Fri, 03/06/2009 - 5:28pm — gqmartinez
She picked a woman who was on the board of Planned Parenthood to be on the Supreme Court.
Its fun to watch the right wingers going over this amongst themselves (see link above for some tidbits or here). As so many are fond of pointing out here, Sarah Palin is evil and is only doing this because she was boxed in. Or she's playing 11-Dimensional chess. Either way, she wears odd shoes.
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She Didn't Have Much Choice
Unlike federal Supreme Court picks, in Alaska the Governor picks from a list given by a panel and the two choices were this one or (heavens!) someone who served environmental causes. It was a choice between favoring big business or the religious right and she went with big business. So probably a good move on her part, politically speaking, but I don't know if I'd call it 11th Dimensional Chess.
Having said that, while I wouldn't vote for Palin as dog catcher, I've always thought she exposes interesting splits on the right, since she self-identifies as a feminist and openly promotes the idea that women can and should be leaders (even mothers!).* Given how deeply embedded misogyny is in the religious right, having a female face as a potential national leader inevitably raises pesky issues for sexist assholes offended by a magazine cover of female ministers. How does one square the idea of supporting a woman for president with their religious dogma about the role of women? Palin certainly challenges that merely by her existence. And, yes, it's fun watching the wingers step all over themselves to deal with that.
And while I think her politics are awful, she hasn't done more harm than George Bush or John McCain to this country. The reaction to her is so extreme and out of proportion to anything she's actually done (she hasn't done very much, frankly), that it's extremely interesting. In an election where everyone knew the economy was going to be the deciding issue John McCain said he didn't know anything about the economy and yet Palin is the dumb one.**
* Of course, she's also useful in highlighting the sexism and misogyny of many Democrats and so-called progressives who seem to prefer gender trashing her to any substantive criticism of her politics.
** Which is not to say Palin is smart, just that she's not any dumber than Bush or McCain or most of the Republican party. Hell, foreign policy expert McCain didn't know the difference between Shia and Sunni. Yet, she's the one who got mocked endlessly. While the rest are treated as if they're not dumb as posts. I wonder why?
"Do what you feel in your heart to be right -- for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't. " - Eleanor Roosevelt
Let me explain
Actually, you said it better than I can, but let me try anyhow.
Palin is the dumb one:
1. Because she's a woman
2. Because she has the "wrong" class markers
For both these reasons, the "creative" [cough] "class" hates her. It's like the quantity of hate in the world is fixed, and when Hillary wasn't available for CDS any more, the hate had to go somewhere.
Hilarity will ensue when the Republicans run as right populists in 2012, and every sneer and smirk of our fauxgressives re Palin and her children comes back to haunt us, no doubt framed, and doubly ironically, as the hatred of socialists for normal people. (I always thought the Republicans weren't even trying last year; it was all about preparing for the future).
Needless to say, it's moronic to fall in love with Palin because the OFB
hate her, which also happened at some sites that, er, have thankfully purged us from their blogrolls.
"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win." -- Mahatma Gandhi