortion, had a Down Syndrome son and her pregnant daughter is having her baby. Those kinds of things make liberals squirm -- they LOVE to say "what if it was YOUR Son that was dead in Iraq, how would you feel THEN"? So, do they make decisions on automobile travel in the same way? Look for the worst that can happen, decide that they would "feel awful", therefore it must be a bad idea! They love to talk about any Republican that supports the war that didn't serve in combat, BUT, when John McCain HAS served in combat, and BOTH McCain and Palin have children in Iraq, that is a total non-story!
Are conservatives consistent? No, of course not, just like liberals, conservatives are human, therefore far from consistent. BUT, they have a STANDARD and they believe that it is important to TRY to live up to that standard. When they do, they get applause from other conservatives and hatred from liberals. Liberals avoid the issue both by having no standards and applauding their folks independent of what they do -- thus Slick Willie can be a huge proponent of sexual harassment laws, yet harass women in the workplace and not lose the respect of his followers. In fact, the hypocrisy of a Billy C or an Al Gore tends to make their followers MORE comfortable. Most times the left doesn't even WANT to practice what they preach -- they want SOMEONE ELSE to give money to the poor, clean up the environment, pay taxes to balance the budget, etc.
So, we have this --
A few months ago Vanity Fair ran an article about the discovery that the playwright Arthur Miller, with his third wife, the photographer Inge Morath, 40 or so years ago had a Down syndrome son. Miller promptly clapped the boy into an institution--according to the article, not a first class one either--and never saw the child again.
Most people would have taken this for a heartless act, one should have thought, especially on the part of a man known for excoriating the putative cruelties of capitalism and the endless barbarities of his own country's governments, whether Democratic or Republican. Yet, so far as one can tell, Arthur Miller's treatment of his own child has not put the least dent in his reputation, while Sarah Palin's having, keeping, and loving her Down syndrome child is somehow, by the standard of the liberal woman of our day, not so secretly thought the act of an obviously backward and ignorant woman, an affront to womanhood.
"Her greatest hypocrisy," proclaimed Wendy Doniger, one of the leading feminist lights at the University of Chicago, "is her pretense that she is a woman."
There you go, one can't "be a woman" and not support and take part in the modern feminist sacrament of abortion. See, liberals are the "open minded nice folks" -- the only "catch" is that you MUST agree with them!
