Barack Obama thinks that you’re stupid. And, if you’re one of the 45% of us who still support him after Solyndra, after Fast and Furious, after the GSA scandal, after the voter ID controversy, after the Buffett Rule, after the Secret Service Scandal, and so on, you might be.
If you don’t believe me that he thinks you’re stupid, consider the following.
I watched Meet the Press recently, and their roundtable on the War on Women—that is, the Democrats’ agitprop to frighten women to the safe, warm, familiar cocoon of the Democratic Party. They’ve been doing it for decades, and the fact that they are returning to this tactic now tells me that they are afraid—Rasmussen has Romney up by two points already and it’s only April; he doesn’t even have the nomination officially yet; the real money hasn’t been spent yet.
The fact that they are using this tactic means that they actually believe that it will work—that is, that you are dumb enough to fall for it. The only thing more infuriating than that would be if it actually did work, and the fate of United States of America—and thereby the world—was determined by such pettiness.
Fortunately, it does not yet appear that it will happen that way. Men vote too. We can all thank God that, despite the Democratic elite’s low, cynical, deterministic view of the world,it is simply not good enough to divide people up into campsbased upon characteristics determined before they were born and slap a red or blue label on each one. People are still free, thinking beings, not just automata resulting from their genetics and environment. Thank God!
You can imagine my shame, then, to see that Republicans have stooped to the level of Democrats in playing divisive politics—and playing it on Democrats’ terms. Representative Bachmann, whom I admire greatly and who I think is a great voice for the conservative movement, debated Senator Gillibrand, for what proved to be a good demonstration that what they were doing was a waste of time.
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In order to get around disputing the false premise that “forcing insurance companies to cover contraception” is the same thing as “helping women,” Representative Bachmann had to logically contort her way into arguing that high gas prices, high food prices also hurt women.
No kidding. They hurt everyone—why is it even worth saying?
Not to be outdone, Senator Gillibrand would not let Representative Bachmann get away with saying something pointless—she managed to lower the debate even further. As Democrats have done for decades, she brought up sexual liberty as being a women’s issue (as though it did not take two to, um, tango).
The meta-question was, who understands women better, Democrats or Republicans? As a Republican, I hope that the answer is neither. We shouldn’t be pitting the genders against each other any more than we should be pitting the races against each other; it accomplishes nothing for our country, no matter how many liberal base (and I mean that in more than one sense) voters donate to re-elect Obama.
I reject the whole notion that women have some sixth sense that men don’t have, or that women are affected disproportionately by economic realities. The market doesn’t care who you are—all the market cares about is what you bring to the table. That’s what makes it so beautiful.
It goes against the spirit of the Constitution, of the Enlightenment, and of classical liberalism more generally to put the genders in rivalry, or even to speak of them as having inherent inequalities. In fact, this is usually the criticism of classical liberalism—that, in contrast to previous schools of political thought, such as Aristotelianism or Thomism, it is atomistic, and treats people as “individuals” or “actors” (who don’t exist) rather than men and women (who do exist).
Conservatives should not be trying to out-factionalize the factionalizers; we should instead be returning to our principles—free markets not free healthcare; free minds, not free contraception. That’s real fairness—the blind equality of the market, not the pandering of hack politicians to frighten the ignorant into line.
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