This was my post over at Glamocracy today:
Hillary Clinton's Style section cleavage controversy is nothing compared to the sexist, savage attacks being waged on Sarah Palin.
On CNN, John Roberts openly wondered if Palin would neglect her child with Down's Syndrome if she took the VP job, saying "Children with Down's syndrome require an awful lot of attention," and "The role of Vice President, it seems to me, would take up an awful lot of her time, and it raises the issue of how much time will she have to dedicate to her newborn child?" His fellow anchor Campbell Brown put it to to a McCain spokesman that Palin was putting "Bristol Palin smack in the media spotlight at what's already got to be a very challenging time in her life," implying that Palin was damaging her daughter by accepting the nomination. Over on MSNBC, "Some Voters Concerned if Palin, a Mother of Five Has Time to be VP," crawled across the screen.
The underlying assumption of these statements is that Palin will be a bad mother if she became the first female vice president. She can't do both well, and maybe she should just stay barefoot in her Alaskan kitchen cooking mooseburgers till her kids are grown.
On top of that, there have been many "news" stories raising doubts about the McCain campaign's vetting process in regard to the news of Bristol's pregnancy. They want you to think that McCain didn't know about it because if he did, he would have picked Romney or Pawlenty instead. They're using Palin's unborn grandchild to pressure McCain to drop her.
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There's a double standard at work and it's a blend of both gender and party politics.
Do you remember anyone questioning Joe Biden's decision to keep his job in the U.S. Senate after his wife and daughter were killed in a tragic car accident? The media thought it was distasteful to find out if John Edwards fathered an illegitimate child, but has no problem adopting National Enquirer-like tactics to go after Sarah Palin. Have you seen one glossy magazine cover yet lauding Palin's "historic" candidacy?
Let's face it. If Sarah Palin was a liberal Democrat all the media would be salivating over the "woman who has it all." Since she's not, they're using her status as a mother to disqualify her from breaking the hardest, highest of glass ceilings.
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