Sarah Palin Broke the Internet

From "All Things Digital", Sarah Palin, Please Come Back! Hulu Traffic Drops in November:

File under “interesting, but understandable”: After a flurry of election-related interest in October, traffic to red-hot Hulu fell off in November. Blame Sarah Palin–or the lack of her.

ComScore says that traffic to the joint venture between News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox and GE’s (GE) NBC fell 10.8 percent from October to November, dropping from 5.3 million unique visitors to 4.8 million. (Hulu’s PR team notes that ComScore’s separate “VideoMetrix” panel assigned a much bigger audience to the site last month: 24 million uniques.

...

And all sorts of Web sites that enjoyed a bump during the run-up to the election have tailed off a bit since then. ComScore says the Huffington Post, for instance, is down 20 percent– from five million uniques to four million.

She'll be back to bump up the internet. I can guarantee it.

Sarah Palin is a Feminist

I know. It's a horrifying thought, isn't it.

The Maid of Wasilla, with her visions of plowing through White House doors at the behest of God, would do well to heed the fate of Joan of Arc, whose unwavering religious fervor won her the favor of the illiterate hayseed/redneck French countryside, yet cost her something far, far greater.

As predicted in "Sarah Palin, Superstar", the very people who ushered her in with palm leaves in September are now grumbling about her in November.

If the Bible is to be believed, and I don't think it is, we have seen this tale, before.

Just in time for the appreciation post lauding Palin's ability to mess with conservative christian men and their massive gender hangups, some christowank at Crosswalk is currently grappling with his hypocritical Christian innards:

It is in this spirit of honest, forthright engagement with God and his word that I'd like to ask a question that couldn't help but come to me as I was reading the Bible this morning. I was in 1 Timothy 2, when I read this: "I also want women to dress modestly, with decency and propriety, not with braided hair or gold or pearls or expensive clothes .... A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent."

Now how in this world could I read that and not think of Sarah Palin? I didn't want to think of Sarah Palin. I didn't want to think of anything besides the glory of God's word. I hardly waded into my Bible this morning looking for trouble. But (alas) there it was.

So I'm honestly and truly asking, simply because I don't understand and want to: How do Christians who embraced and supported Sarah Palin in particular for her adherence to "traditional" Biblical values reconcile how utterly she violated Paul's injunctions to women to not wear expensive clothes, to stay quiet, to remain submissive, and to have no authority over men? If vigorously campaigning for Vice President of the United States (while, as we all know, wearing expensive clothes) isn't in direct, overt, purposeful, and sustained opposition to all four of those things, then ... then King Kong was a leprechaun. I would think evangelicals and Biblical fundamentalists would reject Ms. Palin for ... well, for one, so ambitiously seeking authority over men.

What do I say to non-Christians when they assert that Christians are being blatantly hypocritical and even opportunistically bigoted when they use Paul's words as justification for the condemnation of homosexuality, and at the same time ignore Paul's very explicit words when doing so suits their own personal desires and ambitions? How do we use Paul to argue for California's Proposition 8, but not use Paul to argue against Sarah Palin?

Poor thing. So confused. All it takes is a wink and a skirt. That's all it EVER takes with these males. Sorry fella, you've been punked by Sarah Palin; butch up and deal with it.

Meanwhile, the Iowa Independent further charts the Christian right's hypocrisy on the issue of a woman drawing attention herself and above all, holding authority over males, noting as John Shore did above, their utter failure to reconcile what the Bible states about women with what it allegedly proclaims about The Gays.

The charitable Christian will leave aside the implications of this injunction for Palin’s notorious $150,000 clothes shopping spree, and ask how biblical fundamentalists can accept Timothy’s teachings and still celebrate a female politician skilled in forthright rhetoric.

Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression. Notwithstanding she shall be saved in childbearing, if they continue in faith and charity and holiness with sobriety.” ~ 1 Timothy 2:8-15

The answer is: Not very easily.

For those who believe that there is an all-encompassing plan by God as delivered in the Scripture, the complementarian view is fundamental. The belief in specific gender roles with men being in leadership positions over women cannot be separated from the order that the Bible says God created:

“But I would have you know, that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God.” ~ I Corinthians 11:3

These two findings help make up one reason I can say I appreciate Sarah Palin, not for being a "feminist" as defined by conventional 2nd wave pro-choice pro-equality activists, but for sticking it to her own conservative valiant male warriors, making them whimper and cry, and even go back to their Bibles to read what it actually says and think about it, as opposed to accepting what they have been told about the Bible and gender roles.

Yes, I appreciate that, very much. Thank you, Brown Eyes. In fact, these guys ought to be grateful she made their party lose, because if the McCain/Palin ticket had won, all you antiabortion control freaks trying to use Sarah Palin as a stick to beat the feminists would indeed find themselves with "a woman" "one heartbeat away" from being Commander in Chief, above countless males not only in the military but in the cabinet.

Oh, the travesty.

I always thought her "equality" and "progress" rhetoric would get her in trouble with the christofreaks from which she draws her support. I didn't expect them to jump ship before the elections, keeping themselves up for grabs. But I also didn't expect them to start throwing her under the theological bus so soon, not even a month after the election.

I guess it's a mark of the sore, male conservative loser: as with the cases of Eve, Lilith and Pandora, we can set our watch to the moment they blame the woman for their own strategic and tactical failures.

Too bad Sarah Palin seems so immersed in this world of scapegoating the always-already scapegoated, she can't quite see just how deeply scapegoated she is going to become amongst these people. Like Eve and Pandora who came before her, she may never be able to see it.

But those of us who can't stop watching, can. And after all the rightwing males suddenly discovering "sexism" because of her, after all the staunch ideological feminists trying to protect her from the same, it will be those of us who can see her for what she is -- the femme top Lilith/Pandora figure that just might have the ability to lift "feminism" to a height previously unknown and unfulfilled by the Steinems, the Lordes, the Paglias.

Welcome to Second Wave, 2.0, folks. A leftist didn't bring it on, a rightwing extremist did.

We're going to have to learn to reconcile it, because this is what history is going to recount.

[Eyeroll] Another Conservative Male Discovers Misogyny [/Eyeroll]

(This Is Why I Tend to Be Dubious About "Kill Him" Reports)

Mark Whittington of Associated Content says,

Commentator Tammy Bruce, who is both a feminist and a conservative, suggests that this kind of thing reveals an undercurrent of misogyny that has existed in the Obama Campaign since the primary fight with Hillary Clinton. Bruce said, "It transcends gender and race. It transcends class. The truth of the matter is, is that one of the most popular t-shirts when Barack Obama was running in the primary season was a t-shirt that said 'bros before hos.'"

O'rly, Tammy.

Never heard of it 'till now. Do tell us all about it.

I say something similar about the "kill him" remark; there are two being reported, now.

It's certainly not that I put it past any of these angry/bitter Palinites that show up in droves to see their magical messiah. But like the "bros before ho's" claim, I want corroboration and proof, because unlike speech on a t-shirt, people who are calling for Obama's death need to be put away, AWAY from normal people, ASAP. By end of business, today.

Hell, these rightwingers drooling for Palin love torture so much, send them to Gitmo where they'll have a grand old time without all that pish-posh of enduring something as tedious and silly as having their rights read to them.

Calling for people's death -- especially that of a presidential candidate -- is not protected speech, anyway, so I don't know who these conservatives think they are kidding, trying to change the topic to bro/ho t-shirts, allegedly all over Obama rallies. Why aren't they all up in arms over the t-shirts at pullinforpalin.com? Oh right, conservative white males with that legendary entrepreneurial spirit run that one, and there's no Black English anywhere on it, so that gets a pass from the Tammy Bruces and Mark Whittingtons.

We can't afford to f' around with ANY of this stuff -- not bros before hos, not illegal, criminal calls for people's DEATH, come on, now. The climate is already a tinderbox, as it is.

Newsweek Cover Dustup

Look at these two rightwing idiots at Fox Snooze, wailing about the upcoming Newsweek cover of SP.



I paged through the issue while at the bank a couple days ago and like a silly fangirl, dutifully ran out to see if it was on the shelves, yet. It wasn't, so we'll just have to wait.

The cover photo looks great, and if the two conservative dunces in the video had the brains god gave a turnip, they'd realize that it's actually a testament to how photogenic Sarah Palin is.

Of course, Andrea Tantaros plays the conservative gender card like clockwork, whining, "any woman who sees this cover would be shocked and horrified..."

Now watch this weeks' issue of Newsweek fly off the shelves.

Idiots.