Word: palin
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...believe that white-male conservatives are hypocrites for limiting women's abortion rights? Why, we have Mr. McLuhan right here: Palin - a woman! - says that when she was pregnant with Trig, she had the fleeting thought that she could have an abortion but didn't. Disagree with her foreign policy? Her son Track went to Iraq! Reject her claim that health-reform "death panels" will cull special-needs children? She's worried about her own special-needs child! With Palin, the political is always intensely personal. She styles herself as someone who has given bodily to her beliefs, and that...
Likewise, having a baby with Down meant that Palin had the authority to condemn Rahm Emanuel for calling politicians he was arguing with "retarded" but to excuse Rush Limbaugh for using the same term because he's "satirical" - a dispensation that somehow did not apply to Family Guy. You say that's illogical? Well, do you have a special-needs child...
...Palin is a master practitioner of identity politics, with an ironic twist. When it comes to social issues or the academic canon or civil-rights legislation, it used to be conservatives who would chafe at liberals playing race, gender or other such oppressed-group cards. With Palin, though, conservatives have a champion who uses group identity - rural, female, military mom, special-needs mom, etc. - as her seal of authenticity. But against Family Guy and Friedman, Palin, for once, was outranked by someone enlisting her own biography and personal experience. This time, Palin was not the McLuhaner but the McLuhanee...
...Palin and her defenders could argue that Friedman is simply one woman with Down and cannot decide for everyone - disabled or not - what is and is not offensive. That response, by the way, would have the advantage of being correct. But it would also implicitly undermine Palin's claim to authority. She would then be just one more military mom, one more teen mom's mother - one more hopeful pol looking for attention. (See the fashion looks of Sarah Palin...
...still get that attention, though, because the Family Guys and the David Lettermans can't resist giving it to her. (On March 2, she's scheduled to stick it to antagonist Letterman by guesting on Jay Leno's Tonight Show. And despite Palin's objections to "Hollywood" intruding on her family, daughter Bristol will play herself as a teen mom on ABC Family's The Secret Life of the American Teenager.) Just as she has made her personal life the basis for her politics, so are the attacks on her consistently personal. That in turn feeds the victimization that only...