Boston Herald | Op-Ed | October 20, 2010
From high upon her perch at The New York Times, the acerbic Maureen Dowd has looked down upon the current crop of female Republican candidates and dubbed them “mean girls.”
Interesting choice of words from a columnist who traffics regularly in sarcasm and spite.
With the stroke of a pen, Dowd defames conservative women, calling them “cheerleaders” and “grownup versions of those teenage tormentors who would steal your boyfriend, spray-paint your locker and, just for good measure, spread rumors that you were pregnant.”
Dowd is not the only liberal commentator to throw a temper-tantrum over the GOP’s female candidates.
In fact, everywhere you turn, liberal pundits are in meltdown mode. There’s the crew over at MSNBC: Chris Matthews, who can’t stop referring to Delaware senatorial candidate Christine O’Donnell as “irresistably cute” and “attractive as hell,” while simultaneously trashing her as an idiot; and Keith Olbermann who refers to Rep. Michele Bachmann as a “moron” who would be better off on “The Real Housewives of New Jersey.”
Then there is Bill Maher, who writes in the Huffington Post of “the lovely MILFs of the new Right.” Granted, Maher is a comedian. But I doubt the National Organization for Women would find it funny if Maher referred to Nancy Pelosi or Hillary Clinton this way.
Next up is Daily Beast columnist Linda Hishman, who belittles female GOP candidates as “modestly educated, beauty-queen types.”
Let’s not forget Hirshman’s publisher, Tina Brown, formerly of Vanity Fair, whose Daily Beast waxes poetic about Republican women who use their “soft features,” “killer curves,” and “slightly bodacious, but fundamentally unthreatening,” looks to lure voters into their political lair.
Apparently, we are to believe that attractice Republican women are all bimbos.
Meanwhile, NOW — patron saint of hypocrites — boldly endorses California Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown just hours after Brown (or someone talking to Brown) is caught on tape calling his female Republican opponent a “whore.” Nice going.
But, hey, what else would you expect from an organization that decried workplace harassment until the harasser happened to be a popular Democratic president, and that sought equal representation of women in public life, but then opposed almost every woman President George W. Bush nominated to the federal judiciary?
I’m not saying that a women’s group must endorse all female candidates or that GOP women should be immune from criticism. But the trashing of female Republicans by Dowd and her ilk reeks not only of desperation but of the very sexism these people claim to oppose.
Admittedly, liberals have been handed a gift in Delaware’s O’Donnell, who seems to have spent an inordinate amount of time babbling about witchcraft and other nonsense on Comedy Central’s “Politically Incorrect.” She’s now paying the price for her youthful flirtation with fame. Fair enough.
But the deliberate attempt to use O’Donnell to paint all Repiblican women as voodoo-dabbling kooks will fail. That is because most of the GOP’s female candidates — women like Carly Fiorina, Nikki Haley, Michele Bachman, Jan Brewer, and Meg Whitman — are competant leaders and serious political contenders.
Indeed, the indisputable professional, business, and political success of the these women contradicts the feminist narrative of oppression and victimization. Which is why infantile leftists like Dowd revert to calling them witches mean girls, and whores. So much for sisterhood.
Originally published in the October 20, 2010 print edition of The Boston Herald.