VIEWPOINT: A Mighty Wind blows through UPDATE #45 - CBC APOLOGY

[Medusa]

No matter how well educated, when a person resorts to name calling and/or vulgarities, it reveals their lack of vocabulary and intelligence and, sadly, their upbringing. She apparently lacks the intelligence and originality to phrase things any other way. Misogyny is not limited to males.

[Catty1]

Thanks for the feedback. I just wouldn't have the perspective from a US point of view...and when I read in Yahoo news that quite a few folks were upset with this - and there was no name mentioned - I thought it might be one of our TV or radio commentators.

I was a bit surprised to see it was Heather. She writes some very intelligent and great articles. Why she got her knickers in a knot over this is beyond me.

Also - it seems it was written right after the Republican convention where Sarah's VP candidacy was announced. I wonder if Heather would change her tune now.

If she writes and comment or etc in response, I'll post it.

[Catty1]

The Alaskan who went 'outside'

Sarah Palin's Wasilla is beyond small-town. The woman who could be president is someone with no grasp of the wider world

Heather Mallick
Guardian Unlimited
September 5, 2008

I was born in a northern Canadian settlement so small it was accessible most of the year only by a Bombardier, a sort of huge military tank built for passengers. It was like a transport plane, a big iron bulb with caterpillar tracks. I swear we had a paddle-steamer for supplies in the summer.

Take that, Sarah Palin. The place was six times smaller than Wasilla, Alaska, the town that birthed John McCain's strange vice-presidential "soulmate", as weird as that disconnected eerie smile that floats on his face as he stands next to her.

My credentials are solid; Palin cannot out-hick me. Until I fled at 18, I never lived in a northern town of more than 12,000 people. My towns were full of Sarah Palins. These types are fine, such as they are, until they leave town and turn fraudulent. They label themselves "the salt of the earth". It's when they try to make that a qualification for a greater glory that things turn unpleasant.

I never claimed a higher moral standing for coming from a great big empty on the map. Small towns are places that smart people escape from, for privacy, for variety, for intellect, for survival. Palin should have stayed home.

Canada has lots of hockey moms. They're called Fran and Nancy. They have cruel haircuts and their voices shake the rafters of the rink as their rink-rats play. How can I translate the hearty, jollying-along Palin for British audiences? She's a working class Joan Hunter Dunn. It's those volleyball shoulders and field-hockey thighs, the energy, the bullying, and the utter self-confidence in every lie she tells.

Salt-of-the-earthers don't lie! But Palins do. I watched Palin last night, my mouth open, my eyeballs drying out, my hand making shaky notes. I read them aghast.

Did she really joke, "You know the difference between a hockey mom and a pitbull? Lipstick."?

Did she just blow kisses to the audience?

Did she just say, "We need to produce more of our own oil and gas. Take it from a gal who knows the North Slope. We've got lots of both."?

Yes, she did lie about billion-gallon slurps of oil and gas available for Americans to blow, about her support of Alaska's notorious pork-barrel "bridge to nowhere", about which particular citizens will see tax increases under Obama (only the richest, and she knows that).

She also lied when she slobbered over small-town folks (an American version of British farm life, except British farmers have a point). The granite honesty of hicks is a cliche, a fantasy, a meme of American life, as much as the working-class solidarity of Tony Blair was in 1997, and where did that get anyone?

But most of all, she lied about the north and the virtues it supposedly confers on citizens. Canadians watch this with horror. To us, Alaska is the back of beyond. Americans feel the same way. Alaskans are a bunch of Ted Stevens, that enraged screaming old senator who explained that the internet was not a big truck, it was more like a "bunch of tubes". He was arrested and charged with taking bribes, but handily won the August senatorial primary.

We love our own north to the point of covering our eyes and humming as it melts (yesterday the BBC headlined the collapse of Canada's ice shelves; Canadian papers and websites missed the story) but Alaska is different from our north. We share a 1,500-mile border with a frontier state full of drunks and crazy people, of the blight that cheap-built structures bring to a glorious landscape. Canadian firms invest billions in the place and mine its ores. One hundred thousand Canadians visit Alaska every year, and we like to pass by in cruise ships. But it never goes further than that. Alaska is our redneck cousin, our Yukon territory forms a blessed buffer zone, and thank God he never visits. Alaska is the end of the line.

Palin got her first passport last year. (Americans didn't need a passport to enter Canada until recently). She seems to have visited us precisely once, not surprisingly since Alaskans regularly refer to the rest of the world as "outside". We are so foreign to her, this woman who might become US president.

What is native to her is smugness, her certainty that what's good for Wasilla is good for the world in all its infinite variety. It's a variety that Palin will never begin to grasp.

[Lady's Human]

It's amazing that someone who spews that amount of poisonous rhetoric has any audience, let alone an international audience.

[Sevaede]

That is sad, really.

Although, I did have to chuckle about "vaginas calling out to to each other".

[sparks19]

LMFAO @ A-holery.

[RICHARD]

This is what an angry feminist looks like.

A little LIPSTICK -LOL, staying away from THAT joke.
Pearls and a little smirk into the lense?


YOU STILL HAVE UBER BIATCH!
I must apologize, A backwards thong isn't the problem this woman has.

It's underwear bought at the local Home Depot. I never knew feminists wore sandpaper panties.

It's sanded down any femininity, soul and girl parts that she owned before.

[momoffuzzyfaces]

Well, sadly there is a bit of truth in the article: lots of women will vote for McCain because he picked a woman VP.

And as for Obama raising taxes on the rich, who else could he tax? I'm already 130% below the poverty level.

[Lady's Human]

Sen. Obama has vowed to let the Bush tax cut package lapse. This would effectively raise my Federal tax bill by about $2000. I'm not rich. His statements about no tax hikes on people who make under $250K /year are deceptive at best, as he has also pledged to let the current tax cut package lapse.

[jazzcat]

What do they call the female version of penis envy?

What a sophomoric piece of drivel!

[sparks19]

OUCH... sandpaper underwear would really hurt lol.

[RICHARD]

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/5098



Not all agree.



Spark,

You can use a-holery anytime you want.

And the sandpaper undies explains why she has a problem with va-jay-jays calling out to each other. I think it has to do with not owning one or having it sanded off.

[phesina]

Oh my goodness!

[sparks19]

Hmmm funny. I don't know any hockey moms named fran or nancy with cruel haircuts... those are reserved for soccer moms

She mentions in the first article that women are trained to hate each other... I can see that was a very successful lesson in her life as I see nothing but hatred coming from her words. She's angry and it seems that she is most angry about the fact that Palin is a woman.

Smart people move away from small towns? Well if moving away from a small town turns you into a bitter, angry "journalist" I will stick with small towns

I enjoy reading articles that are witty and clever but this one comes across like a temper tantrum lol. perhaps her mother should step in, take her hand and tell her that if she cannot behave in public she will turn this car around and go home.

[RICHARD]

Palin got her first passport last year. (Americans didn't need a passport to enter Canada until recently). She seems to have visited us precisely once, not surprisingly since Alaskans regularly refer to the rest of the world as "outside". We are so foreign to her, this woman who might become US president.

Present company excluded.....

NO WONDER SHE ONLY VISITED ONCE. With an attitiude like that I wouldn't want to venture any kind of contact with Ms. Mallick.

And why the a-holery about blowing a kiss to the audience?

It must be that Heather must have been the last one picked on the school ground. That kind of hate and resentment needs YEARS to percolate to the top.

Of course, stupidity and angst aren't two things you want to be known for, as a writer you'd like to have a way with words, beguiling and charming, informative and sharp.....well, I give her the 'sharp' part.....

This idiot must have holes in her cheeks with a tongue like that. We'll just sit here and giggle a bit and then wonder how that got past the editors of her column then wonder how anyone smart enough to be published can be so wickedly stupid to put her thong on backwards.

She'll walk around for most of the day wondering why it chafes so much and never realize that she's got it on wrong.