How ’bout that Doonesbury?
Yesterday Garry Trudeau, the creator of the favorite cartoon of liberals, insulted Condoleeza Rice.
Even by Doonesbury standards, it wasn’t very funny.
The cartoon depicts an idiot president talking to his National Security Advisor. In the last frame, he calls her “brown sugar.”
It’s impossible to imagine President Bush actually saying this to his National Security Adviser. But isn’t this how liberals of the Doonesbury stripe always portray conservatives?
IWF has criticized the ad, but otherwise there hasn’t been the kind of outrage one might expect. In addition to insulting Ms. Rice, Trudeau has — falsely — imputed racism and sexism to a president who is guilty of neither.
Conservative women rarely get a fair shake from the Spin Sisters (or Spin Brothers like Trudeau). Kathleen Parker, one of my favorite columnists, and not a spin sister but a good, old-fashioned journalist, just happened to have a column about the emerging mythology (in the liberal media) about Bush and his “womenfolk.”
Parker noted that a New York Times story had characterized the Bush women (Laura, Barbara, Condi, and Karen) as Valkyries.”
“[A]n interesting choice of iconography,” notes Parker. “Valkyries were Norse ‘corpse goddesses’ originally represented by a carrion-eating raven. Sometime between the third and 11th centuries, they evolved into something less evocative of roadkill — depicted instead as beautiful women who welcomed the hero into the afterlife with a horn of mead.”
Parker notes that these women are depicted as tough but, more important, as deferential to “their man.” Never mind that the man to whom they reportedly defer is the most powerful man in the world and protocol, not feminine timidity, might dictate respect.
“As for Condi,” writes Parker, “we hear, she’s so devoted to the Bushes that she spends most weekends with them. A sort-of second wife, she’s at the president’s beck and call. Stage whisper: just like a woman should be.
“On the other hand, she could be merely a dutiful national security adviser on call to a president during war.
“Whatever the case, we can be fairly certain that were these same strong, accomplished women Democrats, their likenesses would be carved in bas-relief and gold-leafed over the entrance to NOW headquarters.”
And Garry Trudeau would never have insulted her…