Mommy Wars

I really have tried to bite my tongue on a lot of this. After all, if you are going to play politics, you have to be able to endure the "slings and arrows". However, the crescendo has reached such a fever pitch that something must be said.

Since August 29, the liberal/progressive side of the political debate started trying to find the "dirt" on Sarah Palin. The attacks have ranged from juvenile to vile. Rather than address the ones that have come out so far, I will point you to these two websites as they have done all the hard work so far.

But the arguments that have really stuck in my craw are the statements that Governor Palin can't run for office and take good care of her son Trig and the converse (that came out yesterday) complaining that Governor Palin is (gasp) taking her children with her on the campaign trail! These are the kinds of attacks (you can't work and be a good mom) that women have been fighting for half a decade. What is worse is that this is coming out of supporters of the party that supposedly gives a fig about womens rights! While I don't find this surprising (after all they used these tactics against Senator Clinton in the primaries) the sexist comments coming out of Senator Obama's supporters are growing in their histrionics.

Senator Obama and his surrogates in the media are worried. They understand that Sarah Barracuda is "the real deal" and they are trying their darnedest to smear her. It got to the point where Democrat Kersten Powers (HT Gary at LFR) took the feminist movement and the media to task over their reaction.

Last night, "Sarah Barracuda" more than lived up to that slogan as she fought back at the media and Washington naysayers who've ridiculed her as a bimbo bumpkin interloper and showed she isn't going to be pushed around.

Had the media not been viciously attacking her family for the last few days, the speech might've seemed too tough. With that backdrop, it was more than appropriate.

The Obama camp also gave her the perfect chance to smack it around for being elitists - since its first response to John McCain picking her was to ridicule the size of her home town.

On that stage last night, Sarah Palin represented everything the feminist movement claims to strive for: a successful working woman with a happy family life and a husband who helps raise the children. Yet, rather than hailing her accomplishment, the feminist establishment has sat by silently as she's savaged for being a working mother.

Turns out old feminism is really just a bunch of good 'ole girls telling you what to think.

The latest offense came from Senator Obama himself when he turned Governor Palin's "pitbull/hockey mom joke" around saying that even if you put "lipstick on a pig it's still a pig". Imagine the righteous howls of indignation if someone referred to either Senator Obama (and his policies) or Senator Biden - I don't care HOW jokingingly - as a "pig". The left and the media would be apoplectic!

It is obvious that the Obama campaign is scared to death of Governor Palin. If not why would they have sent an army of lawyers and opposition researchers to Juneau and Wasilla to try to dig up dirt of Sarah Palin. (HT Ed) . It is also obvious that supporters of Senator Obama only care about feminist "ideals" when the feminist is one of theirs. I just heard an Obama supporter call into Rush Limbaugh's program and on national radio call Governor Palin a "smelly pig"!

And that could very well be the tale of the campaign as this site indicates:

We keep saying this — and no one seems to listen — but over the course of this campaign, we’ve met about 50 people who worked on McGovern-72, and every one of them said to us, without quivocation, that the main reason McGovern lost to Nixon was McGOVERN’S SUPPORTERS. The way McGovern’s “youth army” behaved, and the terrible things they did in McGovern’s name, worked against their candidate and every day drove more people who would have never voted Republican over to Nixon.

We’ll try to spell this out even more clearly: when people see things like this anti-Palin Ebay stunt, it makes normal people wonder why they would support SoetorObama, if this is what his followers are up to. It makes people who might have pulled the lever for this man question the very act of putting someone like this into office, when these are the types of followers he attracts.

People do not want to be associated with this sort of filth – and the fact that SoetorObama’s campaign doesn’t clamp down hard and stop this sort of daily, vulgar, nastiness says A GREAT DEAL about the person Oprah calls “The One”.

They are correct - the more "The One" and his followers stoop into the gutter to attack Sarah, Bristol and Trig Palin, the more they are going to turn off voters that only get their news in 30 second sound bytes on the nightly news. They are going to remember Senator Obama's pledge not to engage in this kind of cynical personal attack and they are going to reject him just as certainly as the electorate rejected Senator McGovern back in 1972.