January 15, 2007--Rush to Condi

It’s never a good thing to have to depend on Rush Limbaugh to rush to your defense. Especially when he is acting as a “feminist.” It’s even more desperate when he speaks from his high horse as if he were a defender of racial tolerance.

But that’s exactly what we saw at the end of last week when Rush raced to the defense of Condoleezza Rice.

He intervened in what some in the press called a “personal” attack on Condi by Senator Barbara Boxer during the Secretary of State’s testimony before the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs.

In case you missed the flap, Boxer confronted Rice about who is paying the personal price for the war in Iraq. She acknowledged that she isn’t—her children, she said, are too old to be in the army and her grandchildren too young. She then got into trouble in the blogisphere and elsewhere when she said to Rice, “You’re not going to pay a particular price, as I understand it, with an immediate family. So who pays the price? The American military and their families.” (See NY Times article linked below.)

Interviewed later by the Times, implying Boxer had set back the feminist cause, Condi said, “I thought it was O.K. to be single . . . to not have children.” And then a very agitated Rush sputtered, “Here you have a rich white chick with a huge, big mouth, trying to lynch an African-American woman, right before Martin Luther King Day, hitting below the ovaries.”

Putting aside his calling Boxer a chick and his crack about lynching and ovaries, from what they both said, this pseudo-feminist and his protectee, it is clear that neither one of them gets it.

No one wants to take responsibility for this war—politically, historically, or personally. Very few in Congress are directly or emotionally affected, and thus what our administration and congressional leaders have brought down upon us, debated, supported or opposed, has a clear air of the abstract about it. With a volunteer army, which assures that the vast majority of those who sign up come from low-income backgrounds, privileged folks like Boxer and Rice and Limbaugh and me do not have any close family members or friends with their lives and limbs at risk.

So Senator Boxer’s admission about her own lack of direct involvement and her assertion about Secretary Rice’s similar isolation was not only true but "gendered" in the best sense. It was a stunning and important example of why it is essential to have women in powerful positions. What man among us would have brought this war home so personally, and appropriately?

Condi Rice and her knight in shining armor, Rush Limbaugh, are so busy trying to be muy macho that they haven’t a clue.