When is a woman not a woman? No, I’m not getting into Caitlyn Jenner.
I’m talking about the recent gasp of horror in the media when Donald Trump accused Hillary Clinton of playing “the woman’s card.” The outrage was palpable. As Clay Waters reported, The New York Times was incensed at Trump's charge, and promptly launched a salvo on its front page that was headlined "Donald Trump’s Gender-Based Attacks on Hillary Clinton Have Calculated Risk."
The Times broadside (written, note well, by two women, Amy Chozick and Ashley Parker) read in part:
With the nation on the verge of a presidential election between the first woman to lead a major party and an opponent accused of misogyny, Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump are digging in for a fight in which he is likely to attack her precisely because she is a woman.
Mr. Trump, the Republican favorite, has already proved willing to attack Mrs. Clinton in ways that many women find sexist and that her supporters consider out of bounds.
Got that? The attacks on Hillary are outrageously “sexist” and “out of bounds.”
Hmmm. Let’s step in the time machine, shall we? Let’s rocket back to 2008 and GOP presidential nominee John McCain’s selection of -- gasp! -- a woman to be his vice-presidential running mate. From the moment of her nomination to this day, let’s see just how reverential liberals are to a prominent woman. A prominent woman who, to this moment at least , received more votes for vice president than Hillary Clinton has thus far received in two presidential runs.
Here’s left-wing Cenk Uygur in The Huffington Post in 2011:
The Irrefutable Stupidity of Sarah Palin
“From time to time, I’ll get into a debate with a right-winger about whether Sarah Palin is actually stupid…”
Here’s the headline at the left-wing site Raw Story:
Idiot Sarah Palin wrote a bunch of stupid words
about some moronic thing for some dumb reason again
The very first sentence begins: “Sarah Palin — the recurrent infection given to America by John McCain……”
Then there was Comedy Central’s favorite liberal Jon Stewart on Palin, saying she was “incoherent, rambling, unintelligible.”
The website About Entertainment used a "political humor expert" to trashy her:
Top 10 Dumbest Sarah Palin Quotes
Idiotic Quotes by Ex-Alaska Gov. And Failed Reality TV Star Sarah Palin
Then there was this headline at Mediaite about lefty HBO star Bill Maher’s charming description of Palin:
Bill Maher Calls Sarah Palin The ‘C-Word’ During His Stand-Up Act
Days after McCain picked Palin for his ticket in 2008, The New York Times reported that the Obama campaign expected the media to take Palin down:
By every indication, Mr. Obama's aides underestimated the impact that Mr. McCain's choice of Ms. Palin would have on the race. Mr. Obama and his campaign have seemed flummoxed in trying to figure out how to deal with her. His aides said they were looking to the news media to debunk the image of her as a blue-collar reformer, even as they argued that her power to help Mr. McCain was overstated.
Recently, the Times labeled a Palin speech endorsing Trump to be “strange and rambling”.and that Palin has “…holes in her logic and the way those complicated sentences sometimes dribble off into vaguely sinister, possibly offensive nonsense.”
“Conservative” Times columnist David Brooks brusquely dismissed Palin by saying on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos: “She’s a joke.”
One could go…and on and on here with all these liberals and their descriptions of a former governor and vice-presidential nominee. Words like “stupid,” “idiot,” “c--t,” “joke,” “moronic,” and an endless stream of other highly-charged negatives fill the Internet.
So let’s return now to the umbrage about the charge that it is “sexist” and “out of bounds” to merely say Hillary Clinton is playing the “woman’s card.”
Here’s the UK’s Guardian on a Hillary speech:
Hillary Clinton to Democrats: don't you want to see a female president?
Controversy over use of private email as secretary of state is brushed aside in night of solidarity with progressive movement Emily’s List
Then there was the time Bernie Sanders spoke of his opponent as shouting this or that, a description routinely applied to male politicians. Clinton’s response, as noted here in Time: 'Sometimes when a woman talks, some people think it’s shouting!’
Over at Shakesville, a self-described “progressive feminist blog” Hillary’s line was quickly echoed, saying that “Sanders was engaging in some good old-fashioned tone policing and dogwhistling about women's shrillness.”
As CNN reported that feminist hero Bill Clinton was not about to be left out of the game. Here’s the CNN headline:
Bill Clinton rips Sanders backers' 'sexist,' 'profane' attacks
Again, there’s an endless stream of examples. But it all boils down to the same thing. Liberals -- Hillary and her defenders in particular - never hesitate to play “the woman card.” While at the same liberals never hesitate to routinely attack Palin with the vilest of insults -- and its just no big deal.
The question here isn’t that this is done with such routine. Clearly, it is. The real question is why? Why such a vast double-standard about sexism that makes the Grand Canyon look like the tiniest of sinkholes.
The answer, of course, is that women, like blacks and Hispanics, are in the world of the left supposed to be synonymous with “liberal.” Women and minorities are assumed to be chain-carrying occupants of the liberal plantation. For any of them to escape is tantamount to political treason.
This is why Hispanics like former Bush 43 Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, a Mexican-American, can be hounded out of office by a bunch of white Democratic senators without a single cry of anti-Mexican racism. Gonzales was a Bushie, a Republican, an escapee of the liberal plantation. Thus no humiliation or charge, however untrue, was too much. In fact, when Bush judicial nominee Miguel Estrada was defeated by Senate Democrats, word finally leaked of an internal Democratic memo that said the conservative Estrada had to be defeated because he was “Latino” and therefore “dangerous.
So too, of course, was this the reason for the trashing of Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas all those years ago. With the resignation of Justice Thurgood Marshall the cry went up from liberals that this was the “black seat” on the Court. President George H.W.Bush gave them what they called for - a qualified black nominee. Then all hell broke loose for one reason and one reason only. Judge Thomas was black alright, but he was a conservative. The deluge began.
Which brings us back to Hillary and the “woman card.” It is “sexist” and “out of bounds” to attack her for playing said card, goes the indignant cry.
Meanwhile, savaging Sarah Palin is just one no big deal. Sexist? Out of bounds? Not a prayer. Palin is a conservative and deserves everything she gets.
And you want to know why so many Americans are cynical about their politicians?
