Quotes of the day

Listen, actual sexism should, and does, get pointed out. Deciding to discuss if Sarah Palin had a boob job the day after primaries, as a way to diminish the primary wins of candidates she endorsed? Sexist. The Palin Newsweek cover and “humorous poems“? Sexist. Journolist’s planned attacks on Palin? Sexist. A democrat congresswoman suggesting that GOP women need to lift their skirts before voting to check to see if they are female? Yes, that’s all sexist.

However, trying to compare those things to strategic opining by Karl Rove is asinine…

The Left clearly has disdain for women, which is why I write so often about that. But conservatives are usually the ones who understand that we are equal, yet different, and that’s a good thing. We don’t need to differentiate between women and everyone else. We’ve been correctly saying for the last three decades that affirmative action is insulting to minorities. It is. There is no reason at all that we should now embrace a slightly modified form of it ourselves. The racism card has been over-played and one of the worst results of that is that actual racist acts are now diminished by all the Boy Who Cried Wolf calling. The same will happen here. By inventing sexism where none exists, it harmfully diminishes real acts of sexism. Because, if everything is sexist, then nothing is.

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But there would be no Christine O’Donnell without the mainstream media, and it will be to their precincts she will in all likelihood decamp in the wake of her sudden fame, turning the ideas she claims to embody into a dismissible caricature, just as she did in her youth. The same, by the way, will be true if she wins; she will be the first new senator liberal reporters turn to for a quote on something controversial, in hopes that she will step in it. The problem is not the ideas, or the Tea Party. The problem is O’Donnell and her path to the spotlight.

Now consider Sean Duffy, who is running for Congress in Wisconsin. Duffy first came to public attention as a member of the cast of MTV’s ur-reality show The Real World. He married a fellow Real World alum, Rachel Campos. (She spent years seeking and gaining employment as an all-purpose TV personality, and almost made it onto The View. She then seems to have had a kind of crisis of purpose before deciding that there were perhaps more important things in life.) They now have six children. And Duffy, who is 40, went to work. He graduated law school, became the district attorney of Ashland County, and years ago began the spade work to run a serious campaign against an established political figure — David Obey, the powerful Democratic House budgeteer — in a complex swing district. Duffy is a serious man in a tough race, and his is a serious candidacy.

Duffy’s story suggests that the problem is not the path, but the person — not the means by which someone achieves Warholian celebrity, but what the person who achieves it ends up using it for.

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Via the Right Scoop.