Saturday, December 23, 2006

Self-Loathing

There's a great Boondocks strip (I know, that applies to like 80% of them. Bear with me) where Huey and Caesar are trying to figure out whether a Black radio commentator (I forget who) was conservative enough to be a potential date for Condi Rice (don't ask). The punchline comes when said radio commentator ends his show with: "So, should we bring back slavery to give Black youth some discipline? Ultimately, I say...maybe."

I thought of that when, at Feministe, I saw this statement by conservative woman Mary Graber:
After watching The View and following the inane statements made on the program, I've come to the conclusion that it really is true what Aristotle, Saint Paul, and John Milton said: Women, without male guidance, are illogical, frivolous, and incapable of making any decisions beyond what to make for dinner. . .

But it's a sign of our crumbling civilization that a bunch of girls of varying ages and ethnic backgrounds, sitting around all dressed up for a coffee klatch, some of them with cleavage spilling out of Victoria's Secret Infinity Edge Push-Up bras, spout off opinions borrowed from disturbed teenagers and Michael Moore, and call it a talk show.

This was the danger of giving women the vote. The danger to conservatives (and the survival of this country) is the voting bloc of single women, i.e., those who lack the guidance of a man in the form of a husband or intellectual mentor.

I'm really not sure when the last time a women's right to vote was seriously questioned. I suppose it had to be a women who did it--not that this makes it better, just that people all too willing to cannibalize their own exist on gender issues as well as racial ones. Meanwhile, the column was published on Townhall, which looks to join World Net "Soy Makes You Gay" Daily as completely off the deep end of rational discourse.

There are plenty of smart conservative voices out there. But why is it that the aggregators, their "alternative media" (because the real media is so liberal), are so comfortable with being so off-base?

3 comments:

Tully said...

But why is it that the aggregators, their "alternative media" (because the real media is so liberal), are so comfortable with being so off-base?

Read the left alt press recently? Just wondering. You seem to think it's isolated to the right.

In any case, Grabar (whom like most polemicists who think they're being insightful comes off instead as remarkably whiny and tendentious) was writing bitchy satire about the execrable pretensions of The View and the essential immaturity of the panelists, not serious arguments about the worth of the 19th Amendment. (Meow!) She's just not that good a writer, and it comes off stilted rather than insightful or remotely funny.

Writers like that are why I generally skip both Townhall and Kos. What passes for humorous snark in the wings is truly amusing only to wingers.

Anonymous said...

At least DailyKos is funny.

Anonymous said...

Unsurprisingly, Kathryn Lopez also has promoted the idea that women shouldn't have the vote, as has (more surprisingly) Florence King.

Perhaps also unsurprising, Grabar gets her facts wrong. Aside from Rosie O'Donnell (who, as a lesbian, sadly will be without a man's guidance forever, though given that the only man she's declared love for was Tom Cruise, that might be a good thing), all of The View's hosts have been or are married. Debbie Matenopoulos is married; Walters has been married three times; Meredith Vieira is married (albeit to a professor with multiple sclerosis, so I suppose Grabar could deride him as a man who might sit down to pee); Star Jones was quite publicly married; Hasselback is married; Behar has been married.

As I noted at HSM, this article is more interesting for what it's saying about TownHall's audience (when did conservatives start going for stridently unfeminine women?) than for anything Grabar spouts.