AddieStan

cross-posted from The Huffington Post The ascent of Sarah Palin to the national political stage has yielded no shortage of material for legitimate criticism -- even legitimate derision. There's her famous lack of intellectual curiosity, her tortured syntax, and her alliance with a group of Alaskan secessionists , to name just a few. But whenever Sarah Palin makes news, as she did big-time with her decision last weekend to resign her office as governor of Alaska, more than legitimate criticism hits the airwaves and the Web. Seeping through the Web's meshes and wafting through the airwaves is the acrid stench of sexism. I'm hardly the first to notice this trend. At Jezebel, Megan Carpentier has been on the case since the presidential campaign, when Palin burst on the scene as John McCain's wild-card pick for his vice-presidential running-mate. So, too, has Melissa McEwan at Shakesville . But this latest burst of fresh hell leads me to take another approach: I...

Melissa Silverstein of the Women's Media Center offers this take (quoting your blogstress's fabulous former colleague, Mary Kay Blakely) on the new media war between right-wingers and the feminist bloggers who were hired by the John Edwards campaign, only to relinquish those appointments after the noxious Bill Donohue -- a first-rate mysogynist and anti-Semite -- made great hay out of the posts of Pandagon 's Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan of Shakespeare’s Sister : As the drama unfolded, others enthusiastically joined the attack, and disturbing sexualized comments flooded into the women’s blogs. "Problem with women like you, you just need a good fucking from a real man," read one posting. Another was, "It’s just too bad your mother didn’t abort you. You are nothing more than a filthy mouth slut. I bet a couple of years in Iraq being raped and beaten daily would help you appreciate America a little." Sexualized threats against women, and especi...

Your blogstress is most distressed; she no longer rates as an A-list Catholic-basher now that the media's favorite anti-Semite, William A. Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, has discovered John Edwards ' recent hires, bloggers Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon , and Melissa McEwan of Shakespeare's Sister . From the AP via the Washington Post : "John Edwards is a decent man who has had his campaign tarnished by two anti-Catholic, vulgar, trash-talking bigots," Donohue wrote in a statement. "He has no choice but to fire them immediately." You'll recall, mes amis , that your blogstress was once the fetching serpent-borne apple of Donohue's ire when she dared to suggest that the Bush administration made a smart move when the president nominated the very Catholic John Roberts to head the Supreme Court, which would allow them to lob the false charge of "anti-Catholicism" every time Roberts was challenged about his ...