Lady-Parts Strategy Fail

Two women and one man who built their strategies almost exclusively around lady-parts failed to win public support yesterday in their bids for public office.

Sandra Fluke—the Georgetown University law student who became the face of the "free-contraception" movement—lost her bid for a California state senate seat, winning only 39 percent of the vote to her male opponent's 61 percent.

Wendy Davis—the face of War on Women messaging—garnered only 39 percent of the vote in the race for Texas governor.  Her opponent, Greg Abbott, even won the women's vote 52 percent to Davis's 47 percent.

U.S. Senator Mark Udall of Colorado—who was dubbed "Mark Uterus" during the election for his obsessive focus on lady-parts—won 44 percent of the vote to lose to his challenger, Cory Garner.

Another big loser was Planned Parenthood.  Writes Mollie Hemingway:

Planned Parenthood treated Mark Udall and Wendy Davis as their most important races, knocking on a million doors and making two million phone calls, they claimed, to drive votes to them.

Best Description of Modern Feminists Yet

This may be the most accurate description of modern feminists ever. From Kevin D. Williamson @ NRO:

Feminism is not an idea or a collection of ideas but a collection of appetites wriggling queasily together like a bag of snakes. ... A useful definition [today] is this: “Feminism is the words ‘I Want!’ in the mouths of three or more women, provided they’re the right kind of women.”

Feminism began as a simple grievance, mutated into a kind of conspiracy theory (with “patriarchy” filling in for the Jews/Freemasons/Illuminati/Bohemian Grove/reptilian shape-shifters/the fiendish plot of Dr. Fu Manchu/etc.), spent the 1980s in grad school congealing into a ridiculous jargon, and with the booming economy of the 1990s was once again reinvented, this time as a career path. 

Williamson offers 30-year-old law student Sandra Fluke as exhibit A:

For what is she known? For standing in front of a group of legislators saying “I Want!” It is worth remembering that Miss Fluke’s “I Want!” heard ’round the world was a demand for birth-control subsidies at a Catholic institution: What’s a few thousand years of practice and the most highly developed body of moral philosophy in the Western world compared with a callow young law student’s “I Want!”?

Public policy can be complicated, but “I Want!” is simple. In the world of responsible politics, there are sometimes conflicts between competing legitimate goods, and there are occasions upon which the necessities of governance run up against the limitations our constitutional order puts upon the political enterprise. Miss Fluke spoke many, many words on the subject but, defying probability, never managed to stumble upon any interesting ones. She ended where she began: “I Want!”

Read more: The Feminist Mystique.

Hats Off to Kirsten Powers!

"The truth hurts," writes liberal Kirsten Powers in her second article condemning the professional left for its selective—she calls it 'fake'—war against media misogyny following the Sandra Fluke-Rush Limbaugh kerfuffle.

Members of the professional left reacted with outrage to my column this week calling them out for their fake war against media misogyny. Instead of addressing the encyclopedia of left-wing misogyny I raised, many liberals chose instead to start a ferocious battle with all manner of straw men.

In her articles, Powers names liberal names—Bill Maher, Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, Matt Taibbi, Ed Schultz—and documents specific incidents, asking,

...if Limbaugh's actions demand a boycott—and they do—then what about the army of swine on the left?

Powers has no patience with fellow liberals who operate by such a blatant double-standard.

If the left reacted with the same furor to liberal misogyny as they have reacted to Limbaugh, misogynist cracks would go the way of racist and anti-gay “jokes.” Let’s just call a spade a spade: the uproar over Limbaugh is only because it fits into the Democratic narrative that the GOP is “anti-woman.” It’s Democratic Party activism dressed up as feminism.

In an painful-to-watch video posted to YouTube today, Democratic congresswomen Sheila Jackson Lee and Jan Schakowsky—who both blasted Limbaugh for his behavior—repeatedly refuse to condemn Bill Maher calling Gov. Sara Palin a "c--t" and a "dumb twat." Why is this so difficult?

She doesn't let President Obama off the hook either.

President Obama has seen fit to wade into the Limbaugh kerfuffle, even telling reporters Tuesday that Limbaugh’s behavior was an attack on everyone’s daughter and “I do not want them attacked or called horrible names.” Speaking of daughters, do you remember when Bill Maher said that the real name of then-20-year-old Bristol Palin’s book should be “Whoops, There’s a Dick in Me?”

Liberals have demanded that GOP leaders denounce Limbaugh, but President Obama, who has opined repeatedly on the Limbaugh controversy, refuses to denounce Maher. This despite the fact that Maher has made a high-profile $1 million donation to Obama's super PAC, which is run by longtime Obama aide Bill Burton.

Hats off to Powers for her honesty and fortitude!