Monday, March 19, 2012

The Left's War on Women

Rand Simberg on the Left's long-term 'War' on women:


An evergreen guide to what the Left is doing or plans to do is to listen to what they accuse their political opponents of. Along those lines, incandescent in its projection, cynicism, and hypocrisy is the latest mantra emanating from the Democrats of the “Republican War On Women,” based on nothing more than some crude comments (since apologized for) by a talk-show host aimed at a Democrat feminist activist who thinks that the world owes her free (and expensive) contraception and, moreover, that it should be done in violation of the religious conscience of Catholics. Of course, they don’t want their demagoguery to be distracted by the annoying reality that their own misogyny and assault on women is much more virulent, and has been going on for much longer. 
It should be shocking, by the conventional narrative, that the White House of a “liberal” president would be a hostile work environment for women, but it is not at all a surprise to anyone familiar with the history of the Democrats and the Left, going back at least to the 1960s, when a prominent Democrat politician got a pass from the media for abandoning a young woman (possibly pregnant by him) to drown in his car. The same man went on to later fame as the top slice of bread in a “waitress sandwich,” and yet was so lionized by the Left that not that long ago, at the time of his death, a woman(!) wrote that Mary Jo Kopechne might have been happy to undergo the terror as her lungs filled with the brackish water of Martha’s Vineyard had she only known what a great legislator he would turn out to be. 
To see similar hypocritical Leftist misogyny, we need only go back to the last time a Democrat was in the White House. Whenever a woman came forward with allegations of inappropriate sexual conduct by Bill Clinton, the response of the Clinton defenders, both in and out of the media, was to attack her credibility, character, and virtue. Advisor James Carville famously said of Paula Jones (the young Arkansas state employee whom Clinton as governor had his state police guard procure to his hotel room for the purpose of orally pleasuring him), “Drag $100 bills through trailer parks, there’s no telling what you’ll find.” Evan Thomas of Newsweek dutifully complemented the slander by declaring her on national television “just some sleazy woman with big hair coming out of the trailer parks,” though he later was compelled to apologize in print. (One wonders how residents of trailer parks felt about that, but I guess empathy for them is for the little people.) When Kathleen Willey accused the president of groping her in the White House, and was physically threatened for her trouble, feminist icon and (former) scourge of sexual harassers Gloria Steinem said that it was no problem — he was entitled to a freebie, after which Cathy Young of Reason magazine reported on “the death of sexual harassment.”



Read the rest here.

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