Crazy Grizzly Lady

Gail Collins, affectionately known here as the "Crazy Cat Lady" is EtD's Golden Goose at the New York Times. I wonder sometimes if this woman has ever written anything that wasn't demonstrably absurd.

Either way, Crazy Cat Lady tries to take on Sarah Palin this time around and fails miserably. I am no Palin zealot. I like the woman, but I far prefer others to lead the Republican ticket in 2012. (Chris Christie, for example, is a political mancrush that has me doodling little hearts in my trapper-keeper). Still, it's worth noting that Palin's limited electorate-wide popularity is tempered by extremely limited support from women. Collins takes another stab at the feminist blasphemer for the sake of the sisterhood. It's astounding how callow the criticisms of Palin are. 

The Grizzly Manifesto

Am I the only one who can already tell that this piece is going to be a colossal rhetorical turd?

By GAIL COLLINS

Published: November 5, 2010

I think it is time to take back the mama

Not to nitpick, but I’m fairly certain that ‘Momma’ is the generally accepted spelling.

grizzly.

Kevin Smith knew that there’s something endearingly pathetic about a desires of the blithely naïve to retake words that have become entrenched in society’s lexicon. A running gag in Clerks 2 is a central character’s attempt to retake the term “porch monkey” after he is shocked to learn that it’s a racist term, insisting that it is a race-neutral phrase for a hooligan or scamp. The effort, of course, is a miserable failure, but appropriate for a B-grade comedy. I predict similar results here, but I digress.

“In real life, they are famous for their reproductive freedom,” said Gloria Steinem over the phone.

Of course. That’s what “Momma Grizzlies” are known for. Not for mauling the face off of idiots like Crazy Cat Lady.

This is one of the many things I love about Steinem. When things are darkest,

…Like, when Republicans swing 60+ House seats in a massive repudiation of the progressive agenda?

she will come up with a very cheering

Though absolutely irrelevant

factoid about Iroquois women in pre-Columbian America

[datum not found]

or the private life of female bears.

So, by ‘cheering,’ you mean colossally boring, right?

“Mama

[Momma]

grizzlies mate later than other bears,” she continued. “They have two cubs instead of four. They wait four years — about twice as long as other bears — between having cubs. And after they’re pregnant, if winter is hard or their health is not good or the food supply is uncertain, they re-absorb the embryo into their body.”

I nodded off for a second there. I didn’t miss anything, did I?

This is certainly a side of grizzly home life that we have not been getting from Sarah Palin,

That moron isn’t even a professional zoologist. I bet she can’t even read.

who has adopted the bear as the symbol of her movement. After the election, her political action committee posted a triumphant video

in which Palin announced: “This is our movement. This is our moment. This is our morning in America.” It concluded with the silhouette of a humongous bear, presumably of female and grizzly persuasion, rearing up on its hind legs in the moonlight

…That’s not moonlight, but I guess it’ll run in well with a joke or something.

and roaring.

It’s a bear. That’s what bears do.

I thought the bear looked a little like the teenage werewolves you see in movies,

howling and shifting shapes just at the moment when they meant to be picking up their date for the prom.

But probably that’s just me.

You took the time and effort to set up the grizzly-bear-in-moonlight nonsense for that Teen Wolf/Twilight joke? Dude. Weak.

We spent a lot of time during this election season trying to figure out what the campaigns said about women in politics.

The campaigns said very little; the liberal response to the candidates proved beyond any last flickering doubt that left-wing feminism in America is anti-women. Crazy Cat Lady’s colleague, MoDo, railed against “Republican Mean Girls;” the Brown campaign unrepentantly called Meg Whitman a “whore,” which was generally tolerated by the media and the lunatics in California; Gawker’s hit-piece on Christine O’Donnell was astoundingly repugnant in its vitriol; Nikki Haley faced accusations of infidelity, loyally carried by liberal media outlets, despite a) the accusers were both tremendous tools b) Haley was/is far out of their league, c) both accusers had something to gain from the accusations, and d) one of the accusers was a political opponent; Linda McMahon was, portrayed as a “ball buster” instead of a successful executive (pathological liar Dick Blumenthal’s numerous “misstatements” about being in Vietnam were overshadowed); when a candidate like Kristi Noem turned out to be clean, Democrats devoted resources to rooting through her driving records. (And these are just what I came up with off the top of my head.) Not surprisingly, each of these stories reinforces negative perceptions of women and their role in society. Where is Collins’ outrage?

It turned out not much. New Republican women won, incumbent Democratic women lost, but in the same proportions as the men. The numbers of women in the House and Senate will be just about the same as they were before.

“We wanted to ensure the percentage of women in the Democratic caucus did not shrink,” said Stephanie Schriock of Emily’s List, which raises money for Democratic women. “In fact, we were 22 percent of the Democratic caucus, and now we’re going to be 25 percent.”

…so Emily’s list is actively rooting for the demise of Democratic men to boost their stats? What an asinine metric.

When it comes to finding silver linings, Schriock is right up there with Gloria Steinem.

Which is to say, Schriock is incoherent, illogical, and downright backwards.

The most infamous of Palin’s pet candidates, the ones who became national celebrities, were people like Christine O’Donnell

Christine O’Donnell was targeted because liberals wanted to make the election a referendum on Christine O’Donnell. To their base, they largely succeeded.

and Sharron Angle and their high profile was because of their tendency to say, um, crazy stuff. They lost.

Also Harry Reid’s massive entrenched Nevada voting mechanisms succeeded in rounding up voters of questionable legality with questionably legal tactics and getting them to the polls.

Goodbye loopy mama

[Momma]

grizzlies. Thanks for the memories. You often were a headache, but you never were a bore. We’re left with a passel of normal conservatives of both sexes along with a cadre

Passel and cadre? Someone whipped out their Thesaurus this morning. All we’re missing is a cabal.

of male and female wackos, some of whom we have yet to really meet.

Note that this was a major role for O’Donnell and Angle. They focused ire and scrutiny on themselves and away from lesser-known Republican candidates that were simply riding the wave of Democratic unpopularity. It was an exceptionally effective campaign strategy.

Others of whom we know all too well.

Michele Bachmann wants to be in the House leadership!

Is the exclamation point supposed to indicate that she’s aghast? I already knew that.

She’d be the only Republican woman at the top of the heap, but I think even-keeled Americans of both parties and genders can have sympathy for John Boehner’s desperate

Nothing says desperate like the immediate aftermath of winning the largest electoral landslide in seventy years.

signals that he’d rather not.

Once again, even-keeled Americans would prefer that—comical ignorance aside—left wing ideologues not speak for the right.

This week, Bachmann triggered a blog explosion when she claimed, on CNN, that the president’s trip to India is going to “cost the taxpayers $200 million a day.” This is more than it costs to prosecute the war in Afghanistan.

And yet, her figure’s not all that far off. The trip has been estimated around $200M total. At that level of opulence, the gut reaction of “fuck him” is universal regardless of which figure is correct.

Many

[liberal]

women are horrified by people like Bachmann because

Put 20 seconds on the clock, Johnny. Ready? Go.

She is attractive.

She is successful.

She challenges the liberal monopoly on feminism.

Powerful Republican women in general challenge their slanted world view in uncomfortable ways.

She is unrankled by liberal attacks.

She is wildly popular.

She is wildly popular in a deep-blue state.

[BUZZ]

Awww…I guess that’s all we have time for, Johnny.

they fear that when the rest of the country watches her bizarre performances, they see not just an addled person from Minnesota, but a woman in politics.

Survey says? [BUZZ] I’m sorry, we’re going to have to go over to the Jones family to pass or play. (In case you can’t tell, this is a loosely-adapted Family Feud reference)

We have to get past that. Men don’t cringe on behalf of their sex when Newt Gingrich goes Islamophobic, or Carl Paladino threatens to take out a reporter.

Yet we do when guys like John Kerry muffs a football with the grace of a mongoloid amputee 

or Barack Obama stutters and stumbles to name a single player from his favorite baseball team during his formative years.


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/06/barack-obama-white-sox-bl_n_526998.html Sadly, the copyright police at MLB have taken down the original video from youtube, which is breathtakingly funny. 

There are many battles yet to be fought, but I think women have achieved enough success in this country to stop feeling as if Bachmann reflects on anyone but her party and herself.

This seems like a uniquely liberal neurosis. I don’t know anyone outside of Minnesota who thought that Bachmann represented them. That said, I would love for Bachmann to represent me. I’m stuck with Mike Quigley.

Palin, meanwhile, was engrossed in her own postelection minicrisis when she “favorited” an Ann Coulter Twitter message praising a church sign that referred to President Obama as a “Taliban Muslim.” Coulter would be another one of the women we are not taking responsibility for.

I thought after the election was over, liberals would stop the nonsense “gotcha” politics of divisiveness. After all, they seemed so sincere in their desires to reconcile with the right.

This month, a new reality TV series, “Sarah Palin’s Alaska,” premieres on TLC,

I’m relatively certain that “Sarah Palin’s Alaska” is the only reality show that Gail Collins disapproves of. This includes, “Jersey Shore”, 

“The Celebrity Apprentice,” 

“My Super Sweet 16,”

and the 57^th iteration of “the Bachelor.” 

(That’s right, I did research for this one.)

starring Sarah and Todd and the kids. “I love watching these mama

[Momma]

bears,” the former vice presidential nominee says in an early episode, as the family sits in a boat looking at a mother bear and cubs walking along the bank of the river.

Need any more proof that she’s an evil bitch that kicks poor people for fun and wants to force children to swear fealty to her religion?

This particular mama

[Momma]

looked really emaciated. She’s probably working double shifts trying to support her kids, with no help from anybody, and now there’s a TV crew and a bunch of Palins out there in the water, trying to make a profit off her family.

Truly, the “kicking poor people” thing was a joke. Yet somehow, amazingly, Crazy Cat Lady has twisted logic, careened past the limitations of anthropomorphism, and contorted the English language to insinuate that watching a grizzly bear is morally tantamount to exploiting the poor.

Maybe she was on her way to Planned Parenthood. I am grizzly, hear me roar.

Read between the lines here. The central identity of woman’s empowerment in this scenario is the freedom to abort children. How is it that women find this charming or even appropriate? At its best, abortion is invasive, barbarous, and dirty. At its best, it’s murder. How is this a platform?

Not to mention, this is precisely the opposite of the meaning for which Palin chose the grizzly bear. A grizzly will maul your fucking face off if you mess with her kids. Conservative women feel the same way about their own debt-addled children and the government's massive expansionary tendency. The solution is not to have fewer kids or even to allow greater reproductive freedoms. The solution is to limit the size and scope of government in our lives.