The tyranny of the Left

Beauty and the beasts


AS A boy I was urged to join the Left to fight sexism, McCarthyism and the vicious snobbery of the upper class.
But, wow. What's happened to that Left now?
Take the persecution of Miss California, 23-year-old Carrie Prejean.

Prejean last month competed in the Miss USA final, where she was inexplicably asked by a judge, celebrity blogger Perez Hilton, what she thought of gay marriage.
Hilton, not incidentally, is dye-my-hair-blue gay, but such is the official tolerance of these times that he was naturally asked to judge a pick-a-chick show for hetero fantasists.
But that official tolerance is also such that half the crowd started to boo when Prejean, a Christian, respectfully gave her answer: "I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman."
Despite the catcalling, Prejean's opinion was not actually a minority one even in hey-dude California, where voters last year passed a referendum overturning their highest court's decision to legalise gay marriage.
Indeed, even President Barack Obama - a hero of the Left who has "inspired millions", according to this same Hilton - said before the election that he was against gay marriage, too, because "I believe marriage is between a man and a woman".
Just what Prejean said.
But merely expressing her private opinion - and one shared by her President - did not save Prejean from a witchhunt that would make even old Joe McCarthy cry "enough".
Hilton promptly called her a "dumb bitch", and gloated that her answer had cost her the Miss USA crown: "She lost it because of that question. She was definitely the frontrunner before that."
Yet the punishment of Prejean had barely begun. Organisers of Miss California issued a statement saying they were "saddened" by her response to the judge's direct question because "religious beliefs have no place in politics in the Miss California family".
They then cattily announced that not only did Prejean have breast implants, but the pageant had paid for them.
Now they're even checking if they can take away her Miss California crown, on the pretext she broke pageant rules by posing topless at 17 - even though she'd merely auditioned for Victoria's Secret with her back to the camera and an arm shielding her breasts.
And still that wasn't enough punishment for a hick woman who'd dared to hold an opinion not preached by the tolerant Left.
Keith Olbermann, posterboy of the Left-preaching MSNBC cable news network, decided this "boob" (snigger, snigger) had to be ridiculed for five uninterrupted minutes on his popular show in terms so personally abusive and sexist that any feminist should have erupted in blank fury.
He brought on Michael Musto, gay writer from the "progressive" Village Voice, and they snickered through lines like these: "She's dumb and twisted. She's sort of like a human Klaus Barbie doll . . . She thinks innuendo is an Italian suppository . . . They also paid for Carrie to cut off her penis . . .
"Now here's a babe who needs a brain implant. Maybe they could inject some fat from her butt. Oh, they have?"
And so on. For five minutes on prime time. Hurr, hurr, boob joke, hurr.
I said that feminists, whatever their politics, should have denounced this savage and sexist put-down of a woman for merely having expressed a personal opinion, particularly when that same opinion is excused when expressed by a man that's now the President.
Should have. But didn't. Here is Gloria Feldt, "women's rights activist", former Planned Parenthood boss and author of The War on Choice: The Right-Wing Attack on Women's Rights and How to Fight Back, on Fox News: "What Prejean needs is a heart transplant rather than the breast implants."
Ho, ho, more boob jokes, and this from a professional feminist.
You see, defending the tribe counts more than defending a principle. That is why the people tearing into Prejean refuse to say that Obama, who shares her opinion on gay marriage, is also a bitch, boob and moron who has buttock fat for brains and needs a heart transplant, the dumb bastard.
(Actually, I suspect these people excuse Obama as a liar, just saying what he must. And a liar is good, but an opponent of gay marriage evil.)
So what is this tribe that's being defended so viciously, and with such hypocrisy? It's the tribe of the Left. Of privilege, too. And patriarchy.
It's also a class - the kind of people who'd look down on a Miss USA audience, and would use the weapons of power, sex and caste to crush them in precisely the ways the Left once claimed to oppose.
We've seen this phenomenon played out before, of course, and recently.
Last year it was the turn of Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, to be monstered for being a conservative woman from small-town, Christian USA.
Palin, although a successful and popular corruption-buster and Governor of Alaska, was pilloried by the largely Left media as some thick hick, with white-trash morals and ideas above her station.
Salon.com's Cintra Wilson, allegedly a feminist, declared Palin "a power-mad, backwater beauty-pageant casualty" who has "me and my friends retching into our (designer) handbags".
Famed film critic and dandy Roger Ebert dismissed her as "a hopeless provincial", and sniffed: "Anyone who wears glasses that look weird is telling me something I don't want to know."
Our Fairfax newspapers painted her as a backblock bigot, falsely suggesting she'd called Obama "Sambo" and had censored books from her local library.
No slur was too outrageous or false to be flung in Palin's face by writers who'd swear blind they were warriors against intolerance, sexism and snobbery.
Cult filmmaker Michael Moore even claimed Palin's Down syndrome baby, Trig, was actually the son of her eldest daughter, and prominent gay campaigner and writer Andrew Sullivan demanded to see the birth records of a boy the Huffington Post mocked as "the runt of the litter" and the editor of Australia's far-Left Crikey website unforgivably called "a mongrel".
Even Palin's pregnant daughter, just 17, was held up and mocked as a symbol of working-class depravity.
Video Music Award host Russell Brand jeered that Palin "was pro-execution so she is going to give her (daughter) the electric chair for being a little slut". Marxist Guy Rundle, also of Crikey, smirked that her daughter "has a face that says yes".
Rarely have I seen such cruelty directed at children merely because their mother had conservative ideas. And was from the wrong class.
At least Pauline Hanson, the One Nation founder, was spared that final indignity, although she was made to suffer enough for being the voice of the poorest, most threatened and most voiceless of this information age - and, of course, for being an under-educated woman with a working-class accent.
She was repeatedly threatened, mocked, abused, spat on and finally jailed - on false charges - by protesters, politicians and judges who'd otherwise claim to be on the side of women and the oppressed.
This year she was falsely assumed by some papers to be just the trash who'd have posed for porn pictures, too, and deserved to have those fake pictures run without proper checking.
I had little truck with her policies, but I always knew there was less to fear from Hanson than from a class and a creed that could strike her down with such cackling savagery.
And that same calculation applies with Carrie Prejean. Whatever this beauty queen says cannot threaten anyone half as much as does the cruelty of her powerful critics.