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Let me preface this by swearing I am not aiming this at anyone in particular. I just... I know people have political bugbears. This is my own personal bugbear. It always has been, and it always will be.
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Look, Sarah Palin is inexperienced in political terms? So is Barack Obama.
Palin has opinions you disagree with? (And which I disagree with, come to that.) Well, Republicans disagree with Obama's opinions. Many of them even have relatively rational reasons -- the world is a complex, multifaceted place, after all, and no plan is ever going to work perfectly, not even if you get everyone to agree beforehand on what 'working perfectly' even MEANS.
Palin has some vaguely kinda-sorta scandalous stuff in her background? You know what that reminds me of? That shady Chicago real estate guy Obama was somehow involved with!
Amazing parallels, don't you think?
(I could do this all night. I could also make similar comparisons between McCain and Biden.)
...
Look. I am practically a yellow-dog Democrat (I vote a straight Democratic ticket unless I have a VERY compelling reason not to), but I hate, loathe, and despise a lot of my party's behavior. If we want to do the right thing -- if we want to be good people -- then it BLOODY WELL HELPS TO ACT LIKE GOOD PEOPLE.
You can disagree with a person without demonizing him or her. Please try to do so. Failure to be at least minimally polite and to make the minimal assumption that the person on the other side of the issue is not a supervillain makes your own side look exactly as bad as you accuse your opponents of being.
For god's sake, get over yourselves and work FOR Obama and Biden instead of AGAINST McCain and Palin. If you're only against, what the hell are you going to do once you've torn everything down? Being for gives you a purpose and something to DO once you win.
*deep breath*
Yeah. That's pretty much it.
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ETA: No, wait, one more thought. I would not vote for Palin just because she's female. I didn't vote for Clinton, after all, and Clinton is a Democrat and not all that different from Obama on policy. But I feel that the tone of some comments and posts disparraging Palin is... well... anti-feminist. So she used to be a beauty queen? So what? Does that automatically mean she's stupid? So she has a child with Down Syndrome? Does that somehow mean she won't try to do her elected job?
I don't get that. Is it a sense of betrayal that a woman would be anti-abortion? You know, we're allowed to disagree with each other, just like men do.
This reminds me, in an odd way, of an article I read a year or so ago, about Judith Regan and that OJ Simpson book. It talked about a disagreement Regan had had with another publisher, who happened to also be female. The article had one sentence that said something to the effect of "The two women had loathed each other for years," or something like that. And it hit me, afterward, that if the article had been about two men, the sentence would most likely have been written differently -- "Regan and XXX had loathed each other for years," maybe, or "The two executives had loathed each other for years" -- but also that even if it had said "The two men had loathed each other for years," it would not have carried the same cultural undertones of catfights and petty squabbles put ahead of business considerations.
Which has nothing in particular to do with this, except that it makes me wonder how much we hold each other back by tearing each other down, and how damaging our word choices and the images we subconsciously grasp for when denigrating somebody really are.
Sarah Palin competed to be Miss Alaska once. Yeah, okay. That's interesting. It's also completely irrelevant. I thought we already HAD the "Let's attack the female candidate for being too feminine! Or for not being feminine enough! Or both at the same time!" thing. Can we please move on now?
---------------
Look, Sarah Palin is inexperienced in political terms? So is Barack Obama.
Palin has opinions you disagree with? (And which I disagree with, come to that.) Well, Republicans disagree with Obama's opinions. Many of them even have relatively rational reasons -- the world is a complex, multifaceted place, after all, and no plan is ever going to work perfectly, not even if you get everyone to agree beforehand on what 'working perfectly' even MEANS.
Palin has some vaguely kinda-sorta scandalous stuff in her background? You know what that reminds me of? That shady Chicago real estate guy Obama was somehow involved with!
Amazing parallels, don't you think?
(I could do this all night. I could also make similar comparisons between McCain and Biden.)
...
Look. I am practically a yellow-dog Democrat (I vote a straight Democratic ticket unless I have a VERY compelling reason not to), but I hate, loathe, and despise a lot of my party's behavior. If we want to do the right thing -- if we want to be good people -- then it BLOODY WELL HELPS TO ACT LIKE GOOD PEOPLE.
You can disagree with a person without demonizing him or her. Please try to do so. Failure to be at least minimally polite and to make the minimal assumption that the person on the other side of the issue is not a supervillain makes your own side look exactly as bad as you accuse your opponents of being.
For god's sake, get over yourselves and work FOR Obama and Biden instead of AGAINST McCain and Palin. If you're only against, what the hell are you going to do once you've torn everything down? Being for gives you a purpose and something to DO once you win.
*deep breath*
Yeah. That's pretty much it.
---------------
ETA: No, wait, one more thought. I would not vote for Palin just because she's female. I didn't vote for Clinton, after all, and Clinton is a Democrat and not all that different from Obama on policy. But I feel that the tone of some comments and posts disparraging Palin is... well... anti-feminist. So she used to be a beauty queen? So what? Does that automatically mean she's stupid? So she has a child with Down Syndrome? Does that somehow mean she won't try to do her elected job?
I don't get that. Is it a sense of betrayal that a woman would be anti-abortion? You know, we're allowed to disagree with each other, just like men do.
This reminds me, in an odd way, of an article I read a year or so ago, about Judith Regan and that OJ Simpson book. It talked about a disagreement Regan had had with another publisher, who happened to also be female. The article had one sentence that said something to the effect of "The two women had loathed each other for years," or something like that. And it hit me, afterward, that if the article had been about two men, the sentence would most likely have been written differently -- "Regan and XXX had loathed each other for years," maybe, or "The two executives had loathed each other for years" -- but also that even if it had said "The two men had loathed each other for years," it would not have carried the same cultural undertones of catfights and petty squabbles put ahead of business considerations.
Which has nothing in particular to do with this, except that it makes me wonder how much we hold each other back by tearing each other down, and how damaging our word choices and the images we subconsciously grasp for when denigrating somebody really are.
Sarah Palin competed to be Miss Alaska once. Yeah, okay. That's interesting. It's also completely irrelevant. I thought we already HAD the "Let's attack the female candidate for being too feminine! Or for not being feminine enough! Or both at the same time!" thing. Can we please move on now?
(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-30 06:32 am (UTC)(Although I have to admit it's tempting to make jokes about the whole beauty pageant thing. Not that there's anything wrong with that.)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-31 02:04 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-30 02:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-31 02:04 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-31 02:44 am (UTC)*vaguely embarrassed* Sorry about that, but the coverage has been really annoying...
(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-31 04:24 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-31 01:32 pm (UTC)Amen, sister.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-31 02:37 pm (UTC)