The thread about this was closed before I was aware it had started, so please indulge me.
The recent revelations about Sarah Palin in Joe McGinnis’s book The Rogue (I haven’t read it, just the excerpts in Doonesbury) got a lot of traction, especially the stuff about her banging a Black basketball player. I’m not clear why this revelation is considered fair game. Some of the things I’ve heard:
It reveals her hypocrisy To my knowledge, she’s never run on an anti-miscegenation platform. It just reveals that she was very young at one point and nothing more.
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It’s payback for what Starr did to Clinton** Digging up sexual innuendo was wrong then and it’s wrong now.
Sportscasters shouldn’t sleep with the athletes they cover Okay, this one was from my sister; I don’t think anybody else considers what Palin did for the local affiliate to be “journalism.”
She’s a right-winger and they generally scowl at the rest of us for doing stuff like that There is a vast spectrum of political belief under the rubric of “right wing.” I know of nobody who subscribes to every single bit of it. Try again.
The only people feigning shock over the Palin/Rice hookup are left-leaning types who need a much better excuse for acting bothered that a white woman had sex with a Black man. When you’re poking around in somebody’s past, you can follow the trail of blood droplets to horrible things they’ve done, or you can root around and find the kind of undotted I’s and uncrossed T’s that, frankly, we all have. The former is fair game for investigation; the latter is not. Even for someone as noxious as Sarah Palin. Garry Trudeau in particular should know better. Why is this possible bit of Palin’s past acceptable for public scrutiny?
So “miscegenation” is something only a young person would engage in? Is it something you grow out of? Perhaps one becomes more mature and reflective and able to see the error of your ways? Is that what you mean?
A 47-year-old isn’t answerable for every detail of what she (or he) did two decades earlier. If she’d had affairs more recently–while married, a candidate for national office and a spokesperson for “family values”–maybe McGinnis’s allegations would be fair game.
Style manual habit from my college newspaper days. “Black” when referring to African Americans has properly been capitalized since the 1940s, but there’s no corresponding tradition for capitalizing “white.” Perhaps a practicing journalist on these boards can chime in and tell us if this is still the tradition.
As a general rule, liberal people don’t care who you sleep with as long as it involves responsible, consenting adults.
Consevatives generally think the what/when/where/how and who you sleep with and the consequences of that are a big deal. They talk about it a lot and attempt to or do pass laws about sexual issues. They talk about getting government out of people’s lives, then pass laws about who you can marry, restrict information and access to birth control and STD protection and treatment, and promote sexual stupidity by insisting on teaching abstinence only education (as if young people won’t discover sex on their own if you don’t mention it ever), etc.
Who Palin slept or snorted with is only interesting in that light.
You said
“She’s a right-winger and they generally scowl at the rest of us for doing stuff like that There is a vast spectrum of political belief under the rubric of “right wing.” I know of nobody who subscribes to every single bit of it. Try again.”
…as if this were the least important of your points. I suspect it may be the most important of the ones you listed. Of course not every right winger agrees with every right wing position. Who said they do? But do not “most of them” or “a large majority of them” or whatever consider sexual morals to be a big issue. If not, why so many sexual laws?
It seems to me conservatives as a group have deep seated and conflicting sexual issues.
Let’s see, a woman who promotes abstinence only sex education is recreationaly banging athletes, has a baby conceived out of wedlock (we can count Sara), and has a daughter who is an unwed mother that has the gall to promote abstinence herself.
But whine, whine, whine. It’s not fair. Suck it up. Palin promoted one of the great lies in American history with her Death Panel bullshit, and that mistruth will affect millions of people who will not have access to healthare.
There are two major strains of conservatism in the US: Southern (Moral Majority types who want to legislate who you can sleep with, what you can drink and where and when you can buy it, etc. These are the folks who want to post the Ten Commandments in schools and courthouses) and Western (Primarily fiscal conservatives and small L libertarians; They don’t care what you drink, smoke or have sex with, just as long as you don’t impact the tax rate). I’m simplifying, as these groups have a fair amount of overlap and Palin herself appears to be within that overlap.
A surprising number of self-described conservatives have very healthy attitudes about sex. Most of them live out West.
Sarah lost her protection against going back in time,when she accused Obama of palling around with terrorists, when he was on a council with Ayers who was a radical 50 years earlier. Obama was a kid when Ayers was a weatherman. Palin was 23 when she went on a sex spree with a basketball team.
She’s a public person, a very vocal one at that, who at one point was up for a VP spot. As such, pretty much her entire private life is fair game. Them’s the rules of the game. Don’t like them, don’t play. Fact is, I’m honestly surprised this didn’t come up during McCain’s run.
Did the OP throw such a fit when, say, the matter of Obama doing cocaine in college surfaced ? For some reason, I doubt it. Call me cynical.
ETA: don’t get me wrong, I don’t really approve of it being used against her (if it is, rather than just smirking). But one thing she (and by extension, you, OP) doesn’t get to do is play martyr over it.
The thing that gets me about this, isn’t whether or not it’s really relevant to anything (it’s not), but the fact that it’s automatically assumed to be true.
Hi, OP checking in. The first I heard of Obama doing cocaine was when he publicly said “I did cocaine in college”. Given that context, no, I didn’t make a big deal about it. I did a fair amount of drugs in college, and so did everyone I knew well. I did throw kind of a fit over Ken Starr, though. My politics are a bit farther to the left than you seem to think.
IMO, fucking a Black basketball player 20- odd years ago is only relevant if she were the current spokesperson for the Society Against White Women Fucking Black Guys. She isn’t. And as for her being fair game because she’s a public figure and a seeker of high office… Print out your endorsement of that on a card, laminate it, keep it in your wallet and read it again when some future Solicitor General trots out frivolous past innuendoes against someone you actually like and support. I guarantee it will happen soon.
As I recently read around here, someone is generally considered a hypocrite if they’ve once done something they now preach against, unless they themselves reveal that and say that it was a bad decision.
While it doesn’t technically make her a hypocrite to have had sex out of wedlock in the past while preaching against it today, I understand it feeling hypocritical.
I think that it is mentioned that the guy is an athlete to imply promiscuity, as the stereotype of athletes suggests. Him being mentioned as black is just to appeal to the bias that all conservatives are racists.
She’s the self-anointed spokeswomen for American values, faith, morality, whatever, and she likes to pretend that angelic sexual abstinence is part of that. So to build on your hyperbole, actually she is the current spokesperson for Society Against Women Fucking Guys, so by definition she’s a member of the more specialized subset you mentioned. Race need not enter into it, although I’m sure the guys in south Georgia who sponsor segregated high school proms at this late date in history are big Palin fans.
Of course the cherry on top is Palin won’t own it, say “that was a youthful transgression in the abstinence department, and it’s against everything I stand for now, and race has nothing to do with it.” Hell no. She has to pretend like she’s been a virgin forever, and of course it goes without saying that given her white-bread base, the taint of unwedded miscegenation would be a career death sentence.
Just as a general aside I’m sick as hell of conservatives who go whoop it up and have a good time in their youth, and then catch religion and abstinence when older. Mainly I’m speaking of everyone I went to high school and college with. Of course you could see it as people making youthful mistakes and going on to gain wisdom. It’s more likely that people get their fun while they feel like having fun, and never see a need to give it up until they need to look like a responsible family man/woman.