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The ‘Obama is a Muslim’ Tripe Was Bad Enough, But This?

I receive many daffy emails from my conservative acquaintances, usually on the order of chest-thumping twaddle like “A Simple History Lesson” involving conservative cavemen who productively hunt and fish while Milquetoast liberals serve the beer, set the table and polish the silverware. That none of this is the least bit historical or even humorous doesn’t deter the modern office-bound neoconservative — typically a wimpy chickenhawk who these days hunts for bargains at the gas pump and fishes for compliments from women 20 years his junior — from forwarding it all around with the challenge to send it to a liberal and giggle as he gets angry. Neocons follow a tired script; as they sink deeper in their self-created quicksand they scream louder that it doesn’t exist to make themselves feel better. From their perspective, it’s better than admitting you’ve been dead wrong and taken in by cynical con artists like Karl Rove, I suppose.

The latest batch of anti-Obama email is mostly of the ‘Scary Rev. Wright Hates Whites’ variety, even though Obama severed ties to Wright months ago. (Ah, who lets facts get in the way of an unfunny cartoon, right?) One that stood out was a drawing of Obama, Wright and Louis Farrakhan singing in unison about the ‘change you can believe in’ and another was more blatant, with Wright shouting “God damn America and kill whitey!” with Obama nodding assent from an aisle seat while wearing a bag on his head. “I’m not here,” reads the balloon emanating from the Obama character.

But this fetid crapola is nothing compared to the one I received yesterday from the wife of a friend of mine, a nice, white, middle-aged, suburban-bred women, with a tendency to moderate conservatism.

The email, titled “Why Women Should Vote,” subtitled “A Message for All Women,” starts with a brief history of the women’s Suffrage movement and then focuses on a November 15, 1917 event wherein women were jailed and beaten for marching on the White House demanding the right to vote, most of the information gleaned from the laudable HBO film “Iron Jawed Angels.”

After informing modern women of all their ancestors went though to give them the right to vote 88 years ago, the email implores them to make sure and use that right this year. It closes with this paragraph:

“We need to get out and vote and use this right that was fought so hard for by these very courageous women. Whether you vote democratic, republican or independent party — remember to vote.”

But the kicker, stuck in at the end, is:

“History is being made.”

When I read it, the obvious conclusion that came to mind is that the reader should vote for the ‘historic’ candidacy of Sarah Palin, regardless of the supposedly non-partisan nature of the email’s contents.

That the Suffragettes advocated policies that the regressive Palin is against – such as equal pay and equal rights for women – almost goes without saying; that Palin herself, should she have been alive in 1917, would have been condemning the women’s Suffrage movement is also obvious – she’s a traditional conservative woman, and that was the stance of traditional conservative women of that era.

For the Republicans, in their desperation to apply liberal cosmetics to the anti-women’s rights Palin-McCain ticket, to circulate this sinister and deceptive email is insidious even for them and a sign of how badly they are doing this year.

But to use the progressive Suffragettes, and their modern counterparts that the Republicans continue to vilify, to sell Palin to women in this shifty way, especially younger women who don’t remember the Women’s Movement of the ’60s and ’70s, is so far across the line that it’s moved into another dimension of sleaze.

If a friend of yours gets this email, remind them that women didn’t get the right to vote, nor any other hard-fought right, from diehard conservatives like John McCain — who has consistently voted against women’s rights in the Senate — nor thanks to female quislings like Sarah Palin — those rights were secured by progressive liberals willing to put their money, reputation and life on the line.

The Suffragettes weren’t jailed and beaten so that women could vote for slickly-marketed neocons who would chain them to the kitchen again if they could, subordinate vassals to conservative cavemen, sentenced to a life of involuntary servitude.

If anything, their movement was about freedom – the kind of freedom the current version of the GOP has been steadily eroding for all Americans.

Tell your friends who receive this devious email: If they fall for it this year, they may never have a chance to get back up. That means there will be no Suffragettes in the future; they’ll be confined to distant ‘Free Speech Zones’ or rotting in prison as ‘terrorist suspects’ without the right to a fair and open trial, out of sight and out of mind, while the America outlined in the Constitution is finally out of luck.