Obama Disses Women

I tried very hard to let this manifestation of radical feminist nonsense die a natural death. But the story is just too funny, too ludicrous, and too screwed-up for me to resist the chance to take a couple of jabs at this latest manifestation of political correctness and the ongoing war of the sexes.

Barack Obama is the most metrosexual president since, well, ever. In order to prove he is in touch with his feminine side, he even throws out game-opening baseball pitches in his Calvin Klein jeans. He is to masculinity what Andrew Jackson was to femininity. Which is to say, the exact opposite. He is photographed wearing his speedos for the cover of Time (or Men's Health, or the Gay Advocate, I'm not sure which). But he does seem to have a certain affinity for basketball, and that has brought him the condemnation of two major forces of reasonableness--Maureen Dowd of the New York Times (an obscure publication forced on local New York City residents) and the National Organization for Women (an organization devoted to fish riding bicycles).

And what has caused this ire? Simple. He plays basketball only with his male friends and invitees. How rude. And what's worse, he hosted a "high-level basketball game with no female players." It was indicative of the unease felt by some unnamed women on the White House staff who feel uncomfortable around all those, ick, men. The big game was just the frosting on the cake for these unhappy women. They're uncomfortable because Obama always has too many men and too few women surrounding him.

One of the ladies told Dowd: "Without wanting to sound publicly critical of the president, still the 'sports-fan thing at the White House' could become annoying and that her relative indifference to athletics could be mildly alienating." Dowd further editorializes: "Sports bonding can afford a point of entree with the boss." An entree that this particular lady feels will be denied to her.

Anybody, male or female, born after about 1965 simply accepts that men and women are equal under the law. Only radical feminists and those looking for sexual harassment suits think that men and women are the same. What, precisely do the gals on the White House staff expect of Obama? Should he give up his love of basketball? Take up knitting to be more inclusive? Invite the ladies to join him on the court to shoot a few hoops?

Marriage and gender-relations expert Dowd opines: "Men have always craved private realms--the golf club, men's club, workshop, shed; a place to get away from the chatter and clatter of women and kids." For a woman who has never been married and can't seem to hold onto a man (she's complained about it many times in her columns), she certainly seemed to sum up my feelings about the matter very well. Having discovered a truism which destroyed her original thesis, and realizing that it means that male bonding doesn't equate to woman-demeaning, she wandered off the reservation and started making up stories about W. telling off-color jokes in the White House. Not only is there no proof of that whatsoever, but it doesn't have a damned thing to do with the thesis that men must give attention to women that is both equal and the same.

Finally, in a fit of honesty, Dowd at last admits that she couldn't care less about the overly-sensitive female White House staffers. What really irks her is that her colleague Tom Friedman was invited to play golf with the president in September. And all she wants is an equal chance to play Scrabble with the president. "Since the president is finally willing to let women in on the games, I offered up my own challenge, Scrabble." Then she proceeded to relate some gender jokes about words that start with X and Y to prove she could successfully challenge "the smarty-pants Y chief executive." Hell hath no fury, etc.

Meanwhile, back at the nest, NOW realizes that the battles of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin proved nothing about the continuously-improving status of women. New NOW President Terry O'Neill says "we may all have been fooled." The reports on Obama's basketball male chauvinism appearing on ABC and a bevy of cable news stations triggered O'Neill into calling the the situation "a sign of segregation in the workplace."

Her hysterical screed went on to make this as bad as Jim Crow ever was. "Relationships get built in those more informal settings, and the relationships have a huge impact on the influence an individual has. We know what happens when we segregate whether it is by race or whether it is by gender--you end up with first class citizens and you end up with second class citizens. We need to see the White House leading the way for desegregating the workplaces all over the country and it is troubling."

So I guess that means that all those high-ranking female White House women were reduced to the level of maids and courtesans when they weren't invited to play basketball with the president. But wait, there's more. "It's extremely important now especially for the president to have as many women as men in his closest circle of advisors. If women had been at the heads of the companies on Wall Street instead fo these masters of the universe then we might not be in the predicament that we're in today."

Now there's a leap. For an organization that purports to believe in gender equality, it seems their president doesn't want equality (it's a ruse to get to the real thing--superiority). She jumps from non-basketball playing exclusion of women to women being the salvation of American economics without so much as a logical segue.

I don't have a solution to this intractable problem of men behaving like men to the exclusion of women behaving like men. Perhaps we should see what Don Imus has to say about the whole thing. Meanwhile, the Obama administration is leaking credibility on all fronts like a sieve. His policies are failing, his poll numbers are plummeting, and the world is a more dangerous place today than it was before he became president. Even I will give him credit for not noticing he was excluding women from the important state issue of basketball.