Episode 83: What Women Want?

"Given the opportunity, women will behave as badly as men."

So I declared - or, rather, whispered - back when the Second Feminist Wave was at full boil. You didn't make female friends uttering such heresy. It was unassailable movement cant that women would bring their nurturing, gentle ways to positions of power if men would just get out of the way.

I demurred, pointing out that Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi, and Gold Meir all took their nations into war.

Evidence of the truth of my conviction mounts. Look to Washington: Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson of Texas has long been in tune and in lockstep with ideological hard cases like Trent Lott and Mitch O'Connell. Holding up the farthest lip of the loony Washington right is Representative Michelle Bachman of Minnesota, who imputes traitorous allegiances to anyone with whom she disagrees, presumably including most of her colleagues. Michelle has pledged to form a Tea Party caucus in the House after the election.

Need I even mention Backwoods Barbie of Alaska, she of the pretty face and empty head, who can't name a newspaper, who thinks Africa is a country, and who never left North America and didn't bother to get a passport until two years ago. Whenever she cites "common sense" as one of her virtues and those of her benighted followers, check your wallet and make skid marks in the opposite direction. Judging from e-mails I get from conservative male friends and neighbors, the main thing for which they favor Sarah is they'd all like to boff her, presumably joining her in shrieking "Lamestream media!" at the climactic moment.

Let's not linger on Catherine O'Donnell, the Senatorial candidate from Delaware, who thinks masturbation is adultery, took 19 years to get a bachelor's degree, and opened her first commercial with the claim that she isn't a witch. She has defaulted on at least one mortgage and owes thousands in back taxes. She has no visible employment except as a professional candidate. In a recent debate, she couldn't name one Supreme Court decision with which she disagreed. Pretty fades. Dumb is eternal.

Carly Fiorina, Tea Party candidate for Senator from California, isn't dumb. She was CEO of HP. Of course, the company stock plunged during her term and she laid off 30,000 workers while shipping jobs overseas. She was eventually fired by her board of directors but walked away with a multi-million-dollar golden parachute. Not dumb, but certainly inept, she thinks failure is a great credential for fixing her state's problems. She's said to have a ferocious temper, a requirement in a movement that thrives on inchoate rage. And, she's anti-abortion and against gay marriage.

Across the border in Nevada, voters are unhappy that their decisions to live in a state whose economy is based upon gambling aren't working out. About half of them think that Sharron Angle is the answer to their problems. Sharron runs a TV ad that juxtaposes photos of dark-skinned people climbing over a fence with shots of white school children. She has claimed that Dearborn, Michigan and a non-existent town in Texas are ruled by Sharia law. She told Harry Reid in a debate confrontation to "Man up!", an idiotic catch phrase that explicitly questions a man's virility. Imagine if Reid had rejoined with the equally denigrating "Don't be a pussy, Sharron."

Early in her campaign to fill the Senatorial slot from Connecticut, Linda McMahon said she had a plan - a secret one - to bring jobs back to her state. Presumably, she imagined that she would arrive in D.C. and lay out said plan before four-term Republican satraps who would immediately bow before the wisdom of a freshman who had yet to find the bathroom. Linda's credentials for fixing Washington are contained solely in her management of World Wrestling Entertainment, a sleazy operation throwing steroid abusers and their slutty helpmates together in scripted conflict for the edification and amusement of pizza-faced adolescents and their dimwitted older brothers. She has spent over $45 million of her own money on the campaign, which seems to have annoyed voters who wonder what good might have been done in more worthy causes. Should Linda lose, at least she can kick her husband in the crotch. She's done that to Vince before, on camera.

And can we forget Governor Jan Brewer's famous brainlock during a debate when she could do nothing but giggle for agonizingly long seconds? This was around the time that she revealed that headless corpses were strewn about the Arizona desert.

The message? When you vote Tuesday - you are voting, aren't you? - don't fill in the ovals just because the candidates are female or Polish or conservative or Green or gay or Democrats or Latino or Tea Party or Socialist or Italian or black or Catholic or Jewish or small business owners. Vote for the good of all of us, not the worst.

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For those who inquired - and thank you - the absence of posts on this blog and my website, http://www.akeyinthedoor.com/ , was due to a monumental crash of my computer. It wiped out both my basic operating system and my external backup hard drive and has required a lot of work getting it all back.