Michelle Malkin on Conservative Female Abuse

Michelle Malkin's newest column explains this abuse in stark terms so that everyone can see exactly how the Left has attacked Sarah Palin. The derangement syndrome over Governor Palin is almost as bad as the derangement syndrome over President Bush. But it's worse than what he's faced for the last eight years because the fever swamp isn't just content on slandering her, or making her out to be some sort of bubble-headed, tabloid, center-of-attention whore. No, they want her bloodied and broken, sobbing like a little girl, and eventually leaving the ticket.

From her column, the key 'graphs:

The first stage of Conservative Female Abuse by the Left is infantilization. Right-wing women can’t possibly believe what they believe about the sanctity of life, self-defense, free markets, or foreign policy. They must be submissive little dolls of the White Male Hierarchy. Or, as a far Left (is there any other kind of Left in San Francisco?) San Francisco Chronicle columnist wrote of First Lady Laura Bush, they must be put in their place as “docile doormats” with no brains of their own. True to form, no sooner had John McCain announced Gov. Palin as his veep pick than jeers of “Palin = neocon puppet” sprouted across the Internet.

The second stage of CFA is sexualization. A conservative woman is not merely a sellout. She is an intellectual prostitute. Unable or unwilling to argue with them on the merits, detractors resort to mocking the physical appearance of their ideological opponents in skirts and denigrating them with vulgar epithets. MSNBC hosts insulted former GOP presidential candidate Fred Thompson’s accomplished wife and mother of two, Jeri Thompson, as working the stripper pole. Newspaper cartoonists Ted Rall, Pat Oliphant, and Jeff Danziger caricatured Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as a mammy, thick-lipped parrot, and Bush “House Nigga” armed with “hair straightener.” New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd derided former GOP Florida secretary of state Katherine Harris for applying “her makeup with a trowel.”

The third stage of CFA is demonization. When the Left tires of hurling whore insults, it turns conservative women in the public eye into nefarious creatures. Bill Maher called Laura Bush “Hitler’s dog.” George Carlin attacked Barbara Bush as “the Silver douchebag.” A Huffington Post website member wrote of Nancy Reagan: “Like her evil husband, she has lived far too long. Here’s hoping the hag suffers for several weeks, then croaks in the tub.” Another added: “I feel no pity for the bitch who took delight in watching thousands die of a horrible disease and watching the poor having to eat out of dumpsters because of her husband’s political beliefs.”

And the final stage of CFA is dehumanization. Conservative women aren’t real women according to the liberal feminist establishment’s definition. Remember when Gloria Steinem called Texas Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison a “female impersonator?” Or when curdled NOW leader Patricia Ireland instructed Democrats to vote only for “authentic” female political candidates? Or when Al Gore’s fashion consultant Naomi Wolf described the foreign-policy analysis of Jeane Kirkpatrick as being “uninflected by the experiences of the female body?”

This is how the angry Left plays the game. We can't sit back and claim we're going to "rise above the hyperbole" because in doing so we cede them the ground. We can't be content to merely take the high road on such matters. It's appalling that the Left would stoop to such levels -- the levels of childish, immature, and disrespectful name-calling -- but what do you expect from children? We've seen this for eight years, and we'll see it for eighty more until the mature people on their side of the aisle rise up and kick them out, or rise up, and slam their mouths shut.

Until then, we can't sit idly by and expect the media to be fair (they never are, they never have been, and they never will be) in dealing with news. The news is what they make it to be, and if it means having to slander people to move their ideological agenda forward, they'll do it. And we'll never expect surrogates to play the even-handed game. Nope, the only way to win is to fight back.

We have to be just as in-your-face and nasty as they are. The only difference is that we're not going to throw out rumors and innuendo to attack them back. We're not going to fall back on character attacks. We're going to hit them where it counts -- on the issues, and using truth as our defense. Let them play in the mud with the pigs. But if it's a bare-knuckle street brawl that the Left wants, then so be it. We can, and should, fight like that. Give them no ground. "Give them nothing, but take from them everything," as King Leonidas famously quipped in "300."

If it's a fight they're itching for, then I say it's time we obliged them. Enough of the high road. Let's take this to them, and remind them, again, why they don't want to go down this road, and attack the women we highly respect for their accomplishments, their candor, and their level-headed, common-sense demeanor.

Publius II