You Can Put Lipstick On a Fib
By Kit-Bacon Gressitt
I’m a feminist writer. This means I advocate for women to have the same rights and opportunities as men. It does not mean I sent my daughter to kindergarten with a prophylactic in her Polly Pocket lunchbox.
- Can you put lipstick on a pig?
As a feminist, I support candidates who support feminism, for instance, Barack Obama and Joe Biden. I do not support whichever party’s slate has the most female body parts. That would be sexist.
I support Obama for some other reasons: When he was interviewed by David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, at a magazine publishers’ conference and Remnick asked him to explain how he is different from President Bill Clinton, Obama paused, cocked his head and said with a clever smile, “I inhaled.” He also writes books, things near and dear to my heart.
But these are stupid reasons to support a candidate, aren’t they? Yes, they are.
Just as stupid, is supporting Sarah Palin for the inane reasons folks are offering up:
Because she is “fresh.” What does that mean? The only fresh thing I’ve noticed about Sarah Palin is her mouth. And I suppose her mama taught her to put on fresh underwear every day. …
Because she can reach out and practically touch Russia and Canada, thus possessing an executive-level understanding of foreign policy. Whoa there! Although Palin defended this proximity as enhancing her credentials, saying, “Well, it certainly does, because our, our next-door neighbors are foreign countries, there in the state that I am the executive of,”* millions of Southwesterners can reach out and lasso Mexico, which qualifies them for nothing but a long border-crossing wait, a cheap drunk and the opportunity to learn a little Spanish. And a whole mess of them know that Palin can chant “executive” until the moose come home, but it won’t correct her sentence structure.
Because she’s a “conservative feminist” dedicated to women’s issues. Oh, is that what she demonstrated as the Mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, where she approved cutting rape kit funding from the city budget and charging rape victims for their forensic test kits? Is being a conservative feminist what motivates her to encourage our white male dominated legislature to define women’s reproductive rights? Is it her conservative feminism that puts those little form-fitting skirts on her comely caboose? I suppose it’s conceivable that someone might claim Palin was practicing conservative feminism in her executive oversight and stand on women’s rights — someone whacked out on Arctic snow.
Because she likes guns. So do millions of other folks, but that doesn’t qualify them for the vice presidency — or for gun ownership, come to think about it. Remember Dick Cheney and his hunting buddy’s shot-marked face.
Because she has a pregnant, unwed teenager. I can surely sympathize, but I wouldn’t reward Sarah Palin with the vice presidency for that failure — and it is indeed a failure, albeit a shared one. Neither would I reward her — or even sympathize with her — when she parades her disabled infant and pregnant teen through the international media and then complains that folks write about them. Don’t drop you drawers in the tundra if you don’t want to be put upon by bloodsucking Alaskan mosquitos.
Because she claims she said “No” to the now mythic Alaskan “Bridge to Nowhere.” What is myth, is that Sarah Palin killed the project. As many now know (and her admirers still ignore), the bridge died a slow, bureaucratic death at the hands of Congress, which withdrew the earmark for the bridge after it had become a pork-barrel embarrassment for all, including Palin, who had campaigned for it. And as governor, Palin did not return the federal funding; she redirected the 223 million porcine dollars — our tax dollars — to other projects in Alaska.
Her claim that she stopped the bridge is a fib, a large, rotund fib, and Sarah Palin’s pants are on fire. Her snarky little smirk might make her delivery entertaining (and I write this freely, having a snarky smirk of my own), but it does not make her a competent, honorable leader.
Sarah Palin can put lipstick on a fib, but it’s still a fib, and I suspect she knows it.
So how about this, how about casting your vote for sound reasons? How about choosing our next president and vice president because of their track records on clean energy and reproductive rights and public education and pay equity and the Geneva Conventions and civil rights and access to healthcare and Social Security and voters’ rights and the military-industrial complex and foreign policies and honesty? And their ability to articulate a linear thought.
Love,
K-B
©2008 Kit-Bacon Gressitt
* During the week of September 22, 2008, CBS News anchor Katie Couric met with Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin at the United Nations. Much of the discussion focused on foreign policy, which some say could be Palin’s weakness. What follows is an excerpt of an exclusive interview with Gov. Palin.
Katie Couric: You’ve cited Alaska’s proximity to Russia as part of your foreign policy experience. What did you mean by that?
Sarah Palin: That Alaska has a very narrow maritime border between a foreign country, Russia, and, on our other side, the land-boundary that we have with Canada. It’s funny that a comment like that was kinda made to … I don’t know, you know … reporters.
Couric: Mocked?
Palin: Yeah, mocked, I guess that’s the word, yeah.
Couric: Well, explain to me why that enhances your foreign-policy credentials.
Palin: Well, it certainly does, because our, our next-door neighbors are foreign countries, there in the state that I am the executive of.
© MMVIII, CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.
1. It never happened: Wasilla never charged anyone for a rape kit.
2. If Wasilla had billed someone, it would have been reimbursed through a different state agency.
3. The only evidence offered for this is from Palin’s political enemies, offered only after she was nominated for the Vice presidency; it is unsupported, and in fact contradicted, by contemporaneous accounts.
For Rachael Cohen…
Are you trying to say that Sarah Palin did NOT approve cutting rape kit funding?
Hunt
According to FactCheck.org, it was the police chief’s policy (see below). However many in the community of Wasilla wonder how Sarah could be mayor not know about such a policy ….
From FactCheck:
Palin’s police chief in Wasilla did that. Whether Palin supported this is not certain.
We’ve seen countless Internet and e-mail claims that Sarah Palin forced women to pay for their own forensic testing when reporting a rape. Unlike some claims about Palin, this one has some merit, though Palin’s precise role is unclear.
Hi, Kim,
Good point: It was the police chief’s policy, but Palin had to approve his budget. And, indeed, Palin signed Wasilla’s 2000 fiscal year budget (which has interestingly disappeared from the City’s website), indicating she reviewed and approved it. Palin reportedly reviewed the budget at the line item level, so she would have seen the transfer of cost for rape kits from the Police Department to the victims or the victims’ insurance companies, if they had coverage. So, either Palin was negligent in her fiscal responsibilities or she knew about and approved the policy.
Maybe Sarah was just too busy keeping an eye on Russia to notice that pesky little line item. Was that a tad snarky on my part?
Never enough snarks around when you need them.
Palin fired the police chief who was in place when she took office, saying that he was not supportive of her administration. The guy she hired to replace him was the one who altered the budget to require the victims to pay for their own rape kits. Obviously, she knew very well what her police chief was doing. She may be pathetically ill-informed, and may come off like a highschool cheerleader, but she’s slick enough to know how to be efficiently self-serving when suffiently motivated.
Thank goodness, Tony Knowles, then governor of Alaska, got state level legislation passed taking the burden off of the victims and putting it back where it belongs…in the law enforcement budget. Although the Wasilla city website no longer has the 2000 budget available for perusal, their newspaper still has the news articles from the relevant dates up for grabs. The info is there and well-documented.
And in case you can’t think of a good reason not to vote for the republican presidential ticket, how ’bout this? Sarah came in second in the Miss Alaska contest.
And the latest from Katie Couric’s queries to Ms Palin: when asked what publications she regularly reads in order to stay well-informed, Ms Palin couldn’t think of a single one. Katie Couric tried again, asking her to be specific and name one. She couldn’t!
I would like for the leadership of the U.S. to be diverse, like the country’s population. There are plenty of women who are qualified to be Vice President of the United States. I see no benefit to electing Sarah Palin, a woman who is not qualified for the office.