I don’t know how long Fox News’ Kirsten Powers is going to be able to get away with calling herself a “Democrat” or a “feminist.” Without question, she’s dipped pretty deeply into the well of political capital that apostates–mainly on the Right–seem to enjoy, without doing anything I can recall to fill the well with “Democratic” or “feminist” credibility.
But she’s at it again, attacking the president for his “sexist” defense of UN ambassador Susan Rice at his press conference yesterday, leading into a picture-perfect replication of conservative talking points on the incredible, unparalleled importance of the Benghazi issue.
What is the substance of Powers’ claim that Obama was being a “chauvinist” for feeling the need to defend Rice? Here it is, in its entirety:
Imagine George Bush saying that people criticized John Bolton because he was an “easy target.” He wouldn’t.
So Obama is sexist for calling out Republican bullying–and that’s what it was–of an administration official who happens to be a woman. He never said, implied or hinted that Rice’s gender had a thing to do with his defense of her. So this is apparently “sexism” because Kirstin Powers says it is. And we all know she’s a “feminist,” and a Democrat, whose brave willingness to ape every single imaginable Fox News meme is a sign of her courageous independence of “her” party and “her” feminist comrades.
Back in March Salon‘s Irin Carmon called out Powers for responding to Rush Limbaugh’s smearing of Sandra Fluke by arguing that liberal men were piggy-piggy, too:
This is the same Kirsten Powers who called out Anthony Weiner with a hilariously sniffy and self-aggrandizing article that implied that Weiner’s greatest sin was sending her an email denial of the sexting charge before she went on Fox News to defend him. The same Kirsten Powers whose entire career as a commentator seems predicated on the willingness to go on Fox News and trash feminists while assuming the mantle of one, who wrote a column claiming Planned Parenthood was lying about more birth control leading to fewer abortions. “This deception smacks of a fleecing of taxpayers in an effort to promote an ideological agenda, rather than a sincere effort to help women plan families,” she wrote breathlessly, before having to withdraw the entire column because of misread data that she said “invalidates my piece.”
Nobody really believes, I should hope, that Barack Obama is a sexist while Kirstin Powers’ friends on Fox and in WingnutLand are dedicated to the advancement of women. If Powers wants to just come right out and profess herself a convert to Republicanism and more “traditional” attitudes towards women, that is her right. But lease, let’s take down the false flag and become honest about it.
