Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Food for Thought, Are We a Fast Food Nation?




Are Far Right Women Right for America
by Linda Rallo 

The popular appeal of far right candidates suggests that when it comes to picking public servants, American appetites hunger for ready-made meals rather than cultivated cuisine.

Today's menu features a Senate contender whose experience makes Sarah Palin look like Susan B. Anthony. Last night we met Christine O'Donnell, the newest Tea Party candidate to capture national attention. So over coffee and headlines, I took a closer look at this grizzly-esque momma. Seems she's famous not for her "illustrious" career as a public relations consultant but more for her condemnation of masturbation (maybe she won a contest or something) and affirmation of abstinence (that worked well for Bristol eh?).

So that's where we are girls. The best women for national leadership need not work their way through the legislative hierarchy nor possess advanced degrees. Even public servants who wish to reach the upper pay grades are required to attend graduate school.

No, now we just have attractive ladies who can take a banal approach to public policy, slap on a couple of layers of lipstick, call for less government, mention something about the constitution and there you have it, a Tea Party candidate and potentially the newest member to one of the most elite clubs in the world, the U.S. Senate.

This may be fast-food politics, but are we really getting the full-meal deal? Who do I blame for this could-be snack wrap senator? I blame the scores of moderate women in America, women who daily confess to me that they are "fiscally conservative and socially liberal".

But when I try to drum up some momentum for a moderate movement, the response is mediocre at best. Perhaps real women are too busy doing real work to waste their resources in a government that has long operated blissfully from a position of status quo.

Mounting debt, two unfunded wars, record unemployment and hope buried somewhere in the abyss of forgotten campaign speeches, and we have the new adventures of unknown Christine as the next national train wreck to tragically entertain us.

Ok America, we are hurting, I understand that. We need something different, right. But even when the hunger pangs are so completely unbearable, do you really want the aftermath of a bad burrito when you could have a nice, light salad with protein, good carbs and no trans fats?

Please don't promote these tea party girls as the fresh faces of feminine leadership. They are simply pawns in a game of partisan tug-of-war. Ignorantly at the back of the rope, this time they may have pulled popular opinion far to the right, but just like at family picnics, the ones who win end up on their rears while the losers stand tall.

So to the modern moderate woman unmotivated to serve, we need you at the table, we need you preparing the meals, because come November when our country sits down to feast on its new found conservative fortitude, you may think these candidates have what you crave, but by morning, you'll be sick.
Linda Rallo is a public policy graduate student in St. Louis and a member of the Republican Party.

1 comment:

  1. as the product of a long line of VERY strong and intelligent women, and a graduate of Vassar College, I've always felt that women would be the ones to run the world, and I don't mean from behind the scenes. What I never dreamt of in a million years, and what I'm glad my female relatives never lived to see, is the vacuous woman that is emerging from the Tea Party side of politics. Calling them "Lipstick on a Pig" is being really mean to our porcine friends. Not only is Palin an idiot, and a mean-spirited idiot, Christine O'Donnell can't even tell people where she went to college, she has lied on her Linked-In page and mislead people in interviews. I could go on, but why, lol. All of the women I went to school with, and all of men for that matter, are flummoxed by this Teabagging movement. It's as if complete stupidity and lack of compassion is being rewarded and looked upon as something to aspire to,

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