On Sep 10, 2008, at 9:33 AM, TurquoiseB wrote:
While I agree with Paglia's assessment of what Sarah Palin's projected image is supposed to be, it's important in my opinion to remember that it's a LIE. When you have a candidate so weak that you won't allow her to do press interviews, it REALLY DOESN'T MATTER whether she can fire an automatic weapon. It REALLY DOESN'T MATTER what her faux "frontier woman" persona is if she's never had the experience of dealing with military affairs (and she hasn't...the leader of the Alaska National Guard has said in no uncertain terms that she was and never will be involved in any military decisions for the Guard). It REALLY DOESN'T MATTER even if she's "studied miliary history." That's not the same as having military experience.
I didn't get that as the gist of what Paglia is saying, instead it's more that traditional Feminists lack the qualities that would make them a good commander in chief:
As a dissident feminist, I have been arguing since my arrival on the scene nearly 20 years ago that young American women aspiring to political power should be studying military history rather than taking women's studies courses, with their rote agenda of never- ending grievances. I have repeatedly said that the politician who came closest in my view to the persona of the first woman president was Sen. Dianne Feinstein, whose steady nerves in crisis were demonstrated when she came to national attention after the mayor and a gay supervisor were murdered in their City Hall offices in San Francisco. Hillary Clinton, with her schizophrenic alteration of personae, has never seemed presidential to me -- and certainly not in her bland and overpraised farewell speech at the Democratic convention (which skittered from slow, pompous condescension to trademark stridency to unseemly haste).
Feinstein, with her deep knowledge of military matters, has true gravitas and knows how to shrewdly thrust and parry with pesky TV interviewers. But her style is reserved, discreet, mandarin. The gun- toting Sarah Palin is like Annie Oakley, a brash ambassador from America's pioneer past. She immediately reminded me of the frontier women of the Western states, which first granted women the right to vote after the Civil War -- long before the federal amendment guaranteeing universal woman suffrage was passed in 1919. Frontier women faced the same harsh challenges and had to tackle the same chores as men did -- which is why men could regard them as equals, unlike the genteel, corseted ladies of the Eastern seaboard, which fought granting women the vote right o the bitter end.
In her eyes, Feinstein is more qualified in terms of "military matters" and Palin is more the frontier woman capable of rising to whatever challenges arise. "Physical fortitude and indomitable spirit" she calls it. She's "far bolder and hardier than today's pampered, petulant bourgeois feminists, always looking to blame their complaints about life on someone else." In other words, she's a real feminist as opposed to the "prissy, victim-mongering, philistine feminist establishment." Palin has the "muscular" feminism to pull off whatever needs to be done unlike the more traditional Hillary types, which splat on the glass ceiling and fall with a resounding thud, whining in their victimhood.
