Julia Baird

Don’t read Newsweek magazine while drinking a beverage. A spit take is the obvious first reaction to a column by Julia Baird headlined “The Shame of Family Films.” On the Internet, this article is coded as “Why family films are so sexist.”

Baird's denunciation of Hollywood's fraction of decent entertainment began: “They have all been smash hits: ‘Finding Nemo,’ ‘Madagascar,’ ‘Ice Age,’ ‘Toy Story.’ Fish, penguins, rats, stuffed animals, talking toys. All good innocent family fun, right? Sure, except there are few female characters in those films. There are certainly few doing anything meaningful or heroic – and no, Bo Peep doesn't count.”

So what does feminist bean-counting have to do with whether a movie is “good innocent family fun”? Did any young girl come away from “Finding Nemo” feeling like the memory-challenged Ellen DeGeneres fish character didn’t represent female empowerment effectively? Were they offended by the oppressively archaic stereotype of Jessie the Yodeling Cowgirl during “Toy Story 2"? Families can’t enjoy these films without expecting them to pass some politically correct quota exam?

Newsweek on Saturday did an astonishingly poor job of exploring why Republican women are suddenly being attacked for their beauty even suggesting it's all the former governor of Alaska's fault.

"There seems to be an insistent, increasingly excitable focus on the supposed hotness of Republican women in the public eye, like Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Michelle Malkin, and Nikki Haley-not to mention veterans like Ann Coulter," the article now being prominently featured at the magazine's website began.

Hypocritically, Julia Baird's piece never once explained or wondered why the same thing isn't being done to Democrat women.

Instead, the numerous headlines exclusively trivialized physically attractive GOP females such as the following from the website's front page (h/t Twitter's @buszero):

Newsweek deputy editor Julia Baird only arrived in America in 2007 from Australia, but she knows how to play a good corporate soldier. In the wake of Newsweek’s Sarah Palin cover fiasco, she wrote a column for the November 30 issue loyally dedicated to making excuses for her editor Jon Meacham’s bratty cover theatrics, like he was the editor of Spy magazine for a week. Palin’s complaints of sexism are lame, declared Baird:

And now Palin thinks she has been Palinized by NEWSWEEK, for last week’s cover image of her looking fit and posing in running shorts, even though she has been photographed and filmed more than once in aerobic gear (most recently on Oprah just a few days ago.)

Baird knows that Barack Obama has been photographed topless in a swimming suit, too, and that didn’t make the cover of Newsweek. (A few pages before Baird’s column in the November 30 issue is a photograph of Obama topless in the surf, illustrating the Palin quote that her Newsweek cover was "sexist and a wee bit degrading.")

That sleazy yet hallowed HBO television series "Sex and the City" is now in theaters as a feature film, and the cultural elites are having a religious experience. Newsweek previewed the movie by reporting how an estimated 50,000 people, some from far-away lands like Australia and Japan, "make the pilgrimage each year to the shrine," the fictional New York City home of "Sex" protagonist Carrie Bradshaw. The magazine chronicled a tour group standing silently, some weeping.

Am I the only one who thinks that those estimated 50,000 people out there make the Trekkies look sane by comparison? But Newsweek seems to lament how the movie isn’t outrageous enough. The headline is "Girls Gone Mild," and the trailer is all about our protagonist getting married – maybe. Writer Julia Baird was amazed at "how many people speak of it in hyperbolic terms: as a revolution, a phenomenon, a cataclysm, almost an insurgency."