Columnist Mona Charen goes all Jonathan Swift on us today in a must-read, satirical column that purports to be a letter to President Obama. Charen tells the president that there are many other free things, besides contraception, that women must have:
So, I love the free contraceptives, but there are other things that are important to my health that you and Secretary Kathleen Sebelius seem to have overlooked. What about abortion? … Sure, some religious types may object, but they aren’t sincere in their religious scruples. It’s only a smokescreen for their “war on women.”
There are a few more items, while we’re on the subject. Have you thought about calcium supplements? Every year, more women suffer osteoporotic fractures than heart attacks, strokes, and breast cancers combined. We cannot participate fully in national life with weak and broken bones. So we need free calcium supplements, along with free bone-density scans, and free hip replacements when the time comes. Also, weight-bearing exercise is good for bone health, so gym memberships should obviously be “covered” by insurance. And when I say “covered,” I mean it the way Sebelius does: Free. No co-pays. We don’t want women to be set back by decades, do we? Republicans, of course, want women to be crippled and hunchbacked. But not you.
Since it’s well known that women do the majority of housework in America, it’s only fair that maids and cooks be covered by insurance. It’s for our health. While the maids are cleaning and the cooks are in the kitchen, we can spend time at the government-subsidized gym.
And let’s not forget dental health, why, did you know that women…
The “war on women” strategy doesn’t seem to be paying off for President Obama. And Mona's column shows why: this pathetic bid for women's votes, based on an imaginary war against us, lends itself to satire. That is another way of saying it is becoming a joke. Dana Loesch believes wow is backfiring, too:
It's a bad day for optics in the White House, and a bad day for the administration's strategy of deflecting from these awful truths [gas prices, the economy, etc.] with an elaborately-staged press conference on contraception designed to divert attention away from a two-pronged failure: the attack on the free practice of religion by way of abridging employers' freedom to choose faithfully against providing "free" contraception, and the sinking confidence in the President concerning his mismanagement of the nation's economy and energy policies….
Many women see as a greater threat to their freedom the administration's insistence that employers — many of whom are also female — compromise their religious beliefs to provide for the contraceptive choices made freely by other women, women who can empower themselves by paying for their choices themselves. It's not "feminist"
Loesch has links to the Washington Post/ABC News poll that shows just how ineffective, at least for now, the wow strategy is proving for the White House.