Those darn gals are just so stupid

This is beautful. Joining the chorus of Republican overkill in response to ABC's new show "Commander In Chief" is a woman blogger whose name is new to me, Debbie Schlussel. From what I can tell, she seems to be something of a lower-rent, lower-profile Ann Coulter. Whose name she invokes in the first paragraph of her badly formatted web-site bio, so it's a safe bet she wants to encourage the comparison.

Anyhoo, as previously discussed, I don't hold much of a brief for "Commander In Chief." (Hey now, that rhymes). I thought the pilot was witless and derivative. The most interesting thing to me about it has been and now remains the fact that Republicans are all so aflutter, you'd think they were chickens and Geena Davis had just shown up with a hatchet.

And after all, as Schlussel argues, ladies can't be trusted with the tools of men.

...this is what a female President will be like as brought to you by Oprah and the women of "Desperate Housewives"--and the legions of female fans who love them. Do you want them picking the leader of the free world?

I don't.

Here's why. Every presidential election year, Harvard's Shorenstein Center conducts 26 polls. Each time, the school finds that women didn't quite know what was going on. Men, on the other hand, were more likely, during the preceding day, to have thought about the elections, talked about it, and read or heard about it on the news.

So if she's right, obviously, this means women shouldn't have the vote at all, should they? Back into bondage with you, sister suffragette(Ohhh, wham bam thank you ma’am!).

I do give Schlussel credit for one thing, though. She manages to come up with a joke that makes "Commander" writer Rod Lurie look positively Sorkinesque.

It gets worse from there: a joke about how if women were running the show instead of Moses, the Jews would have asked for directions, and been in Israel in a week, instead of wandering the desert for forty years.

No, they'd have spent forty years searching the tent closet for the outfit of the day and asking, "Does this make me look fat?"

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha...because, you know how gals are obsessed with physical appearance. Fortunately, Schlussel is free of this character defect...

Of course, an anti-female joke on the level of the Moses joke would never make it on the air--without Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, and the whole gang of feminist hags bitching and clamoring for sensitivity training.

...Hillary Clinton, Madeleine Albright, and most other liberal women that have been mentioned in the role of President are hardly attractive--or even straight-looking

Now, I'll admit I've never had much of a crush on Madeleine Allbright, but Hillary Clinton I've always thought was at least attractive. Though moreso before she was subjected to enough unprecedented hatred and humiliating scandal to put a dent in Jodie Foster's self-esteem.

I choose not to deal with the non-sequitur and likely homophobic "straight-looking" comment and move on instead to Schlussel's next bizarre assertion:

From soap operas to "Desperate Housewives," to "Oprah" to "America's Next (Non)Top Model," to "Sex & the City" syndicated re-runs, TV is dominated by women. The problem is that there aren't enough men. And the men that are on TV (unless you count pro football) are incompetent, unemployed fools, absent dads, and loser criminals and drug users.

Now, granted, I don't watch much televison and clearly, I'm not watching the same shows as she is. Of those I do, "Boston Legal" is about lawyers, not loser criminals (avoid the obvious joke). "Supernatural" is about a couple of dudes. Chris on "Everybody Hates Chris" doesn't have an absent dad. "Veronica Mars" certainly doesn't either. Even the girliest show I watch, "Gilmore Girls," has Luke, who is competent enough to own his own succesful business and the farthest thing from a fool.

And though he may be currently unemployed and a one-time drug user...well, you go tell Jack Bauer he's an incompetent and foolish absent dad, and a loser. I'll wait in a corner to collect the body.

As a side note, Schlussel mentions she finds the idea of women coaching men's sports "absurd." I've never made any secret of my ignorance of sports but I'm under the impression that men coach women's sports. So why...but then, perhaps that's a question that shouldn't be asked.

In fact "questions that shouldn't be asked" seems to be a theme both in the general Republican response to this series, and the specific right-wing blogger I cited earlier about the George Clooney movie.

In both cases, critics seem absolutely unwilling to let a piece of entertainment fall or rise on its own merits. There was a time, when I saw conservatives doing the same thing about "The West Wing," that I thought that when you see everything in terms of politics, you assume everybody else does too.

Now I think it's more than that. They really are--there's no other word for it--threatened by the thought of things like journalists doing their jobs and strong women. Any representation of these as even potentialy good things must be banished and scorned.

Which would lead one to the question: What are they so afraid of?

ETA: And thanks to Lauren and Feministe for making this a Sunday Read. I'm in some interesting company...