Fox News's Juan Williams apparently had a very bad Thursday morning on Twitter (readers will see why shortly), but out of respect for Kellyanne Conway's wishes seen in the video which follows the jump, I have resisted inspecting the carnage.
Williams reacted to the news that President-Elect Trump has appointed Conway as Counselor to the President by, in Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo's words, "questioning, well, Kellyanne has four kids, how is she going to do it?" Conway's three-pronged response to Bartiromo, with two prongs quite sharpened, neither towards Williams, will be seen in that video.
The full five-minute Fox Business segment is here.
The snip below focuses on the work-life balance issue — and a bit more:
Transcript (beginning at 0:06):
MARIA BARTIROMO: Yeah, it's funny, we were talking with Juan Williams earlier and he was questioning, "Well, Kellyanne has four kids, how is she going to do it?" He got creamed on Twitter. (Laughter) Very funny.
Everybody on Twitter was saying, "Why? A woman with four kids can’t do it and a man can? So what that she’s going to be working 24/7?"
KELLYANNE CONWAY: Well I would, I would say to everyone, not — not Juan, because I don’t want him to be creamed — but, I would say that I don’t play golf, and I don’t have a mistress. So I have a lot of time that a lot of these other men don’t.
BARTIROMO: Whoa!
CONWAY: I see people on the weekend, they spend an awful lot of time, you know, with their golf games. And that’s their right, but the kids will, they’ll be with me. We live in the same house and they come first.
But everybody has to do what’s best for their family and that’s why I didn’t jump immediately, Maria, on, on a position that was offered to me early, early in the transition, because there is a lot to weigh. And my children are 12, 12, 8 and 7, but I — I certainly hope too that we can continue the conversation as a nation about the balance that many men and women face. And I respect the stay-at-home moms, I respect the working moms, and I think that having an open conversation has been very healthy.
That's going to leave a couple of serious marks in places which need not be named.
For those of us who remember, Williams's reaction to Conway's appointment is very similar to that of some supposedly feminist media members who all of sudden became concerned in 2008 about whether Sarah Palin, John McCain's Vice-Presidential nominee, could handle the campaign and her desired executive position with five children.
As seen here:
NBC reporter Amy Robach introduced a September 3 (2008) Today segment by asking, "The broader question. If Sarah Palin becomes Vice-President, will she be shortchanging her kids or shortchanging the country?"
Scott Whitlock at NewsBusters, who posted on this segment at the time, also noted that David Gregory, then at NBC, had asked essentially the same question an hour earlier, while Today's Meredith Viera called it "an interesting twist" that "conservatives who would probably advocate that moms stay home are backing Governor Palin and a lot of the other working moms are questioning her decision."
The idea that sensible conservatives believe that women can make their own life choices after discussions with spouses and family members without endless second-guessing from the peanut gallery is apparently still foreign to many on the left, particularly in the media, apparently including the aforementioned Juan Williams. Additionally, Viera's assumption, still held by many in the press, that conservatives still adhere to the "barefoot, pregnant, stay-at-home" stereotype is intensely insulting but also funny at the same time, because the sniping almost invariably originates with liberals who claim not to have that mindset.
We never see the media go after liberal women with children who stay on the job. What's with that?
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
