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Monday, January 15, 2007
Feminism, Boxer style
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It may just be me, but with the death of the Scoop Jackson Democrats, they’ve lost their touch on when and how to be tough. They’re missiles-to-mud-huts and they’re whatever that performance was that U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer exhibited in questioning Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
That exchange, in which Boxer implied that as a childless single woman Rice lacks standing to involve herself in decisions about war, is a lesson to all of us that we really do need to move out of our circle of like-minded friends and, in the case of politicians, sycophants. If you hear often enough from ideological soul-mates that Bush is dumb, for example, or that the makers of war don’t commit their own children to it and therefore lack the legitimacy to prosecute it, you are led into absurdity, which is where Boxer was Thursday.
With Democrats in control of the Senate, Boxer was clearly feeling her Bidenism , which would roughly translate as blow-hard sanctimoniousness in pursuit of air time on a foreign policy subject . Boxer observed in Senate Foreign Relations Committee questioning that Rice has no children of her own. “Who pays the price?” she demanded. “I’m not going to pay a personal price.My kids are too old, and my grandchild is too young. You’re not going to pay a particular price, as I understand it, with an immediate family.” When Rice started to reply that she talks to their families and knows what they’re going through, though “I could never do anything to replace any of those lost men and women in uniform, or the diplomats, some of whom…” Boxer cut her off. “Madam Secretary, please. I know you feel terrible about it. That’s not the point. I was making the case as to who pays the price for your decisions.”
So we have on the one hand feminists complaining that too much attention is paid to what Nancy Pelosi wears because she’s a woman, though in most instances I’ve seen it’s women writing the stories and making the observations. But when a woman whose life achievement would seem to represent the feminist dream comes to testify on the most important issue of the day, her standing and opinion are devalued because she’s not borne any front-line troops. And yet, does anybody think that most liberals would fairly represent to the children they do have that the military is a desirable career choice?
Boxer’s line of questioning was, as White House spokesman Tony Snow said later, outrageous. It was tacky, well over the line. I question whether liberals of this age know how to fight, in politics or war. Like Boxer, they think if the tone is soothing, they can say the nastiest things, even things personal and nasty, and be thought “tough.” They lob missiles, verbal and otherwise, certain that they’ve demonstrated that they can be as tough as the stay-the-course crowd. That’s not the message anybody but their own cheering section gets.
