What's with the New Backlash Against Women? (Part 2: Palinophilia on the Right):
Here’s a bit from Sarah Palin’s new book, Going Rogue: "I moved to go speak with him [a reporter from Anchorage], but a campaign handler grabbed my elbow and said, 'No, no, no ... this way.' A few minutes later on my way out of the building I saw the same reporter and photographer back behind a rope line.

"He yelled out 'Alaska!' But as I tried to holler back, different pairs of hands hustled me into the campaign's Suburban. It was not a respectful thing to do. I had turned my back on our own local press. Right then and there, I knew it wasn't going to be good."

Now imagine Hillary Clinton in that situation. Do you think for a second that she would have allowed herself to be forced away if she had wanted to answer a question? Feminism is about agency - that is, the ability to act on one's own. In that moment, as in so many others, Palin didn't assert her agency. Now she claims she finally is. It's a bullshit conversion to a depoliticized feminism, and she reflects, about as clearly as anyone, the kind of feminism-lite that passes for liberation. It's reaping the benefits of the feminist movement without giving a shit about the actual goals of the movement.

Palin likes to insinuate comparisons to Clinton regularly. She empathizes and treats Clinton like a victim of the evil Obama machine, which is pretty much the polar opposite of how Clinton would want to be perceived. It’s much the same way she sees herself as a victim of those gosh-darn mollusksuckers on the the McCain team, like Fatty McShouter, Steve Schmidt.

Of course, the absurd reality is that Hillary Clinton has worked her ass off endlessly for her country; agree or disagree with her or her goals, she has sure as fuck had a lot more on her mind than how funny it would be to make reporters walk in muck (as Palin delightfully recounts). Sarah Palin wouldn't know a policy debate if it tweaked her tits and called itself Jesus. She invokes Clinton in order to try to make some of Clinton's accomplished glow rub off on her through a confusing conflation. It's sort of like when people try to say that Michael Moore is the liberal Ann Coulter. It discredits Moore while legitimizing Coulter.

And her elevation to the status of someone any women should look up to and admire for anything is pure cynical anti-feminism. The very things that Palin is celebrated for by conservative bags of fuck are what feminists have been condemned for: being outspoken, combining work and family lives (although, you know, Palin decided she couldn't have it all), standing up to even the men who have supported her. But she is a sex traitor. She uses her femininity to support policies that enslave other women. And she derides the accomplishments that allowed her to become governor in the first fucking place.

She is worse than a joke. She is a disgrace. If she is the end result of the work of Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug and Betty Friedan and so many other women, who were attacked with the language of violence and rape by politicians and the mainstream media (not from some asshole bloggers) that makes Palin's little buffeting about gentle, then that work needs to kick back into high gear. And now she's out there as if she's standing up for women's rights to...speak, one supposes, as long as the lines are the in a general framework of what the right wants her to say.

There’s this fantasy that the right has that Palin shouldn’t be underestimated, like, they claim, Ronald Reagan was. What people like Newt Gingrich and Bill Kristol (who, one should always be reminded, even on a daily basis, was Alan Keyes’s campaign manager) are doing is falling into an insider’s trap. The only people who didn’t think Reagan was a viable candidate were the inside-the-beltway circle jerkers who pooh-poohed the upstart outsider. It’s what they did with Bill Clinton, too. But the people in the rest of the nation had different ideas. Reagan and Clinton both had been elected and re-elected to governorships. And polls indicated that they were popular beyond the scribblings of David Broder. Not so with Palin. The vast majority of the nation thinks she's an incompetent twit.

Besides, she ain’t running for jackshit. Once she resigned as Alaska’s governor and told the state’s citizens who elected her to suck her clit, any political career was over. She knew it. She probably had an agent who told her that she was super-hot right now and if she slogged away for a couple of years more in Alaska, her brand would get stale. Strike while the iron’s hot, bitches. Make that money, ex-Governor; there's a lot of blood and sweat spent in this nation's history so you could. Not that you'll care as you stand on their bones.

It's a goddamned insult to women, to the American political system, to the media that we're still even talking about her.