How Newsweek got the normally photogenic Michele Bachmann to look so stunned for its recent cover photo is a mystery. Maybe they played the video of Barack Obama claiming to have campaigned in all 57 states with one more to go.
That comment raised eyebrows for a number of us.
However they got the stunned look, all that remained was to add "The Queen of Rage" under the photo, and the message was clear: People who think that we cannot borrow and spend our way out of a debt crisis not only have funny beliefs, they look funny to boot.
Other conservative candidates seem to strike fear in the hearts of the left and in establishment Republican circles – Ron Paul this year and Patrick Buchanan in 1992 and 1996. But, as WND's Joseph Farah pointed out in two recent columns, the left's long knives this year seem especially reserved for Bachmann. From the disclosure – alert the media – that she gets headaches to the fact that she seems to take the Bible seriously on the subject of marriage, nothing about this lady is too mundane to be used in an attack against her.
Granted, the left attacks anyone who supports the Constitution, but they seem especially incensed when the patriot is a woman.
When they thought the answering machine was turned off after leaving a message for a union official, Jerry Brown and staffers tossed around the word "whore" as a description for opponent Meg Whitman. About the only thing John McCain did to rally the conservative base of his party in 2008 was to pick Sarah Palin as a running mate, and the left pursued like baying hounds everything from the cost of her wardrobe to questions of who actually was the mother of her youngest child.
Not the father of Palin's child, mind you, but the mother.
Contrast the media's treatment of Bachmann and Palin with their response when Nancy Pelosi informed a news conference that, "Every month that we do not have an economic recovery package, 500 million Americans lose their jobs."
If Sarah Palin had made such a colossal blunder, media teams would have descended upon her high school algebra teacher for a pithy quote about Palin's math ability. When Palin mentioned that her state of Alaska borders Russia – which, as every homeschooled child in America knows, it does – the line became the subject of comedy sketches.
But ranting about sexism while behaving like Archie Bunker seems at first glance to fit easily within the broader pattern of liberal double standards. After all, the Obamas and Clintons got rich in politics, yet they have no problem demonizing those who have done well in the private sector. Al Gore bloviates about greenhouse gasses, even as he flies around in a private jet belching greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.
But those double standards, like so many others on the left, seem to lack real conviction. Leftist attacks come across more as tactics out of "Rules for Radicals" than heartfelt conviction.
Liberals preach tolerance and diversity, and then they try to censor talk radio or campus speech they don't like as "hate speech," but it all comes across more like political theater than passionate conviction. We see the lofty rhetoric about "tolerance" and "hate speech" as mere showmanship, not strongly held values. So the left's attempt to silence any opposition may be offensive in its own right, but we don't necessarily experience it as hypocritical. But let a conservative woman speak up and the professed guardians of women's rights unleash a Katie-bar-the-door hatestorm that seems almost desperate in its emotional intensity.
Like a schoolboy throwing rocks at a girl he loudly professes to hate, however, the sheer intensity of the left's emotional storm may tell a very different story than the one coming out of their mouths. As children, we learn that the exaggerated toughness of the playground bully seems to mask a deeper insecurity, and maybe that insight is relevant here. The bully seems desperate to convince everyone of his toughness, and it is that very desperation that betrays the bully's deeper insecurity.
When people behave in ways that seem wildly out of proportion to the reality of a situation, we suspect that they are hiding something that would cast them in a bad light if it surfaced. When Shakespeare wrote, "The lady doth protest too much," he captured this idea succinctly.
But it's not the ladies who protest too much these days; it's the liberals who cannot seem to debate conservative women on the issues without descending into political rock-throwing. It was bad enough for the left when male representatives stood strong in the face of pressure to fold during the debt-ceiling debate, but Bachmann seemed to draw disproportionate fire, as have other strong women before her when they took strong stands for constitutional government.
Is it really the strength of their constitutional stand the left finds so threatening about conservative women, or is it possible that liberals are just plain threatened by strong women?
Tim Daughtry is a conservative writer, speaker and political consultant with Concord Bridge Consulting in Greensboro, N.C.