Peter Hitchens is Right About Sarah Palin

Peter Hitchens is Right About Sarah Palin

Iain Dale 1:33 PM

Peter Hitchens has got it bang on in the Mail on Sunday - and it's not often I say that.
Watch as the ultra-feminist sisterhood back away in horror from Sarah Palin, John McCain's new running mate.

Mrs Palin is technically female, but she's enthusiastically married, hates abortion and thinks criminals should not be the only people allowed to own guns. She's everything Hillary Clinton isn't. In short, she's the wrong kind of woman.

Which just goes to show that ultra-feminists are not actually interested in promoting women because they're women. They pretend they are, but really their agenda is a campaign against marriage, in favour of abortion and for every other disastrous liberal and socialist cause that ever existed. In which case, they really can't go on pretending that their opponents are women-hating bigots.

Not least because they are the bigots - merciless when it comes to a choice between their own convenience and the life of an unborn baby.

Perhaps I wouldn't put it quite in those terms, and I don't want to get sidetracked by the abortion debate, but Hitchens' point is valid. The left hate it when a woman succeeds on the right. They cannot stand it when a black person becomes famous as a Conservative - remember Ray Lewis?

The coverage of Sarah Palin in the Sunday papers borders on the sexist. She's dismissed as an inexperienced bimbo. Why is it that people describe her as inexperienced? Obama hasn't run anything, Biden hasn't run anything, McCain, so far as I am aware hasn't run anything. Palin has. She is the Governor of one of the 50 US States. OK, it's a small one, but were these charges really made so virulently against a certain Bill Clinton when he ran for the Presidency in 1992? Jimmy Carter in 1976? Neither of them had any foreign policy experience and both had been governors of comparatively small states.

I don't know a huge amount about Sarah Palin, but the left's reaction to her tends to indicate that they are deeply concerned by her electoral appeal. They're even dissing her as McCain's Dan Quayle. We'll see. For my own part, I like what I see so far.