Posts Tagged ‘John McCain’

Feminists: Here’s Your Problem

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

feminismFeminists 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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Stop the Speculation

Tuesday, December 1st, 2009

Allow me to vent for a second.

I realize that speculating about the next election is Washington’s favorite pastime, which is quickly followed by gossiping and complaining about Metro, but I’m sick of it.

The 2012 election is approximately 1,070 days away. Anything, literally anything can happen. There’s also a mid-term election coming up next year that could be a game changer. Sure, it’s likely that the GOP will pick up seats but it’s unknown if that will hurt or help our chances in 2012. There’s also a war going on in Afghanistan, a terrible economy, record government spending and a massive health care bill that could alter our society completely.

No one, and I repeat, no one knows what will happen in three years.

Think back to 2005. Did anyone think that John McCain and Barack Obama would become their parties’ nominees in 2008? If you did, please contact me. I’d like you to help me purchase stock and possibly pick out numbers to the next Powerball.

Unless you have the ability to predict the future, I’m absolutely sick of hearing guessing games about who will run in 2012. Let’s focus on next November first. There’s a lot of work ahead of us.

Going Rogue Faith

Tuesday, December 1st, 2009

On Twitter a number of people asked my opinions of Going Rogue, and I promised a review. Honestly, I doubt that I could say anything original. Overall, I enjoyed it. I felt like the last chapter was rushed and was a mixture of everything that she wanted to say and couldn’t fit in elsewhere. It’s a stupid attack to say that it Palin didn’t cover policy issues. Palin wrote an autobiography, not her plan to change America. She also writes extensively about energy and oil — the most important issues in Alaska. However, the one theme that stuck out to me was Sarah Palin and her faith.

US News and World Report finally published the first review of her book from the faith perspective. If anyone else has written on her faith, I’ve missed it.

Though most of the talk surrounding the release of Going Rogue revolves around how it affects Palin’s standing as a political figure, including her chances of winning the White House, should she choose to run, the book is as much poised to heighten Palin’s profile as a Christian leader. “It’s a mistake to frame all this in the context of her potential candidacy,” Mark DeMoss, one of the country’s top Christian media specialists, says of Going Rogue. “She wants to tell her story and the story of her personal faith journey.” At a time when politically conservative evangelicals lack a national figurehead, Palin’s ability to connect with them could also deepen her appeal to a key part of the Republican base. “Christian audiences could respond to this like they did when George W. Bush talked about his faith,” says John Green, a religion and politics expert at the University of Akron. “This community takes faith very seriously and likes people who talk about their faith journey.”

For the record, I am a Christian and started my relationship with Christ when I was four.* Hence, as a person who shares the same faith, my views of the book come from this perspective. Anytime a well-known figure writes about his or her faith, the media tries to find an angle behind it. A person can’t write about a relationship with God because it’s a crucial part of his or her existence but because he or she is trying to court a demographic or change public opinion.

When it comes to Palin, I get the impression she’s just writing about her journey with God.

To those who have not experienced a personal encounter with God, this is absolutely impossible to understand. Faith requires, well faith. It can’t be understood unless you believe and have experienced it yourself. It simply can’t be analyzed. If you are a Christian, your relationship with God is the single most important thing in your life. Everything else revolves around it. Your decisions, your actions, your thoughts — everything stems from your faith. If you are a Believer, it is impossible to write your memoirs without including your personal relationship with Christ. It’s more important than oxygen to our existence.

Hence, it is ridiculous to analyze Palin’s faith as an attempt to become an Evangelical leader, assume the mantle of James Dobson or get the Christian vote.

US News also covers how Palin’s faith affected her actions and political views:

Until now, that part of Palin’s story has been mostly implied. As John McCain’s vice presidential running mate last year, she generally avoided talk of her faith and its influence on her politics. But word of her decision to carry her pregnancy to term despite knowing her son Trig would be born with Down syndrome was an inspiration to antiabortion activists, mostly Roman Catholics and evangelicals. News that Palin’s unwed teen daughter Bristol was pregnant and would give birth had a similar effect. “[The Palins] should be commended once again for not just talking about their pro-life and pro-family values,” Focus on the Family’s James Dobson said at the time, “but living them out even in the midst of trying circumstances.”

I’ve seen a number of people attack Palin for writing that her first response to discovering she was pregnant was how easy it was to get an abortion. Why? She believes it’s wrong, but it’s still human nature to consider the easiest way out when faced with a dilemma. The “Christian” course of action is to realize that those actions are wrong and choose the course of life. Christians are just as human as everyone else and make mistakes, as evidenced by Bristol.

I had always admired Palin because she was a conservative women who reflected my views. After reading Going Rogue, my respect for her grew because I recognized a fellow Christian trying to live out her faith in a very public sphere. I would like to get the perspective of a liberal Christian’s views of her book. Would you respect Palin more as a fellow Believer or do politics still cloud opinion?

*I always hesitate to write about issues relating to faith. Once you expose yourself as a Believer, you get attacked anytime you deviate from the stereotype of what is “acceptable” as a Christian from both Christians and non-Christians. You also get written off as an uneducated nutjob or hick (i.e. Kenneth the Page from 30 Rock) . Frankly, writing about your faith is a hot mess, and I try to avoid it. However, it is impossible to write about Palin’s faith without responding as a fellow Christian.

The Transparency of Obama’s Web Use

Monday, November 16th, 2009

During the 2008 campaign, Obama pledged to have the most transparent administration ever. This was one of the first promises he broke by not posting bills to the web for a full five days before he signed them.

It appears, he is also not as transparent with his digital media prowess as the administration claimed:

Well, first of all, let me say that I have never used Twitter. I noticed that young people — they’re very busy with all these electronics. My thumbs are too clumsy to type in things on the phone.

Is this a major deal? Kind of. When you run your campaign on the premise that you’re the most amazing thing to happen to the Internet since Al Gore, you open yourself to criticism in the future, especially when your campaign was lauded for being an early adopter of the technology in question.

Sarah Granger at TechPresident opines:

Meanwhile, I expect we’ll see more hoopla about Barack Obama not using Twitter, even though his campaign never asserted that he did himself. So far about half of the follow-up tweets on the #obamacn hashtag are RT’s about the admission and the other half is people responding that they never thought he was tweeting. Are 50% of Twitter users really that surprised?

Yep, actually Sarah we are surprised. For a number of reasons.

First, remember all of the media attention about Obama refusing to give up his BlackBerry and the NSA having to build a super-deluxe-ultimately-secure version of software? That kind of negates Obama’s comment about thumbs and makes you question if he fully understand exactly what Twitter is. If you are addicted to a BlackBerry, how do you not have the skills to tweet? Same device and skill set. It’s also possible to use Twitter on a computer. Tweetdeck anyone?

Secondly, as James Richardson at RedState recalls, the Obama team released an add attacking McCain for not using technology. While the McCain camp deserved to be flogged for their lack of enagaging the interwebs, John McCain actually tweets every day. As Top of the Ticket points out, he has nearly 1.6 million followers. RedState notes:

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