Phenomenal Women

What happened to Nancy?  Nancy Pelosi, that is.  Yes, that’s right, the Nancy Pelosi who is now the Speaker of the House of Representatives.  For the last ten years, Nancy has been a special target of the far-right. The conservative attacks on her, seemed, just a few months ago, to be a major Republican strategy.  That national GOP strategy, so evident, was to use her as a villain in campaign ads.  Democratic candidates were forced to answer the question about whether they would support Nancy as speaker if their party won the majority—why?  Because Nancy was labeled the enemy as seen in this Trump statement, “The Democrats and the dishonest media are losing their minds because they lost the election.  They’re owned by Nancy Pelosi and crazy Maxine Waters and they’ll undo everything, turn our country around.  They’ll raise your taxes, take your guns, continue their witch hunt, and open the border to drugs and crime.  We must elect Republicans to stop their un-American agenda.”

Why this animosity toward Nancy (and Maxine Waters) and women in general?  The answer from the right-wing will be that it isn’t really Nancy they are ridiculing, or women—it is the liberal policies these women represent.  Sure it is!  Sorry, I don’t buy that.  That’s like saying voter-suppression tactics are about the integrity of the ballot.  It is the same as saying that “imposing draconian regulations on abortion clinics are really about protecting women’s health, and when Trump attacks football players and LeBron James and Maxine Waters, it has nothing to do with race.”  

The attacks on Pelosi (and women in general) is that ugly misogyny, that same “venomous loathing” that seems to come out of the far-right whenever and wherever a woman begins to wield any kind of power, or displays ambition, or whose policy ideas have merit.  Nancy has been forgotten for the moment now that new targets have come to the fore (the Freshman Trio):  Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC).  

Questions: Does saying something negative about Iran constitute anti-Muslim sentiments?  Does saying something negative about Israel become anti-Semitic?  Was House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) Twitter post last year targeting and labeling billionaire George Soros anti-Semitic?   Is the obsession of the right-wing with Ocasio-Cortez really about her “Green New Deal” or is it about her being a woman?  Is the current diatribe about Omar and Tlaib about anti-Semitism, or is it xenophobia of another kind? Or is the right-wing obsession with the Freshman Trio because they are bright and unafraid young women, who take Dr. Seuss seriously.

“You have brains in your head.

You have feet in your shoes.

You can steer yourself

Any direction you choose.

You’re on your own.  And you know what you know.

And YOU are the WOMEN who’ll decide where (we) go.”