Trashing a conservative woman

All the media tut-tutting about Sarah Palin's supposed lack of qualifications and their phony concern about whether she can be a good mother and serve as vice president has been infuriating. Were there any concerns about whether John F. Kennedy could handle the job of the presidency when he had young children? And remember, his wife was pregnant through part of the 1960 campaign. What about John Edwards who ran for president and vice president with two small children? And has anyone at all questioned whether Barack Obama can perform the job of the president when he has two young children?

Usually, I tend to slough off all the complaints about anti-women bias in the media. I figure that that comes with the territory. But the bias in addressing these concerns only when it is a conservative woman in question is so blatant that it amazes yet again. Here we have a woman who has achieved whatever she has in politics on her own - not because she was married to a more successful politician like Hillary or because she had a wealthy husband like Nancy Pelosi. She has a husband who is supporting her career and stepping up to help with the kids just as we have always said we want husbands to do so. And instead you get the media, as represented by the New York Times, suddenly so concerned about how a woman with a small baby can take on the job of the vice presidency. Would they be writing those sorts of articles if she were the father of a special needs baby? Does anyone seriously believe that the media would be having these concerns if it were the Democratic candidate who had young children? Or if it were Obama who had a 17-year old daughter who was pregnant, would the media take that one fact as a proxy to argue about the benefits of abstinence education versus birth control education under the fallacious theory that one example makes an argument for the general population in the aggregate?

As Mona Charen wrote yesterday,

Rubbish. The experience of one individual tells us exactly nothing about the wisdom of any public policy. For what it's worth, it seems Ms. Palin may indeed have received traditional (i.e. contraceptive instruction) sex ed in her public school. But in any case, we do not know (and speaking for myself, do not wish to know) anything about the particulars of her pregnancy. It may be that she and her boyfriend used contraceptives diligently and the contraceptives failed. Certainly, this much is undeniable: More girls get pregnant by thoroughly following the recommendations of birth control advocates than do girls who strictly adhere to an abstinence program.

About 20 years ago a Washington Post reporter named Leon Dash made a great contribution to the debate over contraceptives in schools with his book "When Children Want Children." He studied the lives of inner city black families in the District of Columbia. At the time, the conventional wisdom was that many teenagers were having babies because they lacked knowledge of or access to birth control products. Dash interviewed the pregnant girls and they set him straight. They told him (and I paraphrase from memory) "Mr. Dash, we know all about birth control. And we can get them at the supermarket. But we want these babies."

The cheerleaders for contraceptives often overlook that reality in their eagerness to place condoms in the hands of teenagers.

So let's not argue from one individual case about what is the best way to avoid teenage pregnancy when we all know that the real purpose is to undermine a conservative woman by using her daughter's situation as a weapon against her.

As a conservative woman she is as much an affront to liberal pieties as Clarence Thomas is as a conservative black man.

The Wall Street Journal puts its editorial finger on why the media seems so upset about the Sarah Palin nomination.

They want a VP to be a kind of parliamentary choice, someone they have already vetted, someone who's made them laugh with insider jokes at the Gridiron dinner. The Beltway class whines constantly about how it wants fresh voices in politics, but we guess this means a first-term Democratic Senator rather than a first-term Republican Governor from some godforsaken U.S. state few of them have ever been to.

We are instructed that Mrs. Palin isn't qualified, because she lacks Washington experience. But until recently that was said to be a virtue in Mr. Obama, who is at the top of his ticket. Meanwhile, there's hardly a peep of media notice that the Obama campaign is preposterously trying to remake Joe Biden into a poor scrapper from Scranton when he's been in the Senate for 36 years. They all know Joe. But when Mr. McCain picks an authentic middle-class mother who is also a Governor, we are told she's not up to the job.

And as Victor Davis Hanson writes,

Much has been written why Palin both brings strength to the McCain ticket and is a gamble at the same time. Why then the growing wave of popular sentiment in her favor?

Various reasons, but one I think is that millions of Americans are simply tired of being lectured at by smug elites. Jetting Al Gore made tens of millions finger-pointing at us about our global warming. Obama's America, apparently unlike Rev. Wright's Trinity Church, is a cruel, downright mean and dysfunctional place. John Kerry's United States is one of the half-educated in need of Ivy-League enlightenment and tutorials.

So along comes someone (unlike Biden's vastly inflated middle-class biography) who really is from the working class. She likes it—and finds snowmobiling, hunting, fishing and living in small-town America not as a wasteful use of carbon-emitting fuels, cruelty to animals, gratuitous depletion of our resources, or proof of parochial yokelism. Instead it is a life of action in an often harsh natural landscape, where physical strength is married to intelligence to bring us food, fuel, and progress.

Palin's symbolism is the antithesis of the metrosexual wind- or body- surfing politican, and hair-plugged, neurotic TV pundit So at this time, right now, millions apparently like Palin's atypical 19th-century profile. Again, it's a pleasant change of pace from Harvard Law School, DC politics, "community organizing" and the can't-do, 'they raised the bar on me' collective complaint.

Now it's up to Governor Palin to prove that she is more than just this symbolic representation that Hanson touts. I wouldn't want the pressure that she is facing in her speech tonight. But perhaps she relishes that challenge; why accept the nomination otherwise? And maybe when we start hearing from her in her own voice instead of through the filter of the talking heads, we'll be able to make up our own minds about the woman.

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin writes today about the four stages of conservative female abuse.

Liberals hold a special animus for constituencies they deem traitors. Minorities who identify as social and economic conservatives have left the plantation and sold out their people. Women who put an “R” by their name have abandoned their ovaries and betrayed their gender. As Republican officeholders and conservative public figures who are women have grown in number and visibility, the progression of Conservative Female Abuse has worsened. The astonishing vitriol and virulent hatred directed at GOP Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is the most severe manifestation to date.

Read the rest. The evidence is clear.