When have you seen a VP or P candidate not have children or a wife/husband? It just doesn’t happen now. Singles and divorced just isn’t allowed. You can try with a third, forth or fifth party but they get no traction in a system designed to cut them out. Without national access you are just tilting at wind mills.

Yes, children are used as props. They are obligated to use them. I think Letterman just shouldn’t have crossed that Rubicon, especially without being precise in who he was talking about and who was at that particular game. Palin’s oldest daughter who was for abstinence then got pregnant then had the gall to be for abstinence again did deserved to be ridiculed. She practically begged to be slapped down for her wanton stare you in the face hypocrisy.

But then Palin with the instincts of a showwoman, or politician, worked to milk it just one too many times and turned me off again to her. She was actually right at first but then stepped over the line and jumped the snark. From ridicule to hurtful and unwarranted attack of her own. Calling him a promoter of child rape lost my sympathy for her.

Using her children as props and winking at the camera during speeches and debates blows the shit out of your ‘sexism’ claims.
She dragged those kids out like stage props. Floated her ‘folksy’ image on her ‘Mom Credentials’. Thus they became far game. Haven’t Sanford and Ensign been called hypocrits, and tormented by the media, because they expoused ‘Christian Family Values’ while carrying on illicit affairs? So why should Sarah not be called out on her claims to ‘Mother of the year’ 
She also ‘worked’ the femme fetale angle- “what’s the difference between a Pit bull and a soccor mom- Lipstick”? Maverick? Killing wolves in high heels, merely to win a contest for their forelegs. She created the image of ‘Caribou Barbie’,not the ‘sexist’ media.
And What is the ratio of Sarah winks on camera to those off? What is the Total of ‘winks’ combined? Who does she rival in the number of winks during a campaign?
And didn’t a male politician take some shit for playing Tim Meadow’s “Ladies man’ routine in the Oval office? Working your ‘mojo’ on the campaign stump, or in office, is fodder for the media, regardless gender.
There is a distinct difference between the manner in which you present yourself when competing for a crown and campaigning for public office. Sarah failed to make the transition in her public appearances from her ‘constestant’ days. It eluded her that people voted on issues that effected their daily lives, not just “Likability” or even gender, or race. They voted on a stratedgy forward and on the perception of eptitude and contininuity. She not only did not instill confidence in her abilities, her commitment to the top of the ticket was questionable at times. Her going ‘rouge’ from the campaign talking points, and making up a few of her own,made her a ‘wild card’. So accusations of being erradic or irrational is not surpising.VP nominees FOLLOW the nominees campaign staff, over any of their own ‘advisors’. It was the top of the ticket which won the party’s allegience and who gave the VP Nom the Shot at the big time, gender neutral. It was not that she ‘didn’t know her place’ as a Woman, But she did not comrpehend it as a VP. 
Sarah is a hypocrit and she is being called out on the very claims she was making about herself. That’s fair.
If you want to talk about who is experiencing real sexism, compounded with venomous racism, You should be talking about Sotomayor. Please the Rightwing media has abandoned all Self respect, or sanity, on this one. Liddy and his worries over how her cycle will effect her legal decisions? In the face of this blatant, unabashed sexism and you chose to write your Cry Wolf article focusing on Sarah? Give me a Break.

- in a follow-on to Night-Gaunt, I have stopped wondering where “some people” get their ideas.  On the average, people believe their predispositions, cannot discern propaganda, many of whom still think, “- our government would not lie to us.”  Since the official overtaking of the U.S. by the NAZI machine with “Operation Paper-Clip,” and the conversion of the OSS into the CIA, 1942-1946, via leadership of NAZI general Gehlen, little accurate information has been released by “our government.”  For example, a retired major-general, former chief of Army intelligence, publicized his opinion that none of the pentagon-damage fotos contain evidence that the pentagon was struck by an “airliner.”  A few of us question that a certain Lt.General and staff were “temporarily moved” to the section scheduled to be blown up.  Published only once, immediately after the initial damage to the pentagon, was the statement of a woman walking the sidewalk, as the initially-destructive, flying object passed by: ” - it looked like some kind of small airplane - - .”  CHALK UP ANOTHER POINT FOR THE LADIES.  An excellent description of the Tomahawk missile, reportedly fired from a U.S. ship off the coast, immediately thereafter dispatched to the Sea of Japan for twelve months. I wonder if, in the meantime, the officer participants have succumbed to mysterious deaths, such as unpredictable cardiac arrests, or if a couple have simply “disappeared”?  Rendition is not new.  Perhaps they were only “frightened shitless,” by their unpatriotic, treasonous leadership.  Such suppression, done to the crew of the U.S.S. Liberty, quasi-destroyed by the israelis, thirty years ago, with support of the U.S. “president,” Johnson and cabinet pimps, is standard.  Americans owe gratitude to the remaining crew of the U.S.S. Liberty, for publishing the facts.  It is very gratifying that Americans are increasingly daring to “tell it like it is,” disregarding the NAZI treasonists.  http://www.jfkmurdersolved.com/files1.htm  Such activity in counterposition to the statement of the former CIA director, “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.” - William Casey, Director CIA (Quote from internal staff meeting notes 1981).  However limitedly, Increasingly, Americans are behaving like Americans.

Gulam, where do you get this? Feminism is the fact that women and men are on an equal level when it comes to being human. Not equal in skills or capabilities but as sapients. How does that help the corporations, many of whom are owned by families and churches, and are still dangerous to Feminists (male and female) and to the rest of us. Most of who think personal liberty and a representative gov’t supersede the evangelical dictatorship of the Abrahamic based religions.

“Because you have thrown off the old discipline advised by all of the successful civilizations of the past…”

Hoo boy.  It’s hard to know where to start.  First, where ARE those successful civilizations of the past?  They still around?  Still “successful”?  How many of them owed their “success” to, say, slavery?  As long as we’re discussing the oppression of half the human race (by which I mean, more than half), let’s bring that back as well.  In for a penny, in for a pound, “civilization”-wise.

This is cherce, too:

“Most of the high-end jobs created in the past generation have gone to the wives and sisters of men who already had high status occupations…”

Yes, and most of them were Capricorns.  It’s an outrage.  What?  Documentation?  Only a society feminized into feeble passivity cares about documentation of sweeping claims.  Wake up, sheeple.

Unless the writer is either an extraterrestrial (or a character from a Robert Heinlein novel), he should proclaim his open admiration for reactionary patriarchy so we don’t make the mistake of assuming he has the least bit of sympathy for the values any sensible person, in the 21st century, in any society, subscribes to.

After years of reading comments on web sites, I thought I’d seen it all.  How wrong we can be…

We humans on this planet have a finite amount of oil to work with, a given amount of easy energy to use in the building of a new way of life. Feminism is THE social mistake that most threatens the chance of moving on into a better time and instead simply crashing it. Because you have thrown off the old discipline advised by all of the successful civilizations of the past, this resource is being consumed in a fit of consumer idiocy and the pursuit of happiness today. Most of the high-end jobs created in the past generation have gone to the wives and sisters of men who already had high status occupations, doubling the wealth of those who already have and expanding the distance between rich and poor. Ask most lower middle class women if they are dying to go out to work instead of staying home and raising their children. Feminism is a tool that industry uses to destroy those institutions that impede their ability through the media to control our lives: the family and organized religion.

to Gulam:

“The old patriarchal social order was efficient and sustainable” ?!?!? By “efficient and sustainable” I suppose you mean endless wars of conquest and imperialism; slavery, indentured workers, poverty, disease, and destitution for the majority of all peoples on the earth as the norm; oligarchy, monarchy and plutocracy as the primary forms of government - with brutal dictatorships here and there in the mix - and of course, the total subjugation of women as nothing more than pieces of property to be traded amongst the ruling males of each society. Ah, ‘the good ole days’ when men were men and women were . . . Who gives a shit so long as dinner was ready when I came home from my crappy job -irritated and beaten down by that wonderful boss (a man of course) - and always ready to “knock some sense into her” if she’s not properly deferential.
Yes, love those “good ole days.” At least for us males, no matter how low we were on the social/economic/political scale in the larger society, we always knew there was someone waiting dutifully at home who would always be a few steps lower than us - someone on whom we could take out our frustrations, focus our inadequacies, and always feel superior to. Someone who, if things got bad enough, we could beat the hell out of with no fear of physical or legal reprisals.
Boy, do I yearn for those days of old - NOT!!! Gulam, if you were being sarcastic, it was too subtle for me and therefore I apologize for what I’m about to say. If you were in earnest then I’m afraid I’m left with considering you a brainless cretin in the social/economic/political realm. Come on, have you been asleep since the late 18th century? Have you no conception whatsoever as to women’s many, many, many contributions to western civilization? Don’t you understand that, despite the barriers and the discrimination, at least half the great art created in the west has come from women? Artists, scientists, teachers, doctors (and let’s not forget nurses), technologists, builders, farmers, designers, engineers, even religious leaders (who do you think lead in the conversion of Europe to Christianity?). You name it and women have done it - and all of that in spite of the ruling patriarchy doing its best to keep them out. Pretty damned impressive I would say.
I’m 62, I have been a soldier, government intelligence analyst, professional roofer, old house restorationist, gardener, househusband/father, owner/operator of a cafe’ in Jamaica, undergrad and graduate student, film production assistant, and recently the head pastry chef for a catering company in northern Virginia, USA. In all of those years and throughout all of those professions, I have always found most of the women I’ve encountered infinitely more interesting than most of the men. Women complement men, complement our society, as equally as men complement women and society (i.e., if men are able to shed the blinders of their forced-superiority).
Come on Gulam, throw off your patriarchal chains, remove your oppressive blinders, and live! Live a life of joy, compassion, love and caring: all things that women have been far more “efficient and sustainable” at than we boys.
 

Sad but true. The Calvanists who wish to dominate will be that way. Women will be covered, their faces and bodies, much like in the Islamic countries now.

The old patriarchal social order was efficient and sustainable. Where woman drive there are more than twice as many vehicles on the road, and the limited supply of oil is consumed in half the time. By “liberating” women, putting them into the work force, the West embarked upon an unstable course of exponentially increasing consumption that could only be sustained by taking by force the resources of the rest of the world. This made their need to dominate other nations inevitable, their destruction of the environment was greatly accelerated, and their family structures have been undermined. The rhetoric of liberation has again and again been used as a stalking horse for tyranny. After America crashes her economy, in the chaos and under the regimes to follow American women are likely to be among the most abused on the planet.

and so your point is?

I wonder how you feel about her being the first woman president of the United States, and a conservative?

Haven’t you learned anything about politics?

She was chosen as a symbolic candidate to defuse the symbolism of another symbolic candidate, knowing that some people would only look at the symoblism of her candidacy, and not give a dam about what was underneath the symbolism.

That’s what this nation has become, a bright and shiny box of ceral, with nothing inside.

Thus far, no one disagrees with the premise that Mrs. Palin is an attractive woman.  If the string-pullers chose her for her sex-appeal, they made an excellent choice.  The fact that she was governor of the largest state in the U.S.ofA. (before the NAZI-supporting, Bush family finished it off) should not be summarily dismissed, although it requires qualification.  If Mrs. Palin behaved as a “solicitous whore” during her candidacy, she behaved as her string-pullers wanted her to behave, a “good little girl” who did as she was instructed.  I find it a shame that she adapted to the will of the super-rich, and behaved as a solicitous, sex-symbol with a turned-off intellect, which resulted in a trail of family infractions and continuous personal degradation.  While I suspect that her genuine intellect did not qualify her for the VP slot, I also suspect that she would not have been guilty of the genocides equal to those of the previous V.P., had McCain/Palin been elected.  I also wonder if Mr. McCain messed in his pants when the string-pullers informed him of his VP running mate?  Only after his death are the atrocities of McNamara being brought to the fore.  Will Americans wait until their deaths to bring the atrocities of Bush/Cheney to the fore?  Or, will Americans simply observe the translation of the USA into nothingness, while watching TV sex, eating fast-foods and being decimated by the latest, fraudulent, anti-flu shot from Baxter International, legislated by the World Health Organization, in violation of the U.S. Constitution?

I tend to agree with Ms. Cocco that Sarah Palin has been subjected to unfair and even sexist criticism, although I also tend to agree with a number of the comments that Ms. Palin brought much of it on herself. But the important difference here is that when George W. Bush - another airheaded mimbo -  first came on the scene as a presidential candidate I never heard a single disparaging word about how he dressed, how he “turned his head in such a provocative way,” how he was neglecting his children, or even what a dismally stupid clod he was. When Mr. Bush stumbled and mumbled his way through reporters questions; when his comments were idiotic and irrelevant to the subject at hand; when he showed absolutely no knowledge of anything relating to domestic or foreign policy and couldn’t even name the German chancellor at the time (Gerhard Schroeder), there was no firestorm of criticism, there was no 24/hour newscycle trashing that went on. On the contrary, no matter how stupid he appeared to be, no matter how clueless his answers were, the press was always respectful and in most cases, almost deferential. Throughout that campaign, at the end of the day when the various news anchors were summing up the day’s campaign appearances, the comments were always something like, “Bush seems to be coming up to speed more each day, he gave a good speech at the Citadel today (despite the fact that when answering reporters questions after that speech he invariably came across as a moron).
So what is the explanation for one dunce being treated with deference and even respect and the other dunce being mercilessly trashed and ridiculed? They both seem clueless, they both are mean-spirited, right-wing jackasses, they both stoop to the lowest rung of the political spectrum, and they both had about the same political experience. What’s the difference?
The most obvious of course is that one is a man (more or less) and one is a woman. Is that it? Does anyone else have a better explanation?

I thought about this column for a long time. I am one of the first to call someone out on sexist behavior. But I came to the conclusion that like she has used and continues to use her kids, Palin has consistently used her sexuality. Therefore, I think it is OK to comment on it. It’s kind of like a woman who gets breast implants and then gets angry when men look at her breasts.

I agree that Hillary has been the brunt of sexist comments, beginning way back when she was chastised for her “I do not bake cookies” comment. But Palin is no Hillary on any level, and Hillary advances herself using hard work, her knowledge, and her intellect. Had Hillary gone the Palin route, I would again say that I think commenting on her sexuality is fair game.

And also do not forget the firestorm when Obama was photographed sans shirt (without his knowledge). Like the men in Palin’s case, most of the women I know were swooning, while some of the men were amusingly (and uncharacteristically) puritanical about it.

So, let sexism be called sexism, but let not everything be called sexism because if it is, it will water down attention to real abuses that should be redressed.

The main difference in criticisms is that males tend to be attacked for anything but their looks. Women will get that and usually as an ad hominim and not anything of any relevance to the problem. Women forced to live or die by their looks over the substance of their character. In Palin’s and Hillary’s cases what hey stand for was more than enough to condemn them.

There is still some question as to whether it was Palin who was the one actually pregnant and not covering up one of her children’s pregnancy. But either way it wasn’t a prudent thing to do.

The best way to avoid sexism is to treat the women the same as men. Their character is important, not their looks or how they speak. It is what they say and do is of paramount importance.

It would have been sexist to treat Palin (and Hillary) different from how they were treated.  I am a woman and I’m really sick of women crying sexism.  Perhaps it was mccain’s fault for launching palin’s national career (she coulda and shoulda have said no), but everything else about palin was brought on by palin herself.

After reading numerous comments, I will raise the questions, which of Mrs. Palin´s characteristics qualified her for the republican ticket VP, and, who made the selection? Perhaps the “selecting official(s)” are the weak link. McCain alone did it? Hardly.

Nonsense.  Sarah Palin is a pig with lipstick.  She is too dumb to be in public office, much less national public office.  She is also dangerous: a narrow-minded, fundamentalist theocrat with a neocon playbook and mean-spiritedness masquerading as “compassionate” conservatism.  Nothing anyone could say about her would be improper or sexist.  She is worthy of the grossest insult, and it has nothing to do with her being a woman.  Don’t you think it’s odd that the Drugster is defending her?  The man who invented the term, “feminazi” and who once claimed that N.O.W. is “an association of lesbians”?  Get real, dear.

This is all too simple. An idiot is an idiot, whether or not the idiot wears a dress or trousers. In this case, the idiot usually wears a dress.

Xntrk, Good points. (I also support Boxer.)

Once upon a time, Washington State had a woman Governor who was elected as a Democrat. Unfortunately, Dixie Lee Ray made me ashamed to be either a Democrat, or a woman. Some times, that is simply the truth.

I cannot support Hillary Clinton because of her politics. As far as Palin is concerned, she is just plain stupid, and it is truly unfortunate she is also a woman. Think how that makes those of us with brains look! It is similar to what many in the Black Community must feel when they get handed a Justice Thomas or Marion Berry, and then are expected to defend them because they are Black.

Give humanity a break. It doesn’t matter who stands up to pee, the problem is what comes out of the mouth!

FYI, I do support Senator Boxer; I was disgusted when Schroeter was forced out because ‘she cried’; and Shirley Chisholm was a fantastic politician and role model.

Anyone, man or woman, ought of get out of the kitchen if they cannot take the heat, and that is especially true in politics. Tough nuggets if that is thought sexist. Competence is something we all should want in elected or appointed officials. Token nominees, who would not be considered for dog catcher if it weren’t for their sex, or race, or whatever, should not be surprised when it becomes an issue. If Sarah Palin thought she should be taken seriously, that is only another indication of her ignorance and stupidity!

Agree with fairminded, Yell and Roberto, just to keep it all real. Plus, I was a Hillary supporter because she was qualified, smart and tough and a woman because it will be a long time before we see a woman President—a Jewish President probably never. Also just to keep it real.

Well, I see palin as the ‘attractive’ female I would want have a relationship with until I heard her talk, then that vanishes.

Walker and Yell both miss the point - Palin was not criticized or condemned as an inept, shallow, idiotic politician, but as a woman. It would be the same as McCain being criticized for being short, or if there was speculation on his potency - can he still get it up kind of thing. Had George Bush been criticized for being overly macho because of elevated testosterone levels, that would have been akin to what has been done to Palin and Clinton.

Cocco has it exactly right.

Although I did not support Hillary Clinton, my reasons were based on my beliefs and her policies, or lack thereof, I was horrified at how she was treated by various mainstream media outlets—newspapers and TV, etc. In fact, I wrote letters to various news outlets on the issue of the treatment of Hillary Clinton in the media—and specifically, sexism. The jokes, to me, weren’t funny! Below, are a few of the items I noted, and now, recall:

1) somone referred to Hillary as a she-goat; I asked them to tell me what they meant
2) the Hillary nutcracker; her legs cracked the nuts
3) the signs in the crowd that read, “Iron My Shirt!”
4) The t-shirts that read, “Bro’s Before Ho’s”
5) Rush Limbaugh asking if we really wanted to watch Hillary age if she were elected—I’m paraphrasing

In addition, I wrote several letters that questioned the treatment of Sarah Palin—with whom I also disagree on more fronts than I have time to relate. But, as a woman, I was quite offended by some of the comments made by the press when they were covering her campaign.

I’m also irked at the press for the way they cover Michelle Obama—sometimes. I really don’t care what she wears, or if her arms are uncovered. She is a very intelligent, highly educated, accomplished and capable human being. I would like to hear more from her on serious issues. Naively, I was anticipating, albeit with trepidation, something different—closer to a role model, like Eleanor Roosevelt, but in a different key. I’ll keep hoping!