Jonah Goldberg (emphasis added):
Feminist author Cintra Wilson writes in Salon (a house organ of the angry left) that the notion of Palin as vice president is “akin to ideological brain rape.” Presumably just before the nurse upped the dosage on her medication, Wilson continued, “Sarah Palin and her virtual burqa have me and my friends retching into our handbags. She’s such a power-mad, backwater beauty-pageant casualty, it’s easy to write her off and make fun of her. But in reality I feel as horrified as a ghetto Jew watching the rise of National Socialism.”
And that’s one of the nicer things she had to say. Really.
…
On Tuesday, Salon ran one article calling Palin a dominatrix (“a whip-wielding mistress”) and another labeling her a sexually repressed fundamentalist no different from the Muslim fanatics and terrorists of Hamas. Make up your minds, folks. Is she a seductress or a sex-a-phobe?
But this any-weapon-near-to-hand approach is an obvious sign of how scared the Palin-o-phobes are.
Gloria Steinem, the grand mufti of feminism, issued a fatwa anathematizing Palin. A National Organization for Women spokeswoman proclaimed Palin more of a man than a woman. Wendy Doniger, a feminist academic at the University of Chicago, writes of Palin in Newsweek: “Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman.”
It’s funny. The left has been whining about having their patriotism questioned for so long it feels like they started griping in the Mesozoic era. Feminists have argued for decades that womanhood is an existential and metaphysical state of enlightenment. But they have no problem questioning whether women they hate are really women at all.
This strikes me as completely unsurprising and quite in character. This is exactly how the left has repeatedly treated blacks who dared to depart from leftist orthodoxy: belittle them, condemn them as "oreos" (that is to say, not authentically black), do anything and everything to destroy them as punishment for their apostasy. Look at how they treated Clarence Thomas and Ward Connerly. Look at how they caricatured Michael Steele:
The people who loudly proclaim their concern for women and minorities always savagely attack any woman or minority who doesn't fall into line and do what they're told.
As I noted a short while ago (evoking incredulity from some readers), the left is far less tolerant and more judgmental than the right. They're convinced that anyone who disagrees with them is not just wrong, but evil. And because of their situational ethics and belief that the end justifies the means, they've convinced themselves that anything they do to defeat their enemies is morally justified.
Palin can expect more of the same. But I'm guessing it will backfire badly.