There is an old joke, told by a Dallas based airline pilot thirty?years ago: What’s the difference between the women in Dallas and the women in Austin?
Answer:?In Austin, the breasts are real and the diamonds are fake.?The implication being that in Dallas, the breasts are fake and the diamonds are real.?Haha — er, uh — yeah, whatever.
In apparent retaliation for all those jokes in which former Governor,?beauty queen, and?incredible bimbo Sarah Palin (R-Alaska)?was called “Caribou Barbie,” the GOP, mustering their usual quantum of originality, have taken to calling Harvard educated lawyer and gubernatorial candidate?Senator Wendy Davis (D-Fort Worth), “Abortion Barbie.” Because you can be a Palinesque bimbo who cannot name a single newspaper and?still get through Harvard Law School.?Haha — er, uh — yeah, whatever.
It is by now clear to all intelligent people that your average GOP man hates and fears?independent women. What may have been less clear, despite their?shelling out gynecological disinformation like peanuts at a ball park, is that that your average?GOP male knows perilously close to nothing whatsoever about women.
That men consider a woman’s looks political fair game at all shows how little thought?men give?to what it would look like if your average man in Congress were criticized for his looks, good or bad.?Here’s looking at you, Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), who once?chastized Attorney General Eric Holder for casting?”aspersions” on his “asparagus.” His asparagus is the least of his problems.
Salon wrote about the?”Wendy Davis Truthers” this past July. On the apparent theory that all feminists (like the still va-va-va-voom gorgeous Gloria Steinem) must be ugly, Senator Davis?was outed on some sites as an “anti-feminist,” because she used to have frizzy brown hair, and she may have had breast augmentation surgery and/or a rhinoplasty.?Women who become beautiful betray all feminists! Suddenly, the Texas GOP?is completely shocked?to learn?that some women in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, home of George W. Bush,?the?Dallas Market Center, Neiman Marcus, and the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders,?may have taken?major steps to improve their looks.?According to U.S. News and World Report, there are at least 164 plastic surgeons in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex.?Another site puts the number at 376?in Dallas alone.
God only knows how many hairdressers there must be in the metroplex.?GOP men also apparently?do not know that?women who color their hair go lighter as they get older because?blonder tones?do not contrast as much with the incoming grey roots.?One would think Senator Davis had gone orange, like?that late old?floozy with a secret love child, Strom Thurmond. Slut shaming should no longer be the one-way street it has historically been, and continues to be, with lectures on what straw man?”Democrats” are purported to?think about women’s?ability?(or not)?to control their libidos, from libido killers like Mike Huckabee.
One?ironic thing about the attacks on Wendy Davis’s good looks is that the Texas GOP was not satisfied with Ann Richards’s appearance, either.? Governor Richards (D-Austin) proudly and beautifully wore every wrinkle and?white hair she had ever earned, and was derided by the GOP with nicknames like “Old Wrinkles” and whispers that she was a lesbian.?You’re either an attractive gold digger trophy wife sell-out, or a feminist lesbian who choose the natural look. There is no in-between.
GOP attacks on women’s looks, good or bad,?go way back to references to Lady Bird Johnson’s?pet project:?”Help beautify America: Sterilize LBJ.” Fat drug addict and gasbag Rush Limbaugh called young Amy Carter unattractive and referred to teenage Chelsea Clinton as “the White House dog.” Senator John McCain followed that knee slapper with one of his own:?Chelsea?is unattractive because Janet Reno is her father. Fortunately, Chelsea blossomed into a stunning and educated young woman, which will doubtless be held against her at some future date.?There’s just no pleasing some men in the GOP, whether your appearance is enhanced in some way or completely?natural save for a little hairspray.? Okay,?in?Governor Richards’s case, a lot of hairspray.
The “good looks” attacks on Senator Davis did not do much for the Texas GOP, so?ad hominem swiftboat-like attacks on?her reputation as a self-made single mom were in order.? As Ann Richards once said in an interview with Texas Monthly, ?I tell you, it’s terrible to have a reputation for being perfect . . . . cause when you fail . . .? Senator Davis’s purported failure was not putting enough detail into her official bio, and having more help along the way from her second husband than she had previously acknowledged.?She was twice married.?She was a teenage mother, but she wasn’t technically a single teenage mother because her first divorce was not final until she was 21.? She did live in a trailer as a single mom, but only for four months.?She did work multiple jobs while putting herself through school for a while.? And her second husband, a lawyer of some means?fifteen years her senior,?put her through Harvard Law School, while taking care of the kids.?Worst of all, she left her second husband the day after he sent off her final tuition payment.
So the first sin making Wendy Davis a fraud in the eyes of the GOP is that, at age 50, she was not as precise about the details of her life more than 30 years ago as she could have been. Gee, that would be a first in the history of busy working women of a certain age with grown children.?Is her story of hard work and self-reliance as a teenage mother less inspiring because her first divorce was not technically over until she was 21??Not to people not looking to nail her for any little discrepancy.
Her second sin was not acknowledging her second husband’s role in bankrolling five years of college for his former wife, a story which she related to Vogue?and?acknowledged her second husband as one of her “role models.”?The?real bottom line here?is, or should be, that he could have written all the checks he wanted to, but her superior performance in undergraduate school and law school was all her own doing.?It was her hard work that got her through Texas Christian University?at the top of her class.?That same hard work got her into and through Harvard Law School. Mere “trophy wives” and “floozies” do not get through Harvard Law School.
Texas is a community property state, and whatever Senator Davis’s second husband made was half hers, and vice versa. Did she leave her second husband after he put her through school??A better question is, whose business is it but theirs??They were both lawyers, and those issues about who contributed what to whom were worked out in her second divorce decree, no doubt. Jeff Davis certainly harbors no grudges against Senator Davis:? ?When you’re married to someone, you put them first; it’s pretty simple.”?He said his ex-wife would make “a very capable governor.”
The latest blast is a temporary restraining order (TRO) entered against Wendy Davis while her second divorce was pending.?A very dishonest piece in Red State singles out the juicier portions of the TRO, which are, in fact, boilerplate allegations that appear in standard forms that many lawyers never even bother to modify beyond filling in the parties’ names. A TRO is an order entered “ex parte,” or without a chance for the other party to respond, until a permanent order can be entered by agreement or at a hearing where both parties are present.?It’s temporary because it would not be fair in America to enter a permanent order without giving both sides a chance to be heard or present evidence.
This TRO is being used by Republicans to assert that a court ordered Wendy Davis to stop drinking and using drugs; but there is nothing there that either says or proves that’she was doing those things.? It just says, don’t so these things.? Sometime people don’t even contest TROs because they have no intention of doing any of the things alleged in them, anyway, and?a hearing on the matter is just an additional expense.
The individual who wrote this article about the TRO, Erick Erickson, was singled out for being the worst conservative blogger of 2013.?Erickson is purported to hate all female bread winners, causing Fox colleague Greta Van Susteren to say on her blog that?he has a??pattern of being disrespectful to women? and label him a “jerk.”?Using a TRO?as evidence?that Wendy Davis has a problem with alcohol and drugs is the same as lying, because in no legal forum would a TRO ever be?recognized as evidence of anything.
What the GOP, which as an entity?clearly hates and needs to control independent women,?cannot seem to figure out is that looking good does not make you stupid or a traitor to feminists everywhere, and relying on a spouse for support does not make you unworthy or?a gold digger. John McCain left the wife who waited?for him for more than five years, while he was in a prison camp in Vietnam, herself crippled by a terrible car accident and four inches shorter than the fashion model McCain had married.?Carol McCain was so selfless she omitted mention of her own accident in letters to McCain in prison camp, to spare him that pain.?So great was his gratitude to Carol?that he?threw her over within six years of returning to the States?for?his young and beautiful heiress and mistress, who was to become Cindy McCain. Is he a trophy husband, a bimbo, unworthy of public office, disloyal, a slut, and an opportunist? He was the GOP nominee for President six years ago. I rest my case.
Edited/Published by: SB
