Feminism and Sarah Palin

RUSH: Let’s go to the top of the audio sound bites. This is last night on DNCTV, David Gregory talking to the president of the NAGs, Kim Gandy, and Gregory said, ‘Is Sarah Palin a feminist?’

GANDY: I think that if she identifies herself as a feminist she probably is, but my guess is that she does not identify with the feminist movement. Uh, she’s been promoted all summer long by Rush Limbaugh, who, uh, calls women’s right supporters feminazis.

RUSH: No, I do not. I call liberal, pro-abortion fanatics like you ‘feminazis.’ Feminazis are liberals first. It’s incidental that they are female. Let’s go back. People say, ‘Rush,’ it’s all these guys, Gloria Steinem and now Kim Gandy, another guy, I’ve been talking about Sarah Palin all year. I’ve had some people say, ‘Rush, I don’t remember you ever talking about Sarah Palin.’ Oh, really? Well, let’s go back to February 26th, 2008, me on my own show.

RUSH ARCHIVE: Speaking of vice presidential nominees, a new name has surfaced on the Republican side. She is Sarah Palin. ‘Sarah Palin (born as Sarah Louise Heath on February 11, 1964 in Sandpoint, Idaho) is the current Governor of Alaska. She is the youngest governor in Alaskan history (42 years old upon taking office), as well as the first woman to hold the office in Alaska. In addition to being Alaska’s youngest governor, Palin is also the first who was born after Alaska achieved statehood. She is also the first Alaska governor not to be inaugurated in Juneau, instead choosing to hold her inauguration ceremony in Fairbanks. She took office on Monday, December 4, 2006. Her Lieutenant Governor is Sean Parnell. Palin is the former mayor of Wasilla, Alaska. Palin’s husband, Todd, works on the North Slope and is a commercial fisherman. She also has four children: Bristol, Piper, Track, and Willow.’ What, Snerdley? Yeah, the kids have strange names, but that’s off limits. The names of the kids are: Bristol, Piper, Track, and Willow — and (Palin) is a babe. She’s a babe. I mean, you’ve gotta say it. She’s a babe. So her name has surfaced. It’s high up on the list, now, of potential vice presidents for Senator McCain.

RUSH: I know I didn’t know how to pronounce her name at the time, I’d never heard it pronounced at the time I read all this, Palin or Wasilla as her hometown, but it’s February 26th, February 26th. So, you know, Kim Gandy and what’s-her-face, Gloria Steinem yesterday, ‘Ah, Limbaugh, talked about her all summer long,’ blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Situation Room, CNN, montage. CNN, I think, has a reporter assigned to me, an info babe named Carol Costello, and they had a beat reporter (this Carol Costello) do a story on me and Sarah Palin. You know what I’m finding as I read some of the media blogs? They’re stunned that I like a woman. They really think that my opposition to feminism means that I’m a misogynist and that I don’t like women. Nothing could be further from the truth! (laughing) But they’re still stunned by it and I think that’s one of the themes that runs through this report. This is a montage of CNN’s beat reporter on me.

COSTELLO: Rush Limbaugh says she makes his heart crazy and his mind nuts. Dare we say it? Some conservatives are. Sarah Palin is…their Barack Obama: charismatic, compelling, a rock star conservatives can love. Talker Rush Limbaugh called her fabulous, a once-in-a-lifetime politician who can spin a line.

PALIN: That luxury jet was over the top.

RUSH ARCHIVE: She sold the state jet.

PALIN: I put it on eBay.

RUSH ARCHIVE: I put it on eBay (laughing). This lady has turned it all around, and John McBrilliant pulls this off with the gutsy choice of Sarah Palin.

COSTELLO: This from a guy who once urged Republicans to vote for Hillary Clinton over John McCain. (sic)

RUSH: I never did that! I never said that. I never said that. I said, ‘Vote for Hillary over Obama,’ you ditz! She’s a journalist at CNN, what should I expect? Why am I surprised? I’ve got a new name for Sarah Palin. The Lorena Bobbitt of Republican politics.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I want to go to Oklahoma City, start with Tammy. Thanks for your patience, and welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Hi, Rush.

RUSH: Hi.

CALLER: Pleasure to talk to you.

RUSH: Thank you.

CALLER: And I totally agree with you that Sarah Palin is a new kind of feminist. She’s actually not a new kind. It’s been around for a long time. I have a women’s studies minor because, like all people when I was in college who grew up conservative, I turned into a big rebel. Well, my way of rebelling was to be a big old feminist. So I have a women studies minor, and we were taught that there is two schools of feminism. You have the first camp that thinks that men and women are all the same, the only reason that we act differently is because of how we’re socialized. And I believe that all these liberal journalists, female journalists, liberal female politicians all belong to this camp. And you have a second camp, and they believe that men and women are inherently different, but what is female should be valued. And that’s the kind of feminist that I believe Sarah Palin is, that’s the kind of feminist that I am, as a conservative Christian woman, that what is female should be valued in this society, and they don’t know what to do with her. And now suddenly they all want to switch camps —

RUSH: No they don’t want to switch. That first camp that you described, you know what their big tactical mistake was?

CALLER: What?

RUSH: Their big tactical mistake occurred because they were mad. They were mad about everything. I mean everything. They were just outraged and so that was the impetus behind changing. And what they struck out to do was to become just like men. They wanted to dress like men; they wanted to pursue corporate careers like men; they wanted to invade male-only clubs because they were just mad. And of course no man wants a woman to be like him.

CALLER: I don’t want to be like a man. I mean I want to be valued as a woman, because, you know, I feel sorry for men sometimes that they can’t be more like women in some ways, but I don’t expect them to be. I expect my man to be a man and I expect me to act like a woman.

RUSH: See, that opens up a can of worms because in different people’s attitudes, what’s a woman? If you look at Hillary Clinton side by side with Sarah Palin, now, Hillary Clinton has been held up for the longest time as the archetypical victim of a male-dominating, oppressing society. She gave up everything that she could have been on her own to trek to the sticks of Arkansas with a hayseed that she met at Yale who she thought might be president someday. So she broomed everything of her own, hitched up with this guy and then decided that when he got wherever he was going to go, she would take over. In the process, he humiliates her with all these affairs and so forth, but she doesn’t care, per se, not like a normal woman would because she’s got another agenda which is shared power and her own future power. So she puts up with all that. That’s not being a woman.

Now, you take Sarah Palin, who basically runs her life, and she’s found a way to incorporate men in it and love a man for 20 years, incorporate children in it, love them. The early phrase I remember with the militant feminists was, ‘Women can have it all,’ that being a traditional woman denied them a chance to have it all because they were subservient to men. Sarah Palin is the epitome of exactly what the militant feminists told women that they should be, and now and look who they dump on? They dump on her not because for any reason other than she is a Republican and a conservative. So feminism is about liberalism. Your second definition of feminism, there’s no political context to it. The first feminism that you described there is. It’s totally politics. It’s just a fig leaf for another tentacle of liberalism.

CALLER: Well, what I love being a mother of two daughters, is Sarah Palin is going to change the whole conversation about what being a feminist means, and that goes —

RUSH: No, it’s not, please, don’t say —

CALLER: Well —

RUSH: — why do you keep using the term feminist? Why do we have to label this? She’s a woman. Why can’t you say she’s going to redefine what it is to be a modern woman in the business of politics and leave it at that?

CALLER: Well, you know what, I will accept that, because you’re exactly right. And I can show this to my daughters and say, ‘You know, you don’t have to be this one way to be a strong woman. This is an example.’ I show them every day what that means, but now they have someone politically that they —

RUSH: Precisely.

CALLER: — can really rally around.

RUSH: The first strain of feminism you described believed that the Sarah Palin woman in many ways was impossible because if she committed to a devoted marriage and had a bunch of kids, that she was sacrificing herself, that she was giving up and violating the tenets of the sisterhood, that she was demeaning herself, that she was missing out on so much. It’s like I said yesterday, there are Sarah Palins all over this country, it’s just they’re not known. But these are the women that go to the PTA and they’re fighting the bureaucracy in education, and if their towns are doing things they don’t like, they go fight the town and so forth. And then they take the kids to play baseball or soccer or whatever. They may have a husband running around that they have to keep in line here and there, but these women are all over the place, they’re the backbone of America. They’re the literal backbone of America. What makes her unique is that she’s visible.

Now, everybody has different capabilities and different degrees of ambition. It may well be that not every woman could handle the life Sarah Palin’s chosen for herself, but she can. Enough said. It doesn’t diminish anybody else who doesn’t do what she does. This whole notion that women ought all be the same, all be militant, all be hanging out together, hanging in together, everything for the sisterhood and so forth, typical liberal groupism, typical socialist take away the individuality here. All about advancing some sort of perverted movement that’s true purpose was to subvert a traditional American culture, which is what militant feminism always has been. To the extent that militant feminism has been nuked, it’s not because Sarah Palin is a feminist, it’s because she’s a real woman