Talking About Bad and Unpopular Republican Policies Is So Uncivil!
Shorter Kathleen Parker: “How dare Democrats focus on an increasing number of creepy Republican comments about rape, policies enacted and/or opposed by federal and state Republican legislatures, and the Republican platform to show that Republicans are in many ways opposed to the interests of women? Mitt Romney has been very clear that he would not unilaterally overturn Griswold v. Connecticut!”
You didn’t shorten her enough.
Yeah, I was thinking more:
Shorter Kathleen Parker: Eww, sex, eww! eww, rudenes, eww! double eww, poor people!
That should cover 99% of her columns.
Just because everyone says they’re opposed to the interests of women – doesn’t mean they’re not opposed to the interests of women.
I decided I particularly disliked Kathleen Parker when she wrote a column about how boy high school wrestlers were being oppressed because girls were allowed to compete. In reality, the column and the ideas expressed therein were a lot worse than I’m making them out to be, but that was the gist.
I don’t see how she could possibly be making the argument in this column seriously. If you don’t like politics to feature issues of women’s rights and autonomy, then you must have been extremely put off by the major political push about those issues the Republicans put on in the House and the various state legislatures they won in 2010. How, then, can you turn around and denounce opposition to that political project?
I suspect that Kathleen Parker wasn’t actually putt off by the Republicans’ offensive on “cultural issues.” What the hell is with that term, anyway? It sounds like an overly-relativistic description of the Taliban’s educational system. “They have cultural issues.”
Steve M. took a brief and nauseating tour through selections of Parker’s thoughts on sexual and reproductive policy, and it’s pretty hard to avoid the conclusion that she likes Republican policies in those areas, and that she likes them because they won’t ever apply to her and because it re-enforces a hierarchy that she thinks her family sits atop.
Pretty much this as a comment everywhere ever.
(see also: Brooks, David. “Every column.” The New York Times. New York: October 2003-present. inf. pp.)
(Edit button please. Also, assume the above is edited for number/gender concordance.)
I decided I particularly disliked her when I realized that she doesn’t understand basic math. About ten years ago she cited a study and claimed it said that even using a condom, there is still a fifteen percent chance of contracting HIV from any random sexual encounter. Of course, the study said no such thing. Instead, it said that condoms reduce the chance of HIV transmission by eighty-five percent. She also missed the fact that your partner needs to have HIV for this to even matter, something the vast majority of teenagers (at whom this column was aimed) aren’t infected with.
Since then I’ve filed her under “generic dumbass” and ignored her.
I don’t think I ever gave her more than a cursory read until she published a completely ludicrous column 4 or 5 years ago. The general gist, as I remember it, was that lady brains are so fluffy that it’s a miracle we don’t routinely get lost on our way to the nail spa. I’m fairly certain that the subtext was, regardless of what women say they want, conservative Republican males, with their superior brains, know best. I can’t take anything she says seriously since then.
When I wrestled, one of our opponents had a girl wrestling varsity at my weight class (126). At the time, I was junior varsity, because our best wrestler in my weight class was state-championship caliber, so I didn’t have to wrestle her.
She pinned him in about eighty seconds. It was his last loss of the season.
The kicker is, this took place in 1986. In the south. Have things actually gotten worse on the high school sports equality front since then?
And let’s be frank, it was the right-wingers who made the ‘culture war’ a major component of every political campaign since Reagan.
Since Reagan?
Since Nixon.
Tuned in my radio today
To see what Spiro Agnew had to say.
He said, “If you don’t like The Ballad Of The Green Beret, then you must be
One o’ them long-haired dope-smoking filthy living-in-the-commune hippie Marxists!”
Since James G. Blaine
“We are Republicans, and don’t propose to leave our party and identify ourselves with the party whose antecedents have been rum, Romanism, and rebellion.”
“Ma, ma, hwere’s my pa?”
since before 1860 …
that’s how he got the fundie evangelicals on board the republican train.
before then, they weren’t hot button issues.
I accidentally hit “reply” before I was done. So, continuing
And we aren’t even really talking about the ‘cultural’ part of the Republican messages. They want to change laws that are there to protect women’s autonomy and bodily integrity, aka freedom. They want to change laws in a way that will impose financial burdens on women.
How could those not be political campaign issues?
It’s amazing, the conservative, Republican TeaBagger complex is so well funded and specialized that they have columnists devoted to simply being a fog machine on the issues that they care the most about and an excuse maker for the crazies that populate their party (Akin – he’s an outlier, Mourdock – he’s misunderstood, etc.).
Always comes back to the same question – too stupid to understand what er party stands for or too evil in trying to cover up the true nature of the beliefs she shares with the crazies, or both?
I like the Mourdock “misunderstood” or “words out of context” defense. It’s very epic.
Mourdock stated very clearly what he meant, and there is no dodging the fact. How can one “misunderstand” that he believes there should be no exceptions to a ban on abortion. It’s not even that controversial if you’re really anti-abortion.
Though the TV ads running here where they take his words out of context are funny, because they’re already awful in context.
Speaking the truth about Republicans has been the height of incivility for 30 years now.
as well as speaking the truth to republicans … u ought have a meet-up at one of my family’s thanksgivings … they’re very truth adverse … like when i esplain that the black panther or hells angels chapters of oakland were the proto-tea bagger party for what we all know and love post 2008 … but with a little less style and panache and concern for … nevermind, point crushed by counter-point
Thanksgiving is barely bearable. It is best understood as the revenge of the American Indians against white people.
Actually it dates all the way back to Truman:
‘I never gave anybody hell! I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.’
Kathleen Parker & Naomi Wolf both have vaginas (does that word make u uncomfortable?) and a fetish for al gore’s 2k campaign sweaters …
Don’t know where to begin with this awful person. She’s some sort of perfect storm of southern belle (D.C. loves these), mother of sons (so aren’t lots of women, including, ahem, a few left-wing flaming radical lesbian feminists?), and wealthy prima donna (D.C. loves these, too).
Would say, though, that we’ve given her fodder by not stressing adequately that women’s reproductive rights are central issues for men, not just for women. How many straight men want their sex lives with their wives, girlfriends, casual partners massively constrained by basic birth control issues? (Maybe you have to be older, like me, to remember when they were.) How many men want paternity suits slapped on them by a willing partner to one night of fun sex? Stuff like that. Really, people — male as well as female — need to wake up!
Her “blood equity” column (the shorter of which is a six-letter word repeated until she runs our of breath) shouldn’t be forgotten either.
All I can say is “wow, did the Jewish World Review website really run a column by a white Christian lady going on and on and on about ‘full-bloodedness’ as a proxy for political values”?
I suppose I should note that she didn’t call Obama “rootless” or even “cosmopolitan.”
Though I suppose it’s possible that the WJR ran the piece as a reminder to their readers of what inspires certain Republican.
God, that’s fucking creepy. And really, un-American.
Don’t forget the time she quoted (semi-approvingly) a friend in the military who stated that the Democrats who dared campaign against Bush’s re-election “should be lined up and shot.” Although she changed it to “slapped” in some papers.
Ahem.
Parker scored highest:
About sums it up right there.
What was the “highest”? something under 50% (random chance)?
@LPBB, are you perhaps thinking of the notorious WaPo column by Charlotte Allen, the thesis of which is that women are stupid ninnies who swooned at Obama rallies like teenyboppers at an Elvis concert? That was so depressing. She completely discounted the work that she, herself, had done to get her Ph.D because it wasn’t in a manly discipline like math or engineering.
Actually, if Kathleen Parker also wrote something similar I don’t want to know about it. I’ve had enough of the self-loathing woman writers.
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