Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

Skip to comments.

The Left’s war on conservative women: We’re damned if we do stay home, and damned if we don’t
michellemalkin.com ^ | April 12 2012 | Malkin

Posted on 04/14/2012 7:45:27 PM PDT by NoLibZone

I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession…

Teresa Heinz-Kerry did it to Laura Bush in 2004:

Q: You’d be different from Laura Bush?

A: Well, you know, I don’t know Laura Bush. But she seems to be calm, and she has a sparkle in her eye, which is good. But I don’t know that she’s ever had a real job — I mean, since she’s been grown up.

And now, Anita Dunn colleague and Huffington Post Beltway insider Hilary Rosen has done it to Ann Romney (click the link for full coverage at Twitchy.com):

She’s “never worked a day in her life.”

I am also reminded of the liberal elite female journalists who scolded Sarah Palin for being a working mom in 2008:

Let’s talk Mommy Wars, double standards, and the media elite. Last Friday, Obama Campaign National Finance Committee member Howard Gutman attacked Sarah Palin’s ability to be a good parent and have a high-powered public life at the same time. In a finger-wagging appearance on the Laura Ingraham radio show, Obama’s operative scolded the Republican mother of five children for not putting her professional career on hold.

“Your responsibility is to put your family first,” Gutman lectured as he singled out Palin’s Down’s Syndrome baby and pregnant teenage daughter. “The proper attack is not that a woman shouldn’t run for vice president with five kids, it’s that a parent, when they have a family in need,” should get out of the public sphere and stay home.

The Gutman standard has now been proffered by countless Obama hacks and water-carrying commentators. Damningly, it’s high-powered working mothers in the journalism business helping to broadcast the anti-Palin slams or doing nothing to defend her.

CNN’s Soledad O’Brien denied Palin attacks on her network, even as her colleague John Roberts asked: “”There’s also this issue that on April 18th, she gave birth to a baby with Down’s Syndrome…. Children with Down’s syndrome require an awful lot of attention. The role of Vice President, it seems to me, would take up an awful lot of her time, and it raises the issue of how much time will she have to dedicate to her newborn child?”

NBC’s Meredeith Viera asserted that only blogs went after Palin’s motherhood abilities while running for veep, even as her colleague Brian Williams slyly raised feminists’ “fears or doubts that she should be able to do this, that she should be doing this.”

How would CNN’s O’Brien like the Gutman standard applied to her? She’s been working overtime covering the presidential campaign season, anchoring daily coverage, nighttime conventions, and producing documentaries that require large chunks of time away from home. Disney’s Family Parenting website lauds her as “a modern mom balancing a thriving career as one of America’s top news anchors along with her four children” – two daughters now ages 7 and 6 and twin boys who are 4. Where are the Palin-bashers to lambaste O’Brien’s professional pursuits?

How about Katie Couric? Her husband died at 42 when her daughters were 6 and 2 years old. With two young children devastated by the loss of a father, she opted not to quit journalism. She anchored NBC’s Today Show through his illness and death, continued working an intensive, time-consuming schedule as one of America’s most visible broadcast journalists while a single mother with two fatherless children at home, and then jumped to CBS News, where she maintains a rigorous on-air schedule, travel plans, and off-air social calendar. Where are the finger-waggers?

Also at CNN, Campbell Brown flew to Las Vegas last year to moderate a political debate while 8 ½ months’ pregnant. Fox News host and left-wing blogger Alan Colmes, last seen questioning Sarah Palin’s commitment to prenatal care because she worked and traveld late in her pregnancy, had no comment. When she initially left the Today Show in 2007, Brown said she was stepping down to devote more time to family and baby. She immediately turned around the next day and jumped ship to CNN, where she has anchored wall-to-wall CNN Election Center coverage and will launch a new nightly show in November.

…As a working woman in the media for 16 years and a working mother in the media for the last eight. I know the commitment and energy it took for these women to get to the top. I’ve filed columns from hospital beds, written books while nursing, brought my toddlers to TV studios, and told bedtime stories on the cell phone while boarding planes. I’ve worked hard to strike the “balance” we all seek. I’ve made good choices and bad choices, and have no regrets about the opportunities I’ve taken and the opportunities I’ve rejected. I couldn’t have done it without a supportive husband willing to forego his own career goals – the kind of spouse that the media has ignored in Todd Palin and the kind of spouse I’m sure the Sisterhood of the Protected Female Journalist all have.

I don’t challenge the commitment these fellow working mothers in the media have to their home lives. What I challenge is their silence and complicity as the Palin-bashers impose a “Family First” double standard on conservatives. The sorority is closed to the Right.

This is how the Left’s war on conservative women works:

We’re damned if we do stay home and we’re damned if we don’t.

We’re damned because we conservative moms drive the Left and its feminist shills mad with our mere existence, our exercise of free will, our fierce belief in protecting our families from the Nanny State, our embrace of free-market principles, and our rejection of the perpetual victim/grievance mentality.

From Hillary Clinton to Hilary Rosen, progressive feminists have shown nothing but the most reflexive, regressive contempt for women on the other side of the ideological aisle.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a conservative stay at home mom, work at home mom, or work outside the home mom. If you’re Right, the Left is gonna hate.

Chauvinists can wear heels, too.


TOPICS: Constitution/Conservatism; Culture/Society; Extended News; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: annromney; dncwaronwomen; hilaryrosen

1 posted on 04/14/2012 7:45:35 PM PDT by NoLibZone
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | View Replies]

To: NoLibZone
Will she do a investigation to Fox News being bias for Romney and censoring Newt Gingrich from appearing on that network when he spoke using his first amendment right. I think that happened to other former Fox employees as well.
2 posted on 04/14/2012 7:52:38 PM PDT by Christie at the beach (I like Newt and would love to see political dead bodies on the floor.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Christie at the beach

So that’s what you got out of this column?

Sad.


3 posted on 04/14/2012 7:56:21 PM PDT by altura
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 2 | View Replies]

To: NoLibZone

I don’t really see this this whole brouhaha as a thing against women per se. I see it as yet another in a very long string of examples of how these liberal elites think they are so damn smart. They can tell you how to live your life. They can tell you whether you need to abort your children or not. They can tell you how many miles per gallon your car should get. They can tell how many gallons water it takes to flush your poop down the toilet. And if you don’t agree with them, they just toss you overboard in a New York minute. They can tell you that solar companies are great things to invest in, but a year and a half later, those companies are all bankrupt at taxpayer expense and 0bamas’ cronies have absconded with the dough. Every one.

And you know why they hate the Midwest? Because these libs can’t tell a farmer whether it’s time to plant his corn. Or whether he should rotate his crop to wheat, or soybeans.

I believe this is the more general message, though I am perfectly happy to see the Dems destroy their own stupid little meme they had going.

If these libs are so smart, how come you still don’t have a job?


4 posted on 04/14/2012 8:05:10 PM PDT by Attention Surplus Disorder (A conservative, a liberal and a moderate walk into a bar. Bartender says "what'll it be, Mitt?")
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Attention Surplus Disorder
"I don’t really see this this whole brouhaha as a thing against women per se."

Correct. Does it not resemble the same tactic as that used against individuals in the minority communities who dare to embrace the ideas of America's Declaration of Independence and Constitutional limits on government power?

5 posted on 04/14/2012 8:56:47 PM PDT by loveliberty2
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 4 | View Replies]

To: Christie at the beach

I don’t think so.

So what does that mean to you?


6 posted on 04/14/2012 9:13:12 PM PDT by NoLibZone (I'm with Sarah- Anybody but Obama, because it's not always about me.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 2 | View Replies]

To: NoLibZone

Uhh, just maybe the Democrats forgot that MOTHER’S DAY is coming up soon?

BTW, how WILL the Democrats “suspend” their War On Women, (WOW)?

Happy early Mother’s Day, Democrats, Happy, Happy Mother’s Day - - - .


7 posted on 04/14/2012 9:18:18 PM PDT by Graewoulf ((Dictator Baby-Doc Barack's obama"care" violates Sherman Anti-Trust Law, AND U.S. Constitution.))
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: loveliberty2

Well, I think you may be going out another orbital quantum or two more abstract than I am.

I am not especially sanguine that the “Constitutional” argument works. I think that 0bama has actually been pretty successful denigrating the Constitution and much of what it stands for. The folks whom you refer to, they are not aspirants to the Constitutional model, IMHO. At the risk of overgeneralizing, they don’t see themselves as empowered individuals...they see themselves as de-individualized members of some oppressed class. Whether it’s lesbians, transgenders, Mexico-Uzbekians, single mothers suffering from dyslexia, Blacks, Purples, the “genius” of the left seems to work brilliantly when it can somehow knit all these disparate groups together within their own private envy against rich, white Republicans. And to some extent, one can’t blame them for thinking as they do, because “look at
the progress that farmworkers and union workers and Hispanics have made”. Somehow, the left and the community organizers have managed to take credit for that and those things.

But I am speaking tactically; I am really brain-challenged with the way the admin is supposedly laughing about the GOP got sucked into this trap they so cleverly laid with this “woman” thing. Me? I think they tripped over their own stupidity. I think they blundered badly.

Let’s face it. The “Constitution” argument may very well not be a winner. It may be far too complex an issue with these angry libs who think the whole system has worked against them. They don’t respect free speech, they want to shut it down. Haven’t we all lamented as to the 50% (or 49% or 48%) that are waiting for the next Govt handout? I would like to see the attack for this next election brought onto and into a more effective arena, and personally I *think* I see how it could be done with this “enemies list” thing. Did you hear Jack Welch’s speech last week, and repeated on Kudlow’s show? I think this is something that could be forged into a key tool. This regime is all about enemies. If it’s not insurance companies, it’s big oil, or it’s GWBush, if it’s not big oil, it’s women, or it’s medical care establishments, or it’s billionaires and millionaires. And I would say that there has got to be a way for to get to people and let them know that they could be next. And when you’re “it” you get the full force of this admin coming down on you like a ton of bricks. Meanwhile, who’s been the winners in this admin? Insiders. Cronies. All from this crowd THAT YOU’RE NOT IN and as soon as they are done playing you for suckers, then you can join all the discarded ex-buddies under the bus.

I just want to defeat this slimeball. I really don’t care how we do it. No, I don’t expect Romney to meet anybody’s standards around here as to Conservatism and Constitutionalism. We may not have the luxury, and I’ll freely state I’d like to have a massively more conservative candidate. But we have to beat this POS we got now, and I, for one, will take any way we can to do it. Even Romnoid.


8 posted on 04/14/2012 9:27:27 PM PDT by Attention Surplus Disorder (A conservative, a liberal and a moderate walk into a bar. Bartender says "what'll it be, Mitt?")
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 5 | View Replies]

To: NoLibZone

I didn’t think so either.


9 posted on 04/14/2012 10:20:02 PM PDT by Christie at the beach (I like Newt and would love to see political dead bodies on the floor.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 6 | View Replies]

To: Attention Surplus Disorder
I don’t really see this this whole brouhaha as a thing against women per se. I see it as yet another in a very long string of examples of how these liberal elites think they are so damn smart. They can tell you how to live your life.

I believe you nailed it - has nothing to do with women at all (hell the Left considers them the same as men anyway). Just another way to cause a bit more division and diversion as they work their real evil.

10 posted on 04/15/2012 3:22:54 AM PDT by trebb ("If a man will not work, he should not eat" From 2 Thes 3)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 4 | View Replies]

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson