Sarah Palin: Revenge of the Vagina (Monologues)

American Thinker ^ | June 26, 2009 | Stuart Schwartz

[neverdem]

Sarah Palin is Eve Ensler's worst nightmare.

That's all you need to know to understand the dramatic impact of the individual who continues to be the target of a cultural and political elite that looks for "anything that will criminalize and/or humiliate Palin and her family."  Sarah Palin, of course, is the charismatic, conservative Alaska governor who is unapologetically traditional and Christian in her politics and values. And Eve Ensler is the feminist who wrote the play The Vagina Monologues and has been enshrined by our cultural elite for her bizarre, sometimes depraved, and often just plain silly promotion of a sexual organ as the font of all wisdom.

To understand the Palin hatred, almost always expressed in sexual terms (the David Letterman assessment of her as "slutty" is fairly mild in the Palin-hater scheme of misogynistic insults), you have to understand the profound absurdity of our leftist culture. Ensler's play has been arguably the most visible part of the elite arts scene for more than a decade, performed by adoring feminists at more than 4,000 campuses and college communities in the United States in the past year alone. Her vagina-as-god message has attracted more than twenty awards and a flock of celebrities and politicians anxious to be associated with the playwright who "invented the vagina."

Her original off-Broadway play featured the "good rape" of a 13-year old girl by a lesbian woman who abuses the girl after getting her drunk in order to cure her of the aftereffects of a rape by an adult male some years before. Why is it "good"? Because lesbian abuse of a minor strikes a blow against an established worldview that, according to Ensler and her supporters, must be replaced with...Ensler and her supporters.

The Ensler worldview has become a dominant part of a culture -- most evident on university campuses and in trendy, upscale urban areas -- that promotes spiritual transformation through gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender sex -- not even relationships, just sex.  In this, the world's brutality comes from traditional relationships, which lead to the kind of abuse that Ensler has raised more than $50 million to combat.  How dominant is this view? The New York Times put              its cultural stamp of approval on the world according to Ensler, describing her as "brilliant," a "messiah heralding the second wave of feminism."

Into all of this strides Sarah Palin, who is refreshingly and wonderfully normal, appealing to the vast majority of Americans who don't read The New York Times (303,062,059 at last count) and shake their heads in dismay at the almost endless lineup of celebrities rhapsodizing over the opportunity, like actress Glen Close, to get "2,500 people to stand and chant the word c**t."  Or who, unlike the educators bringing culture to their children, don't think that expanding "the identity category of ‘woman'" to "male-to-female trans individuals" will bring peace on earth and goodwill toward...well, all politically sanctioned victims.

Palin is enormously attractive to a majority that has found itself increasingly scorned for middle class values that emphasize morality, tradition and civility (see Bruce Walker's "The Murder of Civil Life" in American Thinker for insight on this). This wide swath of traditional America has found its "proud sense of respectability and family commitment," conservative critic Michael Medved writes, threatened by a cultural avalanche of sex-as-wisdom media and a political class that encourages government dependency by culturally-appointed victims in both public and private life.

Enter the Alaska governor on the national stage. Just when the average American thinks all is lost and Washington is Mordor-on-the-Potomac, Sarah Palin does the unthinkable in a politician: she serves, she works, she makes sense, and she is unapologetically a mother, a wife, and a Christian. She battled corrupt politicians of both parties in Alaska and won, prompting Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard to describe her, a year before she became the running mate of John McCain, as a politician of "eye-popping integrity." No victim, she: Sarah Palin absorbs the shocks of life the way a ShamWow absorbs water.

Her stewardship of Alaska government has broken the logjam of corruption created by decades of Republican and Democratic politicians, including the incumbent she defeated, and reversed the rating of the governor's office by Alaskans from last to leading all states. Her leadership has enticed Canada and major oil producers to join her in putting together a gas pipeline deal that will do more for U.S. energy self-sufficiency than all the czars and czardines of the Obama administration put together.  "By defying naysayers," Investors Business Daily editorialized this month, "Sarah Palin is now vindicated."

Ordinary Americans are responding. Jay Valentine writes in American Thinker that she would "fill a stadium if she were reciting a cookbook." She has been glowingly compared with Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy and -- worst of all, in the eyes of liberals -- Franklin D. Roosevelt (her connection with the average person is a "rare talent" shared by the iconic originator of the New Deal).

And so, too, is the Ensler left. Just as rape is "good" when done for politically correct purposes, so is demonizing an accomplished woman when she threatens the liberal culture that has dominated the past decade. The media establishment has been particularly vicious in its attempt to trivialize her by reducing her to a sexual object. The Associated Press, for example, routinely photographed her as a vice presidential candidate from an angle that emphasized her calves, deliberately playing on images of strippers; Reuters had a more Ensler-like body part in mind when it paired her with a "jacuzzi (sic) floozy"; Yahoo focused on her breasts; Slate, owned by the Washington Post, was reliably Ensler-like when it tagged her as a pornography archetype, the "Sexy Puritan"; and entertainer Sandra Bernhard won applause and laughs from theatergoers and mainstream Washington D.C. media when she warned that Palin would be "gang-raped by my big black brothers" in retaliation for her conservative views.

Palin does not only threaten liberals; she also threatens culturally elite conservatives, who unashamedly savaged a woman who is so...so...well, gauche that she actually admits to praying. Town Hall (by way of the San Francisco Chronical) columnist Debra J. Saunders spoke for a conservative establishment that resented Palin's extraordinary effect on voters when she wrote,   "I wish Sarah Palin would just go away."  Columnist Kathleen Parker of the Washington Post and National Review attracted cheers from the elite right when she spat, "If BS were currency, Palin could bail out Wall Street herself."

The Washington Post, which has devoted much of the past decade celebrating the Ensler culture, nastily declared that her "greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman."  Those were among the kinder words written by one of its showcased writers on faith, a University of Chicago divinity school professor who also derisively noted that someone who "has a womb and makes lots and lots of babies (and drives them to school! wow!)" does not a woman make.

So what does make a woman...politically, that is? Hate and cultural conformity, to judge by the venom spilling from the nation's elite.  Ensler promotes this, exhorting women to "vote with your vaginas" and put Democrats in office. She has urged them "to get our vaginas to the polls", in this last election warning that a vote for Palin is the equivalent of a vote for rape...the bad kind. Women -- and those non-traditional men who have escaped gender stereotypes to embrace a walk down the "vagina trail" -- should ask themselves: what would your vagina do?

However, judging by the sea of women in the enthusiastic crowds Palin continues to attract, Eve Ensler is not getting the answer she prefers.

[LibLieSlayer]

You have the cognitive skills or a turnip.

LLS

[LibLieSlayer]

kennedy=human feces... lowest type... infectious and smelly evil.

LLS

[rlmorel]

"...rhapsodizing over the opportunity, like actress Glen Close, to get "2,500 people to stand and chant the word c**t..."

Well, I know of at least 2,500 Vietnam War Vets who might sign on if the right woman was chosen as their audience...

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

Sarah has been glowingly compared with Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy and Franklin D. Roosevelt? Seriously? By sentient humans? I don’t see it. I see Sarah as another Obama, an Affirmative Action Selection, with followers and fans who confuse presentability with competence. I mean, if the young, photogenic, conservative governor of Alaska had been a man, would McCain’s VP selectors (or I) have ever even heard of him? 4 posted on 06/26/2009 1:03:49 AM PDT by flowerplough

Also, you do realize that the Kennedy mystique was bought and bottled for you to lap up?

Jack Kennedy, just like Fat Ted, was a party-boy nincompoop who wouldn’t have made it into Harvard without big donations from old Joe, and wouldn’t have made it out of Harvard without the best tutors and ringers that money could hire. “Profiles in Courage” was ghost-written in its entirety by a Kennedy family flunky, and handed an undeserved Pulitzer thanks to more bribes from the old man.

If Sarah Palin had been born with the same advantages in life that Jack Kennedy had, she’d blow him out of the water. I think she may yet do so anyway.

Certainly Palin's being a woman contributed to her selection as VP nominee. But as between her and Joe Lieberman, I'll take her.

Of course we like to think that we have a choice and should choose the best "man" - but in reality we almost never do choose the best man. Ronald Reagan arguably was the best man for us to have as president. Maybe. But that is not true of any Democrat in my lifetime (at least), so why should we think that the Republican Party would always - or even frequently - nominate the best? Was GWB the best native-born American over the age of 35 to be president? Or only the best we could get elected?

My point is that there are any number of really excellent people who do not ever put themselves forward as politicians. Steve Jobs is not someone whose politics I admire, but he is someone who exemplifies a technology CEO. He has a vision of where his organization can go and what it can be, and he rejects mediocrity and gets things done. Is it too much to ask that the president of the United States love the country and its founding culture, have a vision of what can best make the country approach its own ideals - a vision which he/she articulates openly, fluidly and with conviction in season and out, and who has shown the ability to get things done? That describes Ronald Reagan. It also describes Sarah Palin. Who else does it describe? - John McCain? Hah!

A lot of senators get nominated for POTUS, but Warren G. Harding is the only one ever to beat a governor - and none has ever unseated a sitting president - in a general election. So clear your mind, and just focus on the fact that unless you have a Dwight Eisenhower or a Ulysses Grant you need to nominate a governor for POTUS. It is also a fact that no lifer politician has ever been elected POTUS - if you get to be a senator or governor, you either make it to national office within 14 years, or you ain't never gonna be elected POTUS. So the question is, "What rising star governor do I want the Republican Party nominate?" The closest thing to an answer to that question looks to be Sarah Palin.

I will go further, and say that it could be crucial who is given the VP nomination in '12. Not to burnish the credentials of the presidential nominee, but to effectively target the Democratic incumbent. And that could require the nomination of a black conservative with a paper-thin resume for VP. Let's face it, Obama's resume was in effect paper thin, in things that matter. There is no point in making "better" be the enemy of good enough; we need a win in '12.

[668 - Neighbor of the Beast]

I’m naturally skeptical, especially of politicians. They get elected on style, not substance.
Palin, however, can think on her feet; she doesn’t stammer and rely on the teleprompter (has anyone forgotten the malfunction she overcame?) She has demonstrated her ability to answer a question in a complex sentence without losing her way, and when she’s done you know you’ve heard a reasonable thought expressed properly.
She has convinced me, too, of her conservativism.
And that makes two criteria of intelligence. So don’t try to tell me she is not bright. It’s just that when a woman so attractive arrives on the scene, 9 times out of 10 you’re going to be disappointed when she opens her mouth.
Palin is that 1 in 10 exception among attractive women, and among politicians she’s 1 in 1,000.
That said, I’ll be amazed if the majority of voters in this country have the good sense to put her in the White House. :(

[reasonisfaith]

Have you noticed you don’t have a grasp on what exactly it is about Palin that defines her competence? Yet your statement is founded on an opinion of her competence.

Do you ever feel like you’re drifting helplessly in a chaotic mass of confusion?

[Rockhound]

Washington as Mordor-on-thePotomac... That’s funny! Accurate, but funny.

[Senator John Blutarski]

ccmay wrote: “Also, you do realize that the Kennedy mystique was bought and bottled for you to lap up?”

..... OH, SO TRUE. JFK was the first TV president, sold to the American public by the best team of marketing and advertising professionals that Joseph Kennedy Senior’s money could buy. It was that Kennedy marketing machine that put JFK in the White House, made RFK the presumptive 1968 Democratic nominee, transferred its affections to Fat Teddy when RFK was assassinated and put him into the US Senate, followed up by installing John Forbes “Reporting for Duty” Kerry in the Senate, then got the fool Patrick Kennedy elected to the House from RI.

- and American politics has never been the same. We might as well be buying toothpaste or under arm deodorant.

[avacado]

Errrr... She getting a natural gas pipeline going that will increase US gas supplies by 8%, it's privately funded, will crate real jobs, she's reduced state spending by 16% since taking office, and she has not run any deficits.

Perhaps you don't research her her much?

[avacado]

Sarah Palin an “Affirmative Action Selection?” Are you serious? Please explain.

[Wahoo82]

Affirmative action?? When did she benefit form this?

[Enterprise]

Sotomayor said that she is a product of affirmative action. Palin has never said that she is a product of affirmative action. Sotomayor’s accomplishments are proof she is a product of A/A, and Palin’s accomplishments are proof she is NOT a product of A/A.

[calex59]

Sarah has been glowingly compared with Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy and Franklin D. Roosevelt? Seriously? By sentient humans? I don’t see it. I see Sarah as another Obama, an Affirmative Action Selection, with followers and fans who confuse presentability with competence. I mean, if the young, photogenic, conservative governor of Alaska had been a man, would McCain’s VP selectors (or I) have ever even heard of him??

She has accomplished much. She has single handedly brought down the republican corruption in Alaska(a cause for some of the hate from the right), lowered spending, lowered taxes, pushed through a pipe line that no other governor has been able to do in Alaska. These are just some of her accomplishments. Yes, she would have been heard of if she was a man, and probably louder than she was heard as a woman before she was picked as VP candidate. BTW, she has the highest popularity of any US governor.

[Extremely Extreme Extremist]

I see Sarah as another Obama

She was born in Kenya?

an Affirmative Action Selection

Please name the specific government or even private programs that Palin used to get where she is today.

with followers and fans who confuse presentability with competence.

So we're just a bunch of myopic dittoheads who don't any better. Okay...

I mean, if the young, photogenic, conservative governor of Alaska had been a man

But she's not a man, and that what makes her so exciting to conservatives. She has all the experience of a man but PH balanced for a woman!

would McCain’s VP selectors (or I) have ever even heard of him?

No, he would have probably chosen some RINO. But that's why McCain selected her because of her dynamic qualities she has.

[flowerplough]

“she’s not a man, and that’s what makes her so exciting to conservatives.” You said it, EEE, not me. If I’d said it, it would have been more like “she’s not a man, and that’s the main thing that makes her so exciting to some desparate conservatives.”

I remember Palin trying to finesse her brat’s forthcoming brat... looked like she might have been hoping for a quick, shotgun wedding. Didn’t like hearing about the upcoming blessed event from the press. Sarah shoulda told me. And then the embarrassing interviews with Gibson and Couric. Unprepared and inexperienced as she was, she and her handlers shoulda had a better handle on what to expect from the media mavens. And since the election, the main Sarah news I get is about how she promised to appear at some Repub event, but now maybe won’t, but still might, unless she gets asked out to the Prom by a cuter guy. Like you said, EEE, she’s not a man. Looks to me like that’s the main thing she’s got going for herself.

[toddausauras]

Sounds kind of like the press has played you like a fiddle. Meanwhile Governor Palin continues handling a tough job and driving liberals nuts.

[grey_whiskers]

What are your Democrat Underground and Darwin Central handles, anyway?

Cheers!

[Ladysmith]

Sarah is NOT a $cientologist!

[Ladysmith]

“Affirmative Action Selection”? Are you serious?! I wish to God our state was governed by such an “incompetent” Governor.

Just like Barry, it has nothing to do with race or gender and EVERYTHING to do with their ethics, values and policies. AND her competence.

[kanawa]

I remember Palin trying to finesse her brat’s forthcoming brat...

You're a nasty person