Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (8 page)

The point was not to prove Steinem had succeeded on her own, but precisely the opposite: to prove that she had batted her eyes and inveigled a man to save her failing business enterprise. There’s a great role model for American girls: Go out and fail, then find a rich man to prop you up.

While Schlafly was writing about military policy, getting presidential candidates nominated, drafting Republican platforms, and raising six children, Steinem was writing a book about self-esteem,
Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem.
Steinem never had children and now goes around prattling about how unhappy her life has been. As she told ABC’s
PrimeTime Live
—a program that would never interview Schlafly—”I was unmothered or unparented. I was neglected.”
³⁰
Meanwhile, Schlafly is a senior statesman in the Republican Party. She has had a dominant influence on the Republican Party platform for at least two decades. Ask any United States senator, Republican or Democrat: Would you rather have your pet bill opposed by Gloria Steinem or Phyllis Schlafly?

Yet in the mainstream media the “hero” is the unaccomplished feminist harpy. Steinem is “in.” The elites cannot cite her bravery often enough, as she endures endless hardships on the cocktail circuit from Aspen to Beverly Hills. In the special 1986 issue of
Time
magazine’s “Almanac of Victories, Disasters, Heroes and Hurrahs” for the years 1936-1986, Gloria Steinem was the “Hero” of 1971, along with such individuals as Winston Churchill (Hero, 1941), Allied Supreme Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower (Hero, 1944), and Mother Teresa (Hero, 1979).
³¹

Steinem’s job—or “career” in feminist-speak—is simultaneously vague and pompous. (Men always had “jobs,” women have “careers.”) The articles celebrating her nothingness chirp that Steinem is “also attempting a career in screenwriting, getting involved with such projects as a caper movie, the screen translation of her book, and a new, noncartoon version of
Wonder Woman.”

The media’s undying devotion to this banal feminist has produced highly intellectual exchanges such as this with Jay Schadler of ABC News:
³²

schadler: When a woman dresses in a sexy way, what is she trying to say?

Ms. steinem: Well, you know, men’s—I don’t want to embarrass you, but I was about to say that your pants are at least as tight as mine. You know, we enjoy looking at men’s asses.

She is a hero! Much like Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower.

In a 1999 ABC News special report titled “A Celebration: 100 Years of Great Women,” Barbara Walters fawned over Steinem and her fellow termagants for changing the world: “Feminist. This may be one of the most misunderstood words of this century.... But without them, we would be living today in a very different world.” (Schlafly was mentioned only as an obstructionist sidebar to these courageous women.)

Evidently, the way the feminists created a “very different world” related to how in 1960, as Walters explained, “ ‘Father knew best’ TV told us that true fulfillment was a clean house.” But
today
TV tells us that true fulfillment is abortion, lesbianism, and prostitution. You’ve come a long way, baby. Indeed, the entertainment industry is one of the few bailiwicks where feminism is still taken seriously. In the wonderful new world created by feminists, an actress’s surest route to an Academy Award nomination is to play a prostitute. Among the actresses to have been nominated for Oscars for the devilishly challenging task of portraying a prostitute are Julia Roberts
(Pretty Woman),
Kim Basinger
(L.A. Confidential),
Jane Fonda
(Klute),
Jodie Foster
(Taxi Driver),
Elisabeth Shue
(Leaving Las Vegas),
Sharon Stone
Casino),
and Mira Sorvino
(Mighty Aphrodite).

Though feminism hasn’t made much of a dent in America, it has taken the worlds of news and entertainment by storm. Female celebrities are no longer in the mold of Sophia Loren, Grace Kelly, Lauren Bacall, Carole Lombard, or Audrey Hepburn. In the bright new feminized Hollywood, the female divas are Britney Spears, Madonna, Pamela Anderson, Elizabeth Hurley, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Jenny McCarthy. Whatever feminism is alleged to have accomplished, it did not create a world in which women are admired for something other than playing or being sluts.

While there are nauseating prose poems to Steinem, the mainstream media ignore Schlafly when not deploying their trademark elitist snubs. Revealing true facts about Schlafly would inevitably result in unfavorable comparisons with inconsequential feminists. Not one of Schlafly’s books has ever been reviewed in the
New York Times.
Schlafly is preposterously demeaned with articles reporting that she is trying to remain “relevant.”
³³
After two decades of smearing and slighting Schlafly, in 1995 the
New York Times
denounced Schlafly as part of an “attack machine.”
³⁴

While the hard news outlets merely sneer at her,
People
magazine promotes grotesque Schlafly caricatures using, for example, “harridan” as a synonym for “Phyllis Schlafly.”
³⁵
One
People
magazine article
³⁶
snickeringly described a Los Angeles mountainside home that featured “six fiberglass gargoyles depicting, among others, Richard Nixon and Phyllis Schlafly.” In a profile of drag queen Sister Boom Boom,
People
gleefully noted that Sister Boom Boom had “mocked Phyllis Schlafly and Jerry Falwell.”
³⁷
People
magazine also quoted young Ron Reagan Jr. “tartly” saying: “Getting flak from the likes of Phyllis Schlafly is an honor. I’d wear a T-shirt that says, ‘I took flak from Phyllis Schlafly.’ You’d get applause when you walked down the street.”
³⁸

Phyllis Schlafly never comes up with a witty or tart reply. She “fumes”
(Newsweek)^
or “opens her mouth”
(New York Times)
or “snaps”
(Newsweek).
⁴⁰

Time
magazine sarcastically portrayed women attending a Phyllis Schlafly luncheon at the 1984 Republican National Convention for imagining that they were the “mainstream.” A Texas delegate said: “It amazes me that people would think this is not a cross section of the American public.” To demonstrate what a preposterous conceit this was,
Time
magazine noted that the woman had “waved an encompassing arm at the room full of overwhelmingly white, conservative, married women whose greatest mark of diversity was whether they wore silk or synthetic.”
⁴¹
(As regular readers of the elite media know, “mainstream” means “homosexual drug addicts living in Manhattan.”)

The party favor at the Schlafly luncheon was General Daniel Graham’s book on the Star Wars defense system,
We Must Defend America.
At the Democratic National Convention event attended by Steinem, the party favors were condoms.
⁴²

It is an absolute moral certainty that no conservative, certainly not an influential one like Schlafly, will ever be acknowledged by magazine glossies busily passing out “Woman of the Year” awards to mediocre left-wing harpies. In 1992,
Glamour
magazine made Hillary Clinton its “Woman of the Year” for “never apologizing for who she is”—as if it were an incredibly brave act to be a liberal in America today. Anita Hill had been
Glamour
magazine’s “Woman of the Year” the previous year but she was given a special mention in Hillary’s edition because, the magazine raved, Hill’s influence had only “multiplied over time, inspiring others to take chances, to stand up and win.” It turned out that one of the women who was inspired to stand up and win was Paula Jones. Strangely, though, Jones was never honored as a
Glamour
magazine “Woman of the Year.”

Other brave feminists honored by
Glamour
in 1992 included Carol Mosely Braun, Lieutenant Paula Coughlin (who brought sexual harassment charges against the Navy), Katie Couric (“for boosting ratings and feminism at the same time,” as we have come to expect from TV personalities), feminist author Susan Faludi, and Whoopi Goldberg. Does it ever occur to anyone at
Glamour
that their “Woman of the Year” lists never include anyone who might possibly have voted for Ronald Reagan? Ever? Reagan was quite popular with Americans, even if he was not with the editors of
Glamour
magazine.

This is what it means to be part of the cool crowd in America. Liberal snobbery is no more rational or factually based than the “in” crowd in junior high school. The “in” crowd even posts lists in mainstream magazines announcing who is “in” and who is “out.” Steinem is always “in” and Schlafly is always “out.” Indeed, conservatives are always out, yesterday’s news, fighting irrelevance, fading from the limelight. This is odd since if any conservatives were ever “in,” they neglected to tell us. Matt Drudge has been “out” three times in
Vanity Fair,
but he’s never been “in.”

Rush Limbaugh—along with Schlafly—was said to be taking “a back seat” in 1993: He was “on the outs; 1993 is not the time to be Far Right in America.”
⁴³
The
Washington Post
pegged Limbaugh as out in 1996, giddily quoting a “Rush Room” proprietor who averred that “Limbaugh ‘is fading right now’ in popularity.”
⁴⁴
The
Phi Delta Kappan
magazine gave Limbaugh a snooty “Least Credible Article” prize for a 1995 column in
Family
Cz’rc/e.
⁴⁵
In 1997, the Bergen County
Record
noticed that “Rush Limbaugh’s conservative star may be fading.”
⁴⁶
When it became clear that no amount of sneering would turn Rush into Jim Jeffords, the media ignored him. (Except Lewis H. Lapham, editor of
Harper’s Magazine,
who is absolutely obsessed with Limbaugh, mentioning him in snotty asides in seventeen
Harper’s
editorials since March 1993.
⁴⁷
)

It’s not clear if it is possible for liberals ever to be “out,” and if they are, what it means. But if you are a conservative and the mainstream media says you’re out, buy beachfront property now! You know you’re in when they say you’re out.

The corollary is: You can always tell a rotten organization by the
New York Times’
predilection to call it “much admired” or “highly respected.” This is how reporters convert their purely subjective feelings into hard news. When ABC was considering scrapping Ted Koppel’s
Nightline
in early 2002 because of its low ratings, the most common reaction was “Is that still on?” At the
Times,
they were inconsolable. In a series of lengthy elegies, the program was factually described as “quality news,” and an “admired news program.”
⁴⁸
Admired by whom precisely? Rush Limbaugh wasn’t losing any of his audience, but the
Times
never calls his program “admired.”

Truly pompous liberals have achieved such a refined level of snobbery, sometimes you wonder if they realize people are listening. During the 2000 presidential campaign the press was in a high dudgeon about Bush having traveled abroad only three times—in addition to his many trips to Mexico. But “beyond those trips,” as the
New York Times
put it, Bush had traveled “only” to China, Gambia, Italy, Egypt, and Israel.
⁴⁹
How many Americans consider that laughable?

Yet
Newsweek’s
Jonathan Alter, among others, was nearly obsessed with Bush’s petty provincialism for having traveled abroad so little. In the October 2, 2000,
Newsweek,
Alter wrote: “Despite his father’s foreign-affairs background, which offered Dubya great opportunities to grow intellectually, Bush has traveled overseas only three times in his 54 years. Mexico is the only foreign country he has visited often and knows well.”
⁵⁰
On the October 11
Today
show on NBC, Alter again raised the embarrassing fact: “This is a candidate who’s only traveled overseas three times in his life.”
⁵¹
Just three days later, Alter was still babbling on the Saturday
Today
show about Bush having
“only
traveled overseas three times in his entire life, and he’s gotten educated on it some in recent months, but even he would not claim to be any kind of foreign policy expert.”
⁵²
And he still hadn’t exhausted the subject. In the October 23
Newsweek,
Alter breathlessly reported: “Until recently, Mexico was the only country outside the United States that seemed to engage [Bush’s] interest; he has visited the Middle East once, in 1998 (one of only three trips he has taken overseas in his life).”
⁵³

Media sages were not so impressed with foreign travel when Bush’s father was running against Bill Clinton. The senior Bush had been a Navy pilot in the Pacific in World War II, ambassador to the United Nations, ambassador to China, and director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Clinton’s wide travel consisted primarily of his joining antiwar protestors across Europe and in Moscow during the Vietnam War.
⁵⁴

The public never would have known about Clinton’s travels as a peacenik if the Bush campaign hadn’t had the gaucherie to mention it. In response, the media did not lament Clinton’s sparse (and somewhat unusual) foreign travels but attacked Bush for being so vulgar as to have raised the issue. The “admired, quality news” program
Nightline
titled its story on Bush’s tactless questions “A Low Blow on Clinton’s Russia Trip?”
⁵⁵