Unreal, simply unreal.
The Nation confirms what I’ve believed for years:
In a week where the phrase “legitimate rape” became part of the American political discourse, it’s understandable that anyone who believes in women’s liberation would be scavenging for some good news. Like a parched soul in the desert, many believe that a trickle of water, if not an oasis, has appeared. After eighty years of antediluvian sexism, the Augusta National Golf Club, site of the Masters, has finally decidedto admit women into its ranks. All hail the trailblazers: President George W. Bush’s national security adviser and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and South Carolina billionaire banking executive Darla Moore.
[….]
And yet, please forgive me if I don’t join the chorus of cheers. Rice and Moore are not twenty-first-century Jackie Robinsons, and their acceptance into this bastion of exclusion has nothing to do with women’s liberation and is utterly disconnected from the reality of daily life for millions of American women.
Condi Rice as a symbol of female power? Only if by power, we mean the power to put thousands of Iraqi women in graves all in the name of a war based on lies that she actively promoted.
Then there are the birth defects suffered by the children of women in Iraq. In 2009, the Guardianreportedthat doctors in Fallujah were were “dealing with up to 15 times as many chronic deformities in infants, compared to a year ago, and a spike in early life cancers that may be linked to toxic materials left over from the fighting.”
A hospital spokesman, Nadim al-Hadidi, told the Inter Press Service, “In 2004 the Americans tested all kinds of chemicals and explosive devices on us: thermobaric weapons, white phosphorous, depleted uranium…. we have all been laboratory mice for them.”
There were also, under Rice’s watch, 19,000 reported sexual assaults of women combat troops in the the US Armed Forces every single year. As the Guardian reported, “A female solider in Iraq is more likely to be attacked by a fellow soldier than killed by military fire.”
In an eerie echo of the Representative Akin controversy, these women, if impregnated during their assault, could not get an abortion on a US military base. Rice, who claims to be pro-choice, never raised a voice on behalf of these women.
In a sane world, Rice would be awaiting trial at the Hague. Instead, she gets to play golf at a club that, incidentally, didn’t allow African-Americans until 1990.
The part that strikes me as idiotic at best is that this idiot acts like Condi Rice ordered the invasion of Iraq. True, the Iraq invasion was, in hindsight, a bad move, but it was not Condi’s war. Perhaps the mask is slipping and the Nation’s racist roots are showing?
Either way, this is why I left, “the left” because the hatred and vitriol that the progressives have towards the left.