|
 |
Human Events...
Real moms of the GOP
vs. White House SOP
by Michelle Malkin
04/13/2012
The authenticity of conservative women has always been under attack by
radical orthodox feminists, but perhaps not as brazenly as by someone
with such direct and frequent access to the corridors of the White
House message machine as Hilary B. Rosen.
The D.C. career lobbyist and Democratic media strategist took to CNN’s
airwaves this week to craft a left-wing “War on Women” attack on the
real moms of the GOP. Ostensibly aiming at Republican presidential
candidate Mitt Romney for his “old-fashioned” views of women, Rosen’s
mouth instead shot off in the direction of wife, stay-at-home mother of
five, grandmother of 16, and cancer and multiple sclerosis survivor Ann
Romney. Mrs. Romney, sneered Rosen, “never worked a day in her life”
outside of the home and should have no voice on women’s issues.
President Obama never met a payroll in his life, but that hasn’t
stopped him from dictating what business owners across the country
should and shouldn’t be doing. But I digress.
This was no accidental rhetorical drive-by. “Progressives” from Gloria
Steinem to Patricia Ireland to Naomi Wolf have derided their
conservative counterparts as female impersonators, fake women and men
with breasts from time immemorial. It’s SOP: standard operating
procedure. In 1992, Hillary Clinton mocked women who stayed at home and
“baked cookies and had teas.” In 2004, blueblood Teresa Heinz Kerry,
wife of Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry, sniffed that
first lady Laura Bush (a former teacher and librarian before becoming a
homemaker) never “had a real job -- I mean, since she’s been grown up.”
Alas, if you’re a conservative mom, you’re damned if you do stay home
and damned if you don’t. In 2008, Howard Gutman, a member of the Obama
campaign’s national finance committee, attacked GOP vice presidential
candidate and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s ability to be a good
parent and have a high-powered public life at the same time. “Your
responsibility is to put your family first,” Gutman lectured as he
singled out Palin’s Down syndrome baby and then-pregnant teenage
daughter. “The proper attack is not that a woman shouldn’t run for vice
president with five kids; it’s that a parent, when they have a family
in need...” should get out of the public sphere and stay home.
What’s striking about Rosen’s latest ideological sniper attack is that
she is not some lone-wolf operative on the fringes of Beltway
influence. She works with former White House communications director
Anita Dunn at the D.C.-based strategic communications consulting firm
SKDKnickerbocker. That’s the same company that promoted the anti-Palin
smear movie “Game Change” and that represented liberal Georgetown law
school student activist and manufactured War on Women poster woman
Sandra Fluke. Smack dab at the intersection of progressive agitation
and Democratic Party campaign-season maneuvering.
White House visitor logs (which nonpartisan watchdogs point out are
woefully incomplete) show that “Hilary B. Rosen” or “Hilary Rosen” has
visited 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. at least 35 times, including several
direct meetings with President Obama (5); White House senior adviser
and consigliere Valerie Jarrett; senior adviser David Axelrod; senior
adviser turned 2012 campaign manager Jim Messina; and a parade of
communications/media team officials in both the West Wing “surrogate
booking” office and the East Wing.
Axelrod and Messina, who took to Twitter immediately Thursday night
after the social networking site exploded with a conservative mom
backlash, scrambled to disassociate themselves from their frequent
visitor. POTUS and FLOTUS followed suit. But when you collect and
connect the dots, Rosen’s role as a surrogate hit-woman for the White
House is unmistakable.
Rosen was forced to issue a non-apology apology as Democratic women
tossed her under the bus (or at least shoved her temporarily to the
back until things boil over).
What’s changed in 2012 is the Internet revenge of thousands of
conservative female activists who have played a larger role than ever
in controlling political narratives. These include tea party leaders
such as Breitbart.com editor Dana Loesch, national grassroots groups
such as Smart Girl Politics, the proliferation of conservative female
bloggers and podcasters, and the critical mass of stay-at-home moms,
work-at-home moms and young conservative women flocking to Twitter.
As we’ve documented at my new Twitter curation/aggregation site,
Twitchy.com, GOP moms, grandmothers and daughters have besieged White
House social media efforts to paint conservatives as anti-women.
They’ve torn apart hypocritical White House rhetoric about equal pay
from an administration that has failed to practice what it preaches.
And as Ann Romney is now experiencing on Twitter, the women of the
right are fighting their way through a hostile cesspool of misogyny
that has been SOP for the feminist left.
Rosen and her media defenders dismissed “faux outrage” about her
attack. But the real moms of the GOP have launched their own Occupy
movement in the social media space once dominated by Obama’s army. And
they’re winning.
Read this and other articles at Human
Events
|
|
|
|
