Palin’ in Comparison: Part II

12:08 EST  Post debate. 

Not the bloodbath I had hoped for, but as the pundits dissect the debate, something more awful (but admittedly less entertaining) is dawning on me:  Apparently he litmus test for Palin as a potential VP is that she didn’t screw up too badly…again.  What has happened to our standards?

 Are we seriously talking about a supposedly legitimate female VP candidate as if she were a little girl who finally remembered the steps in her tap dance?

 Tonight, Geraldine Ferraro speaking to Brian Williams after the debate, mentioned that she was glad that her granddaughter could watch this debate and see a woman “hold her own.”

 Hold her own, Geraldine? Granted I was too young to even know about voting when you were on the historic democratic ticket (two decades before the Republicans got around to it, I might add) but I remember that you were supposed to be “setting a stage”, “crashing a ceiling”, “establishing a new standard” so that in my future, women weren’t just a surprise quantity if they could “hold their own” against any man.  Rather, in that future (today, supposedly) women could be expected to be able to regularly surpass our male counterparts with no surprise or shock, but rather with regularity and admiration.

 You are hardly the vanguard of feminism anymore, but you did work for a woman who is, and who is one of the finest women ever to serve in politics, no matter what you think of her politics — Hillary went toe-to-toe with Joe Biden and many others dozens of times and didn’t just “hold her own” but used her intellect and experience to wipe the floor with their remains.

 In contrast, why do you… how could any woman …uphold Sarah Palin as a role model for women when she set the bar so low that all she had to do was remove the dunce cap and smile to exceed expectations?  Is that all the farther we’ve come since your historic run?  Is that how far expectations of women have fallen since Hillary left the race? 

Golda Meir didn’t just smile and memorize lines; she attended synagogue in Stalinist Russia and led Israel through war and massacre when none would aid.  Margaret Thatcher didn’t just not screw up against Brezhnev and Andropov; she dominated and defied them and helped bring about the end of the Soviet Union.  Benezir Bhutto didn’t just hold her own against her deterrents in Pakistan, she sacrificed her life for the future of her country.  In no way can Palin even begin to compare favorably with such women. Palin pales in comparison to such laudable models, and even lipstick doesn’t disguise that fact.