Finally! Democrats Are Outraged At The Deplorable Sexist Attacks Unleashed Against Conservative Women Like Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter And Nikki Haley

Nah, just kidding. They are outraged. Nay! OUTRAGED! That Scott Brown responded in a joking way to a shot Elizabeth Warren took at him. (Warning, the link goes to a liberal blogger at the Washington Post but at least it's not Jennifer Rubin).

During the Massachusetts Senate debate earlier this week, Elizabeth Warren and the other Dem candidates were reminded by the debate moderator that Scott Brown had posed nude in college, and asked what they had done to pay for school. ”I kept my clothes on,” Warren joked, to laughter from the crowd.

Today, Scott Brown was asked by a local Massachusetts radio show to comment on Warren’s joke, and he offered his own joke in response: “Thank God.”

But then he got really sexist.

No, I tell a lie. That's all he said.

At the link the Executive Director of the Massachusetts Democratic Party goes after Brown.

Scott Brown’s comments send a terrible message that even accomplished women who are held in the highest esteem can be laughingly dismissed based on their looks

You see it's perfectly fine for Elizabeth Warren to take a shot at Scott Brown for how he used his looks in college but he can't take a joking shot back at her. It's always tough for a man to run against a woman simply because even after all the years of hearing "we're all equal", we're not. If Warren were a guy who looked like Ted Kennedy and Brown said the same thing no one would care. In fact, weren't we just treated to a week or so of "Christie is fat" jokes from liberals? Yeah, we were. In fact, Christie was asked about that repeatedly at his "No means no" presser. He dealt with it head on and didn't whine he was being picked on.

If male and female candidates are too be treated equally, then they need to be treated equally. Are there jokes and jabs that cross the line? Of course but again, it's needs to go both ways and be enforced equally against both parties. I'm really not interested in a set of rules where vile attacks against GOP women are acceptable and the mildest of jokes against a liberal woman is cause for banishment from polite society.

Was Brown's crack ungentlemanly? Of course it was. Was Warren's unladylike? At least as much so and probably a bit more since she as any 4th graded would note, she started it!

But this is politics and gentlemanly and ladylike behavior isn't usually part of the process.

But forget all of this. The important thing to remember is Warren is a danger to the country, not because of her jokes or her looks but because she's a collectivist who is far outside the traditional understanding of what America is about.

Warren is (as William F. Buckley described Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith) a pyromaniac in a field of straw men: She refutes propositions no one asserts. Everyone knows that all striving occurs in a social context, so all attainments are conditioned by their context. This does not, however, entail a collectivist political agenda.

Such an agenda’s premise is that individualism is a chimera, that any individual’s achievements should be considered entirely derivative from society, so the achievements need not be treated as belonging to the individual. Society is entitled to socialize — i.e., conscript — whatever portion it considers its share. It may, as an optional act of political grace, allow the individual the remainder of what is misleadingly called the individual’s possession.

The collectivist agenda is antithetical to America’s premise, which is: Government — including such public goods as roads, schools and police — is instituted to facilitate individual striving, a.k.a. the pursuit of happiness. The fact that collective choices facilitate this striving does not compel the conclusion that the collectivity (Warren’s “the rest of us”) is entitled to take as much as it pleases of the results of the striving.

Scott Brown is a pain in the ass a lot of the time but it's Massachusetts. And he's a whole lot better than Elizabeth Warren.

posted by DrewM. at 02:36 PM

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