Strong Women

The more things change, the more they stay the same

July 25, 2017 by Jeff (ILoveCapitalism)

Lefties have been swarming on Sarah Huckabee Sanders. The most famous comment, which you have probably heard, was a Daily Beast writer calling her “Butch queen first time in drags at ball” – but there have been many others. And no mainstream voices have yet objected.

It reminds me of 2016 when Azealia Banks gave a detailed call for Sarah Palin to be gang-raped – and left-leaning Twitter did nothing to Banks, despite her clear violation of Twitter’s policy against inciting violence on others.

All of this highlights how the Left is more-than-guilty of what it accuses others of. Lefties are hypersensitive to racism, homophobia, transphobia, sexism, etc. because too many of them are racist, homophobic, transphobic, sexist, etc. Not all (I know some who aren’t); but many. They know it in themselves. Knowing it in themselves, they assume that others (righties) must be even worse.

Does Camille Paglia’s example prove or disprove a notion that women shouldn’t vote?

June 16, 2017 by Jeff (ILoveCapitalism)

A commenter pointed us to this Weekly Standard interview with Camille Paglia. As in most of her work, she says true and fascinating things – on the way to wrong conclusions. As a sample, here she is on the election:

Hillary, with her supercilious, Marie Antoinette-style entitlement, was a disastrously wrong candidate for 2016 and that she secured the nomination only through overt chicanery by the Democratic National Committee, assisted by a corrupt national media who, for over a year, imposed a virtual blackout on potential primary rivals…
After Trump’s victory (for which there were abundant signs in the preceding months), both the Democratic party and the big-city media urgently needed to do a scathingly honest self-analysis, because the election results plainly demonstrated that Trump was speaking to vital concerns (jobs, immigration, and terrorism among them) for which the Democrats had few concrete solutions…

She has much more to say; RTWT. For example, she slams the transgender movement of today as dupes of Big Pharma:

…the pharmaceutical industry, having lost income when routine estrogen therapy for menopausal women was abandoned because of its health risks, has been promoting the relatively new idea of transgenderism in order to create a permanent class of customers…I condemn the escalating prescription of puberty blockers (whose long-term effects are unknown) for children. I regard this practice as a criminal violation of human rights.

And she covers President Trump’s recent “infrastructure” speech, which indeed was awesome.

But then, whom did Paglia support? (Disclosure: I supported no one; a registered Independent, I came close on Gary Johnson but even he wasn’t good enough for me.) As Paglia explains:

I am a registered Democrat who voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primary and for Jill Stein in the general election. Since last Fall, I’ve had my eye on Kamala Harris, the new senator from California, and I hope to vote for her in the next presidential primary.

Which is downright silly.

In travelling the “alt” opinion world, one occasionally comes across a strange theory that women shouldn’t vote. Here is an example from the vlogger Black Pigeon Speaks (who is center-Left on many issues, but right-ish on immigration, culture and terrorism). For the record: I disagree with the theory (that is, I think women should vote). But I’m going to describe it.

The essence of the theory (which again, I think is a broken theory) is that biology has wired men to take stands on issues and to initiate projects in the world; while it has wired women instead to be concerned with immediate safety and securing benefits from the group (and/or some patron). Because of that, says the theory, women voters over time will drag a country toward both appeasement (of its enemies) and socialism. Which is not good.

Is Camille Paglia evidence for that theory? Here we have a woman with a talent for grasping and expressing truth, yet she still can’t see through the people-destroying ruse of socialism.

‘The View’ Devolves into Catfights and Low Ratings

November 23, 2014 by V the K

The departure of Barbara Walters has left ABC’s ‘The View’ without any adult supervision. And the addition of a shrill, deranged, conspiracy-spouting lesbian to the mix has… unsurprisingly… led to some serious dysfunction.

A shrill, backstage brawl at “The View” Wednesday left co-host Rosie Perez in tears while panelists Whoopi Goldberg and Rosie O’Donnell battled over how to cover the latest allegations against Bill Cosby and the racially charged upheaval in Ferguson, Mo., sources said.
O’Donnell believed the show — now overseen by ABC News — needed to delve deeper into both controversial subjects, while Goldberg wanted to steer clear of the topics altogether.
Ultimately, both news stories were discussed at length on the air by the panel.
“There’s terrible frustration and there are problems,” a source close to the show told the Daily News. “Whoopi didn’t want to talk about Cosby and Ferguson, Rosie (O’Donnell) did — how could you not? These are topics that are uncomfortable for everyone, but it’s ‘The View’ and it’s their job to talk about topics that might make some people tense.”

Fortunately, there were very few witnesses to the train wreck.

With Walters now retired, there’s no center of gravity to the show, no one to reign in the lunatics inside the asylum. No wonder the ratings have plummeted with the formula broken and the cast is feuding with each other.

Anti-Vaccination whackjob Jenny McCarthy now looks like the smart one for walking away from this not-so-hot mess.

Bet this wouldn’t have happened if they had picked Tammy Bruce instead of Rosie.

I also bet this kind of stuff doesn’t happen on ‘The Five.’ And this clip may explain why:
[Read more…]

Michele Bachmann and the Wedding Cake Fascists

March 12, 2014 by V the K

Gay dude I know from Teh Facebooks was all panty-wadded because Michele Bachmann said, “In Pursuit Of Denying Religious Liberty, The Gay Community Has ‘Bullied The American People.'” He called her “a stupid woman” for using the term “bullying” to describe the act of using the threat of force to coerce Christians who object to gay marriage to participate in gay weddings.

Dictionary.com provides the following definitions for bully in its noun and verb form.

bully – noun, plural bul·lies.1.a blustering, quarrelsome, overbearing person who habitually badgers and intimidates smaller or weaker people. verb bul·lied, bul·ly·ing. 1. to act the bully toward; intimidate; domineer.

Blustery quarrelsome and overbearing certainly apply to gay activists; take a look at any any protest where gay activists are involved. Habitually badgering or intimidating smaller or weaker people? That cuts to heart of exactly what the activists are doing, badgering and intimidating Christian bakers, florists, and photographers into servitude; the threat of jail and lawsuits for refusing to comply is very intimidating, and Christians are at a distinct legal and cultural disadvantage because of the dominant position of secularists and anti-Christians in the media and political culture. And inasmuch as there are always alternative providers for the services the militant ays are demanding, forcing unwilling people to participate is domineering behavior.

If you want to say the word “bully” is ridiculously overused, you will get no argument from me. But the dictionary seems to be on Mrs. Bachmann’s side, at least. The lines between bullying and activism were erased a long time ago.

Could Margaret Thatcher have changed Sarah Palin’s political fortunes?

April 9, 2013 by Kurt

Dan has written a few good posts already about Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as both someone who should be viewed as a “feminist icon,” and as a woman who who rose to power “by dint of her own striving,” in the words of Meryl Streep. In the second post, Dan asked a rhetorical question about the reception of strong, conservative women in politics: “Why is it that certain conservative leaders, particularly women who capture the public imagination, endure this ‘special hatred and ridicule’?”

Dan’s question reminded me of something I saw at the Daily Caller. On Geraldo Rivera’s radio program yesterday, Ann Coulter claimed that, according to sources allegedly close to Thatcher, Lady Thatcher wanted to meet with Sarah Palin to give her advice about presenting herself more effectively:

“One thing that I know, because I know people who know her, is when Sarah Palin first burst on the scene, she wanted to have a meeting with Palin, because she saw raw political talent, but wanted to teach Sarah Palin to do what she did,” Coulter said. “I just know it from friends of hers — to teach [Palin] to speak proper English. Sarah Palin did not meet with her. And just a year or two ago, when Sarah Palin was promoting some reality show or something, she went to England and she announced to the press that she was planning on dropping by to see Lady Thatcher. And Lady Thatcher put out the word that she would not be available.”

I have no clue as to the reliability of Coulter’s sources in this instance or the veracity of those reports, but regardless of whether the story is true or whether it is merely apocryphal, it does serve to illustrate some key differences among Thatcher, Palin, and the political environment that exists in the U.S. today as opposed to that that existed in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s.

There should be no doubt that the left in Britain hated Thatcher as much as the left in America hates Palin–and has ever since she lambasted Obama in her convention speech in September 2008. But despite that similarity and the fact that both Palin and Thatcher are strong, outspoken conservative women, it strikes me as a sort of revisionist history to suggest, as Coulter implicitly does, that Palin’s situation today might have taken a very different course had she met with Thatcher when she “first burst on the scene,” whenever, exactly, that was.

Thatcher rose to prominence in Britain over many years in the British House of Commons, a branch of parliament known for its particularly rowdy and confrontational style of debate and discussion. Thatcher did well in that environment and successfully managed to become the head of her party there. Thatcher’s history of rising to power through parliament bears some similarities to the manner in which Palin rose to become governor of Alaska and to take on the entrenched interests of her own party.

But the similarities end there. The crucial difference is that Thatcher’s rise to power occurred on a broader political stage than Palin’s did, and given the short timeframe in which Palin went from being a governor to being a national figure, it should be evident that she had few opportunities to shape the counter-narrative that the media and the left started putting out about her shortly after she “burst on the scene.”

Short of advising her not to do an interview with Katie Couric, I can’t imagine what Lady Thatcher could have said or done to help Palin navigate the treacherous waters of the 2008 presidential campaign, and that was especially the case as long as Palin’s fate was tied to that of John McCain, one of the most conciliatory candidates I have ever seen run for the presidency.

After the campaign ended, Margaret Thatcher might have been able to help Palin gain a little more polish, perhaps, but I doubt that would have done anything to change the situation in which Palin found herself, with lawsuit after lawsuit filed against her in Alaska, until she ultimately decided to resign as governor in July 2009. Although the media’s harsh attacks on Palin greatly damaged her image with a large segment of the public at large, I would argue that Palin’s decision to step down as governor had more of an impact on dampening enthusiasm for her as a candidate for the presidency in 2012 among many conservatives.

Palin’s story is still being written. Whether or not she decides to run for elective office again remains to be seen. While I have no doubt that Margaret Thatcher could have given her some excellent advice and guidance, it also seems rather like wishful thinking to suggest that Palin’s political fortunes would be dramatically different today had she met with Thatcher many years ago.

Update: Nile Gardner first reported that the Thatcher-Palin story was a hoax when he wrote about it in 2011. (Hat Tip: Professor Jacobson.) Of course, as The Right Scoop asks, that makes one wonder what Coulter is trying to accomplish by repeating it.

Lady Thatcher’s success won “by dint of her own striving”

April 9, 2013 by B. Daniel Blatt

Via Jim Geraghty’s Morning Jolt, caught this in Meryl Streep’s statement about the passing of perhaps the greatest woman of the last century:

But to me [Margaret Thatcher] was a figure of awe for her personal strength and grit. To have come up, legitimately, through the ranks of the British political system, class bound and gender phobic as it was, in the time that she did and the way that she did, was a formidable achievement. To have won it, not because she inherited position as the daughter of a great man, or the widow of an important man, but by dint of her own striving. To have withstood the special hatred and ridicule, unprecedented in my opinion, leveled in our time at a public figure who was not a mass murderer; and to have managed to keep her convictions attached to fervent ideals and ideas– wrongheaded or misguided as we might see them now-without corruption- I see that as evidence of some kind of greatness, worthy for the argument of history to settle. To have given women and girls around the world reason to supplant fantasies of being princesses with a different dream: the real-life option of leading their nation; this was groundbreaking and admirable.

Emphasis added.

Why is it that certain conservative leaders, particularly women who capture the public imagination, endure this “special hatred and ridicule”?

Notable that Ms. Streep has grown to admire Mrs. Thatcher even as she hints at her own disagreement with the Iron Lady’s policies. Would it that there were more like her, individuals able to admire their ideological adversaries.

Lady Thatcher’s Advice to Conservative Bloggers

April 9, 2013 by B. Daniel Blatt

Margaret Thatcher: Feminist Icon

April 8, 2013 by B. Daniel Blatt

It seemed that any time in the past twenty-one years someone offered a critique of Hillary Clinton, her defenders, more often than not, would, without addressing the particular points of the critique, retort that we were threatened by strong women. Many would not change their tune even as we reminded them how highly we regarded and how much we praised the greatest British Prime Minister since Churchill, Margaret Thatcher.

And unlike Mrs. Clinton, Lady Thatcher made it entirely on her own, without having hitched her star to a prominent politician.

This strong British woman truly earned — and then commanded — the respect of men, on both sides of the Atlantic. And one wonders why so few feminists, interested in seeing women succeed in professions once dominated by men, didn’t hold Lady Thatcher in higher esteem. From the 1970s onward, nearly every leading conservative, including the most prominent American conservative of the last century, adored this leader who just happened to be a woman.

Margaret Thatcher proved that conservatives have always looked up to women who showed their strength in the public square.

If you believe a woman can do the job as good as (if not better than) a man, you need only study Lady Thatcher’s life story.

Rest in peace, Iron Lady! A giant has fallen.

UPDATE: Kudos to the Huffington Post for featuring images of the friendship between two giants of freedom.

Neoneocon: Grande Conservative Blogress Diva 2012/13

January 1, 2013 by B. Daniel Blatt

Congratulations to Neoneocon, rising from Conservative Blogress Diva Regent to take on the tiara as Grande Conservative Blogress Diva 2012/13.

Joining her in her court will be Sarah Hoyt, as Conservative Blogress Diva Regent and Bookworm as Conservative Blogress Diva in Waiting.

Through the power of her prose and the wisdom of her words, each woman has demonstrated wit, intelligence, strength and confidence enough to command the respect of conservative men–and is thus a diva, as we define one.

May they continue to serve in loyal opposition to a failed presidency — and to demonstrate that despite the debacle of last November, certain smart and savvy conservative women remain confident about our vision for the country and committed to articulate ideas for real reform.