Palin just wrapped up her speech at the controversial Tea Party Convention. Reaction on Twitter seems to be overwhelmingly positive. Pundits and liberals have stopped listening and just give a knee-jerk “she’s a crazy, fear-monger, blah, blah, blah.” Palin events are helpful though. I always delete the annoying people on Twitter who trash her.

I have mixed feelings about this speech. It was very policy-focused. Much more than I would have expected. She covered national defense, foreign policy, spending and taxes, Obama’s inability to be a responsible leader, listening to the people, and getting involved in local government. She was speaking to her most ardent fans tonight, and it was a good opportunity to lay out her views if 2012 is in her plans. Judging from her speech, I would say that 2012 is very, very possible. I look forward to reading the transcripts when someone finally posts them on the web.

Everything she said, I agree with. That’s the reason why I’m a fan of Palin. She’s not afraid to be frank and address the issue that actually concern Americans. Some call it populism. I would call it recognizing what average Americans are actually facing. Unless you work for the Democratic party, and your head is completely in the sand, Palin addressed concerns that Obama seems incapable of acknowledging. I’m just tired of the populist charge against Palin and Tea Parties. It shows how great the chasm is between the Beltway and real issues going on. If Washington was in step with the desires of the American people, the Tea Party movement wouldn’t have started last year. It’s painful to live in the Beltway and understand how the sausage is made but still side with the grassroots.

She said many things that I applaud. Namely that no one person is the leader of the Tea Party movement and that no politician is perfect. That can’t be emphasized enough. Was Palin speaking to her own supporters? If you read this blog more than once, you’ll realize that I am a Palin fan. However, she’s made mistakes. I don’t agree with her on everything, nor should I. There will never be a perfect politician. Even Reagan made his supporters mad on occasion. Unfortunately, Palin is attacked so much by the media and liberals, that deserved criticism is not tolerated within the Sarah-sphere. There’s also an element of blind worship that mirrors Obama adoration. Those two factors worry me.

Her delivery seemed off tonight, which annoyed me. Maybe I’m overly critical, but it sounded unpracticed. She stumbled through it and never found a steady rhythm. This was a speech that needed a TelePrompTer for a better delivery. There was not enough repetition in it to be read with notes. Her convention speech last year shows how well she can speak. I don’t think she practiced this. Stumbling and taking breaks to find your notes are signs of bad preparation. This was a policy-focused speech. She needed to keep her eyes on the audience and refrain from looking down, which hurts credibility and perceptions of confidence. Not surprisingly, Matthew Continetti at the Weekly Standard disagrees with me on this.

Sadly, Obama has ruined the use of TelePrompTers for everyone. They were once a good tool for delivering important speeches. Now, using one is seen as a crutch. Had Palin walked out there using a TelemPrompTer, the media would have attacked her with their double-standard of attacking Palin for breathing and blatantly ignoring idiotic mistakes that Obama makes (“corpsmen” comes to mind).

I’m glad Palin charged attendees with running for local office. Tea Party involvement needs to be more than holding up a sign and complaining about taxes. Government will not change unless you get involved. We’re hearing about Tea Party members running for office, but it’s still an exception rather than the rule. There should be so many Tea Party candidates running for local and state offices that it’s no longer news.

Will she run in 2012? I hope that I only have to say this once. The speech tonight points in that direction. However, we have absolutely no idea what the landscape will be like in 2012. I can’t predict the future, nor can anyone else. If by some chance Congress flips in November, it will likely restore balance that the American people seem to like. That puts us in a completely different position going into 2012 than the unified hatred towards Obama and his liberal cronies we see now. Also, voters are choosing Republicans as an alternative to the bad guys, not because they like them. The GOP has given no evidence that they learned any lessons from the Bush Administration and the great defeats 2006 and 2008. Two years of Big Republicanism will hurt anyone running for POTUS with an R after their name. This is Washington’s favorite sport, but I wish presidential speculation would just stop. In 2006, would anyone have predicted that McCain would be the nominee in 2008?

Townhall and RedState also have reactions up.

I spend a lot of time here discussing that if feminism is all about giving women choices how come only women who chose liberal positions merit the feminist label? Much of the time it seems that my opinions fall on deaf ears since most people on the right have completely given up on feminism or demonized it as evil. Since very few things in life are black and white, I set out last year to figure what feminism was about. Were all feminist evil harpies, characterized by Hillary Clinton, or had they actually done a few good things like revise rape laws and end workplace discrimination?

It’s very hard to find anyone willing to take middle ground on this issue. Feminists demonize anyone who diverges from the NOW-agenda for the 40+ and the Feministing crowd for the Xers and Millenials. Disagree with them, and it’s character assassination.

I was pleasantly surprised to see an article at MomLogic by two self-proclaimed pro-choice feminists that Sarah Palin is indeed a feminist.They echo many of the sentiments that I’ve shared over the past few months–namely that personal attacks simply because you dislike someone is not a rational political debate. Heather Robinson and Jennifer Ginsberg write:

Many of these columnists do not clearly explain why they believe Palin is not a feminist. But they suggest that her bid for vice president was a slap in the face to women. Their writing is filled with personal digs, referring to Palin, for example, as a “moose-killing former governor and mother of five,” and “Caribou Barbie.”

They believe these names cover a true reason for the attacks:

Women don’t come out and say they don’t consider Palin a feminist because she’s pro-life, because she made the brave choice to give birth to a baby with special challenges, or because she’s religious. But we believe those things (perhaps along with her beauty, and the fact that she hunts, and she’s managed to have both a successful career and a family) are what’s eating them.

I imagine if you’re Suzy Q Feminist and either fought your entire life for “equality,” or became of fan of feminism in order to overthrow the shackles of your middle class existence, Sarah Palin was a huge slap in the face.  A conservative, state-educated woman, a former beauty pagent winner (and we all know that beauty pagents are evil since Naomi Wolf told us so), hunter and PRO-LIFE woman is getting street cred for being a femininst. It would be like getting MVP status at a ball game without showing up to any practices. She didn’t have click moments at her Womyns Center at an Ivy League college, join any marches in DC or file any lawsuits against chauvenistic, capitalistic male co-workers.

Rather than pick a political issue and spend her life talking about it and complaining about it, Palin lived it. She didn’t spend time navel-gazing and writing op-eds about the difficulties of being a working mother or a woman in politics, she just overcame the obstacles and was successful. (There seems to be a lot of that on the right.) As the authors note:

All her life, this woman competed with men on an equal playing field, and in terms of concrete achievement, has done far more than many feminists who stick within their own homogenous enclaves and, frankly, spend a lot of time complaining.

Their last two paragraphs summarize why I write this blog, and why I furiously fight any attempt to be labeled by the f-word:

If feminism’s overall goals are advancing women’s freedom and empowerment, and promoting equality with men, we should have a great big inclusive tent that welcomes different religious and personal philosophies. We can recognize there is room for significant disagreement in our ranks, but that we share some core values.

In years to come, technology may radically alter the way we view issues like abortion. It’s tragic that the real definition of feminism, a doctrine that advocates equal rights for women, has become blurred over this single issue.

In a move that will likely inspire in snobby retorts from liberal elites and SNL jokes, Sarah Palin will attend the Daytona 500.

Aside from taking a tour of the country’s WalMarts, I’m not really sure what else Palin could do to court Middle America. Honestly, if Palin didn’t already have the hokey American vibe going, this would come across as pandering. Where this any other candidate, it would be. In the case of Palin, I get the impression that she will actually enjoy herself.

Is Palin’s strategy to distance herself from the political world and ingratiate herself into American culture? She’s on a tabloid and is a Fox News contributor. Next month, she’ll headline the controversial Tea Party Convention in Nashville. She’s doing a good job of keeping her name in news. (Although, I doubt liberals would allow that to happen. They are far too addicted to trashing her. I’m starting to believe she’s the outlet for repressed disappointment in Obama.)

Has any other potential presidential candidate taken that route? I’m drawing a blank. Is 2012 her endgame or is she content in creating a personality-driven empire more akin to Oprah?

This is a first. Sarah Palin and her daughter Bristol are the cover story of In Touch this week.

Definitely taking a pro-life approach, the article features the two women and their roles as mothers of young children.

Jezebel mocks the Palin’s decision to grace the cover of In Touch:

According to its media kit, In Touch has a circulation of about 800,000 — 85% of whom are women, at a median age of 30. Will these people, who usually look to the magazine for Brad and Angie “news,” be curious enough about the former Vice Presidential candidate to buy the issue? (Wouldn’t they much rather see an in depth at-home with the Jolie-Pitts? We would!) On the other hand, the Palins could broaden the magazine’s reach: Those who have never picked up the celebrity glossy may find the Palins intriguing, and sales could get a bump that way. As for Sarah Palin, is she reaching out to these women, trying to convince them that she’s just like them — a working mom with issues, trying to make the best of it? Maybe.

My first reaction was surprise. Palin has the star power to be on the cover of practically any magazine. Why In Touch? Why  lower her image to a supermarket tabloid when she could do respectable press? Then I thought about it. I think giving an exclusive to In Touch does broaden her appeal to women. Jezebel discloses that the median readers are 30 and female. What they don’t mention is the median household income is $66,592, putting them comfortably in the middle class. These aren’t Glamour readers, nor are they picking up Town & Country.

Let’s think about this. Who are Palin’s supporters? Average middle class Americans. Who makes up In Touch’s readers? Average, middle class women who are bored standing in the checkout line at Wal-Mart. She’s transcending the political world and reaching directly out to her base, and I seriously doubt any of the Jezebel writers would grace Wal-Mart.

The general public doesn’t read political media. Sure, most people watch the news, but only a small segment follow it obsessively. If Palin is going to get her message beyond the politicos and echo chamber of the blogosphere, she has to do press like this. Once you get past the snobbery of the tabloid, there’s a smart strategy here.

Until Palin became a Fox News contributor (which was less surprising than the revelation that Mark McGuire took steroids. yawn.), she depended on Facebook to get her message out. Giving interviews like this one gets her off the same meme that the media won’t move past. I’m sick of hearing he said/she said comments about her VP debate prep. I’m sick of hearing about Wardrobegate. The media seems incapable of moving past the 2008 election. This type of story gives her another means of personalizing herself to average American women.

Traditionally, this group does not vote Republican, so it is critical to woo them if she has aspirations in 2012. This group is also less likely to be the obsessive political types and are busy. Therefore, they’re going to believe whatever talking points the main outlets put out there.

This article also gets a pro-life message out of the religious and political debate. I’ve said before that Christians are losing today because we stopped engaging in pop culture. It’s not very often that pro-life stories are positively protrayed in the media. Usually, we’re seen as religious zealots or potential bombers. Frankly, it’s nice to see a change.

And now more completely unsurprising news about Sarah Palin…

She’s the second-most admired woman in the country after Hillary Clinton. Per Politico:

When Gallup asked 1,025 adults nationwide to name the woman they admire most, 16 percent picked Clinton. Palin was the only other woman to be mentioned by at least 10 percent, being selected by 15 percent of those surveyed.

Clinton has been in the public eye for nearly 20 years now, whereas Palin a little over one. Given Palin’s grassroots following, no. 1 book, and unbelievably successful booktour, this is not a big surprise. Honestly, this poll is probably more of an indicator of who’s been in the news the most. Top of the Ticket notes that Clinton has been ranked since 1993, the year she moved into the White House:

Earlier today, I wrote a post in response to AC Kleinheider’s column. It was getting lengthy, so I broke it into two parts. Below is Part II. Click here for Part I.

It’s not very often that I find myself agreeing with Tennessee bloggers, Betsy Phillips at Tiny Cat Pants or Newscoma. While always provocative, they represent more of the old-school feminism that I rail against most days. However, today they are nearly correct in responding to Kleinheider’s asinine post about conservative women in Tennessee.

To a large degree, Aunt B gets it:

Which brings us to the second thing happening–basic, humanitarian feminist ideals have permeated so far into our culture that even non-feminist women have basic, core feminist values they expect for themselves. They expect to speak and be listened to. They expect to be able to run for office and win. They expect recognition for their own work and to have that work attributed to them and not to their spouses. And they expect to have enough freedom of movement to be able to travel around and campaign.

Yes, Aunt B, to some extent feminism has been successful. But this success is hardly what the founders of the women’s liberation movement wanted in the 1960s. We’ve achieved equality in society. I find it a failure of the conservative movement that it took radical liberals to bring about this change. Equality should be inherent in the conservative platform of individual rights and free enterprise. It’s ironic that conservative women are the success story in this 50-year struggle. That’s what smarts for feminists. It’s a bittersweet victory if conservative women are the first ones to achieve their arbitrary goals and break the numerous ceilings that keep popping up.

Few can have problems with equity feminism.  I fully support those positions. What Aunt B fails to mention are the two different types of feminism, which Christina Hoff Sommers notes in her book, Who Stole Feminism? She and a few other authors explain the difference between  equity feminism and gender feminism. Aunt B is discussing equity feminism, which I support and most people on the planet support. She hints at the differences:

And third, feminists are still enough of a bogey-person (ha) among conservatives, that Republican woman can go a long way–thanks to feminists–while insisting that they are not like those FEMINISTS!!!! Even though, they clearly are. I mean, you folks who lived through the 60s and 70s, when men were hollering about how feminists just wanted to be men, isn’t it hilarious that the first militant female congressman is Marsha Blackburn? And she’s a “Congressman” as some kind of anti-feminist stance? Hilarious.

Gender feminism, the victimization of women, the attacks on men and the relentless pursuit of abortion, is the f-word “bogey-person” that Aunt B references. As someone recently told me, “There’s feminism, all the equality stuff, and then there are femi-nazis.” This is an important distinction that shows feminists have not 1) done a very good job of educating people about what their ideology means or 2) They desperately want to hide the fissure in their movement and admit that one side is so far left that most Americans disagree with them.

We’re now two generations out from the women’s liberation movement. In the 90s and early part of this decade, feminism was simplified to “being a woman who makes choices for herself.” Sarah Palin represented what the modern feminists had been preaching for so long. She’s active in her community, balances a career and a family and enjoys a “partnership marriage” with a husband who doesn’t mind changing the diapers.  Palin was the first test of modern feminism, and they realized that they didn’t like what she represented. So on August 2008, the feminist movement collectively changed the definition that they had been preaching for twenty years. It was no longer good enough to be “a strong woman who made her own choices” but a woman who represented what was eerily similar to the platform of the Democratic Party.

It’s frustrating to see these mixed results. Yes, society has changed. Yes, society did need to change, but the claws are still out because the examples are conservative.  As Aunt B notes:

I mean, yeah, as a feminist, it does make me roll my eyes to see all these TNGOP women building off of the successes feminists have won for them while at the same time pretending to be the same old women they’ve always been.

Sigh…society has changed, and many conservatives with it. Just because you’re stuck in the 80s, doesn’t mean we are. Younger generations have much more nuanced views towards thorny issues like staying at home vs. working. I guess you could call that a feminist victory, but it’s really a reflection of societal change, generatonal differences and sheer economics.

Its genuinely hard for a woman to stay at home now. Due to inflation and higher costs of living, it’s not really possible for most families to exist on one income. Our standards of living have increased since the 70s/80s, but real costs of education and housing making working absolutely necessary. I’ve written before about the debt load that young people are facing. Student loans are a major factor in why young people are postponing marriage and why young mothers are forced to work. Very few conservatives are still going to debate the working mom vs. stay-at-home mom debate. It’s a decision that should be left up to individual families.

Is it best for children to have one parent at home? I believe so. Does it matter if the parent is the mother or father? I don’t think so. I think the two post-feminism generations have extremely different views on gender roles and the second shift work. The concept of sex discrimination never really crosses our minds, and we don’t view our professional and political activities through a gender lens. Many older feminists are extremely angry at those changes, but it’s only inevitable as time pushes generations farther away.

What feminism has done is force women to walk a narrow ideological plank. While feminism claims that it advocates the right for women to make the best choices for themselves, it only advocates for choices that align with progressive politics. It may be possible for a woman to decide to work or a woman to stay at home. But her choices to work outside the home will be the only socially acceptable one out there.

As Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, two leading Gen X feminists, explain in Grassroots: A Field Guide for Feminist Activism, a woman may be pro-life and a feminist, but the moment she advocates for pro-life issues, she’s no longer a feminist. The moment that a conservative woman advocates for issues that are not deemed acceptable by the larger feminist movement, she can no longer carry the f-label.

It’s a problem when the definition of a movement is so vague that it covers everyone, but then it’s members only selectively invite women to the club. Either feminism stands for everyone or it doesn’t. The movement really needs to make a choice.

The emergence of conservative women is invigorating on the right and baffling to the left. A.C. Kleinheider’s piece in the Nashville City Paper would be funny if it didn’t capture the begrudging puzzlement of the larger media as to why the conservative movement suddenly looks so female:

Beyond a steady rightward shift and an increasingly reactionary rhetoric, conservative leadership is taking on another characteristic — it’s becoming more female. Both nationally and in Tennessee, the most beloved and vocal conservative leaders these days seem to be women.

Memo to Kleinheider: conservative women have always been here.  His comments confuse me. Does he not closely follow Tennessee and national politics? The existence of women on the right is hardly new:

Women need to be embraced as leaders — but not out of fear or necessity. It should happen the right way, or else the Right will merely be seen as a bunch of weak-willed reactionary little boys sending their women out to do their fighting for them.

Michele Bachmann was elected before Sarah Palin. Marsha Blackburn’s been involved in Tennessee politics for a long time now. Robin Smith was chairwoman of the TN GOP before Palin was on the scene. In order to have so many women running in 2010 means that women have been working up the ranks of the party and active in their communities for many years. It takes a long time to build up the name recognition, fundraisers and social capital to run for office. I’m surprised that he failed noticed that.

In fact, Republicans and conservatives have seen many of the “first” women across a number of categories. Labels and identity politics are just not as important to us. Just because the media suddenly noticed that women were in the conservative movement, doesn’t mean that we weren’t always there. Most of my political viewpoints come directly from my mother, who became a staunch conservative in the early 80s.  We’ve always been here. Now we’re getting the recognition that we deserve.

Palin is the catalyst not the movement.

Ironically, we owe it to the feminists and liberals in Congress for galvanizing all of the suddenly-visible conservative women that are shocking! Kleinheider.

This movement didn’t start with Sarah Palin nor will it end with her. Palin was the catalyst and should be analyzed, but the media, liberals and bloggers need to look at the bigger picture. Conservative women have always been in the movement, but Sarah Palin was the first woman to resonate with us. Prior to Palin, I always admired Elizabeth Dole. However, she was a DC insider with an Ivy League education. I could admire her (and the struggles she faced at Yale) but couldn’t identify with her. When Palin arrived, we had someone who reflected us.

Had the media and feminists said, “Great. The conservative movement is finally acting on what we’ve been preaching for 30 years,” I doubt that conservative women would now be so vocal. It was the the angry reaction of the feminist movement and the media that attacked Palin,  her family and her education. Suddenly liberals questioned if a woman could work and raise a large family. Her state education was ridiculed and her middle class existence was mocked. Those were the strengths that Palin represented. She was conservative and lived a very different lifestyle from the career politicians and bi-coastal elites, who are constantly telling us how to live.

By mocking Palin and what she represented, the media and feminists were collectively slapping the faces of every conservative woman in the country. This outrage is what motivated the  conservative women’s movement to come together, and what I’ve been writing about for over a year now.

This anger motivated countless numbers of bloggers. My friend, Tabitha Hale,  started her blog directly because of Palin. It led Teri Christoph to start Smart Girl Politics. It motivated a number of women who are now running for office.

Palin wasn’t the only factor though. Conservative women, just like conservative men, are angry at the government and our free-spending Congress. Women are just as involved as men in the Tea Party. The policies and activities of the Bush Administration and now the liberals in power are motivating men and women alike to stand up. Perhaps it’s a combination of our “traditional values” and anger that have caused women to be visible.

My dad told me this week, “I’m just as conservative as your mom, but I don’t have time to go to Tea Parties.” Ironically, the traditional values and roles that conservatives have long defended are what free women up to be active in the Tea Party movement. If Congressman Blackburn noticed that Tea Parties are largely female, it’s because there are more housewives on the right. My mom has always been a conservative activist because she had the time. If women control most of the purchasing power in this country, is it surprising that we’re actively protesting the wasteful actions of our government? Tea Parties are a reflection of the masses of Americans waking up to what Congress is doing, not a sudden pink-wash of the right.

Kleinheider, and others like him, should try to do a little research.  Again, this movement didn’t start with Sarah Palin nor will it end with her. My advice to reporters and academics would be to widen your angle beyond Palin, Bachmann and Blackburn. Palin was the catalyst and deserves to be analyze.  It is shortsighted to say that the conservative movement suddenly turned pink. You’re just now noticing us.

Much of the fault lies with academics. As Ronnee Schreiber notes in her book, Righting Feminism, hardly any academic study has been conducted on conservative women…ever. There was a small amount of research done after the failure of the ERA, but they assauged their failure by concluding conservative women are no different than conservative men. Since the 1980s, they’ve assumed that conservative women view politics indentically to men. Since we’re barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, we vote as our husbands and fathers do. They fail to see that conservative women are independently conservative because that’s the political movement they agree with. Since liberal feminists created the field of gender studies and created cushy jobs for themselves, it makes sense that they wouldn’t research areas that could potentially harm the movement and their sources of income.

To be concluded in Part 2.

Holy cow. Hell must have frozen over at Huffington Post. One of the writers actually read Going Rogue…and liked it!

According to Stephen H. Dinan:

What I found is that it wasn’t really that hard, actually, simply by taking the time to meet her on her own turf rather than through sounds bites, spin, and polarized media battles. Reading someone’s personal memoir is an intimate journey into their inner sanctum, and I developed a real appreciation for Sarah in reading the book. Aspects of her that seemed coarse, simplistic, or combative during the campaign were revealed to be a product of frontier values and growing up in a culture that is faced with subzero temperatures and constant tests of survival.

What! Palin isn’t an imbecile who totes a gun to everything? A liberal grasps the thought that she acts differently because she was raised in an environment far away from the East Coast. Dinan also notes  she’s not a Bible-thumping, Christian crazy:

For example, while her belief in God is deep and sincere, she wasn’t fanatical about it or dismissive of others. I found a real appreciation for the spiritual depths she went to when first faced with having a Down’s syndrome child. Her ultimate celebration of the beauty and perfection of that child, a child that 90% of people would have aborted according to statistics, was profoundly moving and it led hundreds of thousands of special needs children to feel championed through her campaign.

Perhaps if bi-coastal, urban liberals took a few minutes to actually talk to a Christian, they’d discover that most of are like this. Most Believers are genuine people who are facing their own struggles. Very few people are like the parodies that the left and media believe. Perhaps more leftist assumptions are wrong:

On other fronts, her pro-development views on energy and oil did not exclude a deep love for the environment and even an appreciation for alternative energy and reducing our carbon footprint. She wrote in moving terms about her husband’s indigenous ancestry and connection with the natural world, as well as the devastation wrought by the Exxon Valdez spill. Despite being pro-business she was heroically willing to face down the oil industry when it was corrupting the government of Alaska, a kind of bravery we need more of on both sides of the aisle.

OMG! It’s possible to be pro-environment and pro-business? Seriously. Where do liberals get their talking points. Its as if they take The Colbert Report at absolute face value and don’t try to get past the satire of what most conservatives represent. Diden also gets an angle that most members of media failed to see:

In reading the book, I started to see a lot more of myself and my upbringing in Sarah. I too had grown up in a frozen land – Northern Minnesota – a place of unpretentious, middle-class, hardworking people who believe in personal responsibility and straight-talking integrity. We, too, had our sled dog races, subzero temperatures and a spirit of camaraderie to make it through. I began to see her political values as a natural extension of those tough-minded virtues, enabling her to take on daunting tasks and succeed at each level of life.

This is perhaps the most telling paragraph. Not many people are willing to admit having a middle class background. I think that the urban elite vs. middle class difference is the biggest division in our country. Something happens to people when they live in big cities. The urbanites just can’t understand that to Middle America, our political views result from how policies should be practically implemented, not some philosophical rationale written by a bureaucrat or academic. Dinan also realized that SNL is probably not the best place to learn about a politician:

Reading Going Rogue makes me understand that Sarah is not the ruthlessly ambitious and cutthroat caricature we feared; she is a woman who has befriended Democrats personally and professionally, shown real leadership in fighting corruption, and taken a more nuanced position on several issues in which she seemed far more polarizing. She seems quite sincere in her desire to serve in whatever way the universe calls for that service.

Again, hell must be freezing. You mean Sarah Palin isn’t that superficial characterization from SNL? Sarah Palin doesn’t equal Tina Fey? Say it ain’t so.

Is it too much to ask that liberals understand that a person usually has more depth and character than portrayed in the media? Sadly, the McCain campaign made some mistakes and allowed the SNL frame to represent Palin. But did people really believe that’s how she is? Seriously?

I enjoy satire, but the images created by outlets like SNL, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are meant to entertain. They don’t adequetely represent the position or person. If Dinan is correct, liberals are lot more stupid than the most redneck Wal-mart shopper.

Dinan closes his column with a call to action:

I come away from reading Going Rogue feeling that it would be a useful act of citizenship for all those who feel prejudice towards her to read her book and meet her on her own turf in order to heal the lingering prejudices. I feel more balanced for having done so. I would also urge conservatives who hate or fear Obama to read his autobiography to better understand the man behind the political leader and thus heal their own biases.

What a novel idea! Read the book written by the person that you attack endless. At least Dinan did more than most people at HuffPo. That’s a start.

Feminists just can’t get past the shock that women throughout the country view Sarah Palin as a role model. It’s fascinating to watch all of the soul searching, navel gazing, head spinning and venom-spewing. I’m frankly getting tired of writing about it. Can y’all collectively get over yourselves and stop repeatedly asking the same damn questions?

That lovely blog that started the maelstrom against Taylor Swift decided to go interview women waiting in line for the Palin book signing in Fairfax, Va. and incorporate the cover article on feminism in Newsmax this month. The author, Amanda Hess, forgot to mention that the Newsmax article was written by S.E. Cupp, a young female conservative. Since young, female conservatives don’t exist in feminist-land and are only the creation of old, white men in the GOP, she had to  snidely attack the women waiting in line:

In “newer feminism,” every woman’s choices are valued—no matter what those choices mean for other women. Schlessinger isn’t an enforcer of rigid gender roles; she’s a facilitator of women’s choices. Palin’s opposition to abortion rights and comprehensive sex education isn’t anti-feminist; it is her choice to deny reproductive choices to other women. Under this model, Girls Gone Wild founder Joe Francis isn’t an exploiter; he’s a liberator of women’s breasts.

Umm…no. Joe Francis is a pornographer and will be to the vast majority of conservative women. But ladies — and I sincerely hope that Amanda Hess and her colleagues find this post– let me spell it out for you. Sarah Palin is simply a marriage of conservative values with the watered-down version of feminism that you gals sold in the 90s in order to save a crippled and dying movement. Until Palin appeared, no one on the right had represented a liberated woman “making choices for herself,” successfully balancing the family and a career, and enjoying a modern marriage with her not-so-metrosexual husband. You were operating under the assumption that the Gloria Steinem vs. Phyllis Schafly dynamic still worked.

Despite my staunchly anti-feminist upbringing, I’ve gotten familiar with the f-word. I worked for a quasi-feminist organization. Well, it’s an organization determined to train little feminists, but it gave me a solid crash course in all things liberal women. After I left that job, I decided to get to the bottom of this feminist issue. I had been blogging anonymously for nearly a year but had danced around the subject. After I moved back to the DC area, I dove into reading feminist theory, history and anything from the women’s studies genre. I was determined to understand what feminism was. The only problem was that feminists were asking that too.  Sadly for them, Palin arrived on the scene before they could reach an answer.

To understand it, let’s go back to the beginning. Hopefully, this history is familiar to most of you.

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