Mrs. Bush’s absurdity

And here is another very apt reply to Mrs. Bush’s moronic sexism charge, by John Podhoretz: “Okay, we confess. We don’t like Harriet Miers because she’s a woman. We also don’t like Condi Rice because she’s a woman. We don’t like Margaret Thatcher because she’s a woman,” etc. Podhoretz’s logic is unanswerable, but somehow I do not think that it will get through to Mrs. Bush. Why? Because she’s a liberal, silly. Have liberals ever been brought up short when their charges of racism, sexism, etc. were shown to be untrue? Truth is not their ultimate motive, but an entirely different set of factors. In the case of “nice” liberals like Mrs. Bush, the motive is to demonstrate one’s own adherence to approved principles of moral niceness.

However, Jim Kalb has a simpler and more brutal explanation:

Terms like “racist” and “sexist” are all-purpose expressions used to shut people up. Laura Bush picked that up from hubby and his advisors, so she uses them too without turning on her (politically non-existent) brain. Rationally speaking, why is a spinster lawyer devoted to her employer the person any normal mother of two girls would want to hold up as a model for young women?

I’ll reply to Mr. Kalb’s question with a question: Why would anyone assume that the all-indulgent mother of the presidential daughters, also known as Humpy and Sleazy, is a normal mother, in Mr. Kalb’s sense of the word? Since Mrs. Bush has no problem with her daughters’ repulsive public behavior and demeanor and even encourages it, as at the 2004 GOP Convention, why should we expect her, say, to favor marriage and family for her daughters over unmarried careerism, or to favor any traditional value at all? As far as I can see, she’s a liberal through and through, though, like everyone, she undoubtedly has her own unprincipled exceptions.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 11, 2005 05:59 PM | Send