Thanks to Daily Howler, I'm brought back to our front page (funny I never seem to look at that anymore). October 20, two weeks to go before the election, fate of the free and not-free world at stake, trillions of handouts passed around like communion wafers, and Josh brings us back to the most pressing issue of them all - that in the slimiest campaign evuh, or at least since Nixon, Hillary ran a slimier campaign. (Okay, Josh himself doesn't say this, he lets a surrogate poster in rebuttal say this - Josh just claimed this was the slimiest since Nixon. The new ranking - 1. Bush 2. Hillary 3. McCain? Or 1. Hillary, 2. Bush, 3. McCain?). You parse, you decide:

I don't want to diminish the extent to which the McCain campaign
has mired itself in the muck, but I think you are losing the forest for the
trees. It should be noted that for whatever reason, McCain has so far
refused to go places that Hillary went in the primary (Wright, explicit
comments about "hard-working, white" Americans supporting her,
distributing emails with pictures of Obama in Muslim garb, etc.).

Oh my, oh my. Where do I start? First, did Hillary put videos of Wright up on the internet to see? Did she make Obama go to that church? Did she twist Fox's collective arms to get them on the bandwagon, to show videos for weeks? Was there absolutely no truth in Obama's relationship with this church and what was shown, similar to that there was absolutely no truth that John Kerry had faked injuries to get his war medals? Did Obama himself not apologize for Wright's hurtful remarks, claiming if he'd only known he would have done something?

"Americans supporting her, distributing emails with pictures of Obama in Muslim garb" - let's see, originally Drudge said it came from someone in her campaign, though being Drudge provided no proof. This version waters it down a bit. "Americans". More than 1? Not sure of that as well. But where did those scurrilous pictures come from? Oh, from Obama, from his visit to Somalia when he dressed up in Muslim garb. Now, that's a low blow, sending out embarrassing photos of a candidate (or at least ones he seems to find embarassing or inconvenient). People would never do that with Hillary.

What was the 3rd one - oh, those hard-working white Americans, the ones that Obama is currently courting with Biden's and Hillary's help to seal the deal. Yes, that was low too, referring to a constituent group's race that isn't Hispanic, Jewish, black, Asian or Native American, one that normally is referred to properly as "redneck, degenerate, incestuous, backwards hill people, moonshiners" and so on. That's even lower than implying your opponent favors letting all the black murderers out of jail to rape our young white girls, isn't it? 

Thanks, Josh - good to see you're keeping old wounds alive. By the way, what ever happened to Horse's Mouth - is it true (as Daily Howler implies) that it was canceled when it became too friendly to Hillary, such as noting the media study that claimed bias had been worse against Hillary than Barack? Enquirinig minds...are simply curious.

By now I think we all know that Sarah Palin won a beauty pageant and some even know she won a scholarship off of that. And that of course produces disdain in us liberal types: Imagine if she were some rootin', tootin', Moose-shootin' guy from Alaska, instead of the beauty queen that she is. You think all those guys would be giving him a pass? In so many ways Palin is a woman taking advantage of her "assets", so to speak. Yes, just imagine. Or imagine she was a skilled athlete, say in basketball or running 5km or 10km races?

One well known liberal politician, Bill Bradley, was a skilled basketball player. When he graduated high school in 1961, he had 75 scholarship offers. Which by a funny coincidence was the total number of women's sports scholarships in the entire country. Okay, just kidding - there weren't that many. In 1974, my female cousin had the good fortune to attend college in the 2nd year of Title IX. I say good fortune, because it allowed her to sue her university when there were no electric outlets in the female locker rooms. (It was a big football and basketball university, frequently at the top of their class, and had just made the NCAA Sweet 16 that year. But that was men's basketball, and of course the men's locker room had saunas and whirlpools and the other expected facilities). However, lawsuits don't happen quickly, so she transferred to a school that had a few amenities for women rather than spending the rest of her college career trying to find some place to plug in her hair dryer.

So how had it improved by the time Sarah graduated in 1982? Was there a line of scouts waiting to hand out basketball scholarships to women? Well, let's check out women's basketball at the University of Cincinnati almost 30 years after Cincinnati's Big O, Oscar Robertson, lit up America by leading national scoring 3 years in a row. "My first team bought their own shoes, and they were called Kangaroos," she says. "I slept in rest stops to recruit. It was just a really, really different time. I was driving the vans, and my assistant sat on the opposite side and played the music. We have come so far." Yes, in 1986. One UC women's basketball coach notes her first coaching job paid $3000 a year. Well, I won't belabor the point. These days scholarships are roughly equal, though I can't vouch for facilities. It's just worth noting that Title IX was just one area of opportunity that opened up for women over the last 30 years.

So the next time you hear or read someone tearing down women because they're not doing something the way men would, that they're taking advantage of their sex, that they got an easy ride, that they're just too cute or too ugly, how about stepping up to the plate - speak out, question yourself, question history, question the rules, question the inquisitor. Even if you're a woman yourself.

Because women in the US have only had the vote for 88 years (in Switzerland only 25 years), they weren't accepted in the work place for 25 years more (the German woman who discovered nuclear fission in the late 30's, Lise Meitner, had to work for free), college was considered for marrying until the 1960's, and there was no place for women in the corporate system up into the late 90's. With the caveat that anything women did do would have to be paid less and to be on top of raising the kids, cooking and cleaning house, and of course being hit on incessantly during the course of their professional activities and in danger every time they visited a poorly lit spot. And it will always be assumed that a woman's success derives from her husband's, and that she rides on his vote, his property, his political views and opinions.

And instead of taking 18 million cracks as the end of the road, let's take it as a mark of shame - that this is remarkable in 2008, that a woman had to be a wife of a former president to be a serious contender, while another high professional contender for VP is ridiculed for appearing in a beauty pageant as a teen. Well sorry, friends, Sarah did more than just pose in a swimsuit, and Hillary did more than just raise Chelsea, however you critique them, and our political discussion is still warped and twisted and demeaning against women long after it should be.

How else would a country bumpkin think it's appropriate to give a back rub to one of the 8 major leaders of the free world just because she's a woman? How else would it even be possible that hiring a woman as a novelty, as a sign of "change" and "being mavericky" would work in the most industrialized nation in the world? Am I odd for just feeling nausea at the thought of all this shit?