Palin PUMA Watch

By way of Belle, again, time for an excerpt from some PUMA poetry:

I saw a woman in effigy hang,
All while your minions celebrated and sang,
I thought they’d drink a toast to your health,
In glasses they’d bought with redistributed wealth.

I saw a woman’s head in a noose,
I saw the forces of evil let loose,
The woman whose head was in effigy rent,
She should have been our Vice President.

I saw your gendarmes patrolling the street,
I saw my country her conqueror greet,
I saw the young men marched off to war,
And saw women weep for the children they bore.

...In glasses they'd bought with redistributed wealth. You can't even parody this shit.

And now it's time for some more:

I do not drink and do not smoke
But hand me glass; give me a toke
Too hard’s this loneliness to bear
Without my friends my tears to share
The sun’s gone out on another day
I need my friends to help me find my way.

I would to scream ’till voice be hollow
Dance and stomp and weep and wallow
So tho I neither drink nor smoke
Hand me a glass; give me a toke

I grow old...I grow old...
Still my navel I shall oft behold.

madamab, she of the most famous 30% Solution post, had some ideas for PUMAs shortly after the election:

congratulations, ObamaNation. The wimminz have been thrown under the bus in order to make way for the currently-favored group of disenfranchised second-class citizens, African-Americans. Um, yay?

It has become common for commenters at The New Agenda to suggest finding racial "equivalents" for sexist slurs. I have a feeling a lot of the commenters at The New Agenda discovered feminism yesterday and therefore don't know that this has been tried approximately 238723847 times before.

Anyway, do we need a fucking Venn diagram over here? How many times are they going to talk about "black people" winning things at the expense of "women" or "gay people"?

But this type of vindictive, nasty, zero-sum approach was not just for those with scary ladyparts. Oh no, Obama voters in California had to prove they’re more important than the LGBT community as well. They had to vote “yes” on Proposition 8, which (for now) has stripped the newly-bestowed rights of same-sex couples to marry in that state. And true to form, they are blaming the victims for their own actions.

Actually, it appears that overall, people who voted Republican were more likely to vote for Proposition 8 (77%) than people who voted Democratic (35%), but hey, she's made up her mind; don't confuse her with the facts.

Many of us who are not part of the elite in our society have long believed that voting for a particular party would advance our rights. It is clear to me now that this strategy does not work; indeed, if I were an African-American, I would not be so sure that the election of Barack Obama will do me any good at all...

Um, lady, you don't know what you would think if you were African-American, because there's a good chance that many aspects of your life would be different if you were African-American, not just the one. You know, what with racism existing and such.

Thus, in the future, I would like to see PUMAs become a strong voting bloc that is courted by all political parties.

How do we do this? Well, we can learn from the conservative wing of the Republican Party, which has already become such a voting bloc. After 28 years of activism, the Party cannot win without them.

It appears the Party has some trouble winning even with them; their belligerent know-nothing politics certainly appear to have turned some people off McCain/Palin in 2008.

And also...PUMA-ism is a coherent ideology now?  What do PUMAs have in common besides hatred of Obama?

This year, rumor has it that conservatives are the Republican group which stayed home on Election Day, making McCain’s popular vote count several million short of Bush’s count in 2004. This may or may not be true. According to exit polls, conservatives gave 5% more of their votes to Obama than they did to John Kerry, and although they comprised the same percentage of the electorate, there were a great deal fewer of them this year - approximately 19,600,000 in 2008, vs. 21,100,000 in 2004.

So according to these numbers, there were 1.5 million fewer self-described conservatives voting in 2008 than in 2004. Obama won the popular vote by nearly 10 million votes. I don't have time to crunch the numbers, but I think it's unlikely that those 1.5 million missing conservatives (assuming they did in fact stay home, rather than just describing themselves differently) were concentrated in important swing states that went for Obama; also, I hardly think it makes sense to wish for another result like the 2000 election. 

In other news, the PUMA reaction to the Jon Favreau situation is much as we expected.

PUMA attitudes towards sexism are fascinating.  They seem to believe, on the one hand, that sexism is the most severe oppression there is, bar none; as the incomparable jenniforhillary put it, "vagina trumps color."  (And what an interesting bridge game THAT would be.) 

On the other hand, they seem naive about how darn common it is; they seem to operate on the assumption that Barack Obama somehow invented it, that it isn't common in the general population, that everybody who behaves in a sexist way is in fact sexist all the time (Jon Favreau writes misogynist speeches, wears misogynist underpants, scrambles eggs in a misogynist way, etc.), and that while political candidates' speeches and photos should be scrutinized for sexist content, policy itself cannot be sexist and shouldn't be counted. 

(Then there's the double standard issue: PUMAs will happily vote for John "Marvellous Ape" McCain and hang out with myexwifeisawitchwhoshoulddie, but if Obama has sexist men on his staff, well, that's different, isn't it?  PUMAs can accommodate people who wring their hands about the "exclusion" of right-wing Catholic feminists and people who sneer at Joe Biden for being a Catholic; they can trash the extravagance of Michelle Obama while respecting the immensely more extravagant Cindy McCain; they can worry about what Obama would mean for women's reproductive rights, then turn around and vote for a man who explicitly opposes Roe v. Wade.)

All of this is not meant to defend Jon Favreau, who has demonstrated not only a grossly sexist streak but a disturbing lack of judgment, but simply to say that I sincerely doubt John McCain had no comparable sexists on his staff (even discounting McCain's own sexist remarks).  And given the choice between a candidate who calls me "sweetie" and a candidate who put air-quotes around my health, I'd still go with the former.

ETA: Check out Belle's post on the "magnificent clusterfuck of fail" going on at PUMAPAC; did you know the personal is not political? 

I've been mulling about this since Amanda Marcotte's post about Palin's wardrobe expenditures, specifically this part:

I have no idea how [the news of the $150,000 spent on clothes] will be received, because I don’t think most people understand the value of money once you’re talking huge sums, and so maybe the news won’t hit home. But really, that’s a lot of money to spend on clothes. Probably not to the McCain family, but I’ll bet it is to Sarah Palin.

For most people, therefore, it’s going to be annoying to repulsive. But to the rabid Palin fan base that’s emerged, it’s probably just going to be further evidence that they’re living the dream through her. Getting $150,000 to spend at Saks and Neiman Marcus on clothes is like going on “What Not To Wear” and getting a whole new wardrobe, except you get 30 times as much money and you don’t have people make fun of the clothes you picked for yourself to your face. You do have to go on “Saturday Night Live” and called a good sport. The entire appeal of that show is the fantasy that it could be you. Imagine what people who project themselves onto Palin are thinking.

Now think about the comments here:
( Read more... )

I intend to write about other aspects of this wish-fulfillment/identification phenomenon later, particularly the treatment of Palin's motherhood.