Snide celebrations.

AuthorDouglas, Susan
PositionNetwork TV political talk shows and women's rights - Pundit Watch - Column

The last weekend in August marked the seventy-fifth anniversary of the ratification of women's suffrage, and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Women's Strike for Equality, a huge nationwide demonstration by feminists that announced the arrival of the women's liberation movement. Television news made fleeting reference to the suffrage anniversary, and our newspaper of record, The New York Times, ignored it entirely. No one even mentioned the strike, which back in 1970 was the largest feminist demonstration in history, and thus was a front-page story and dominated the nightly news. (Well, hell, who wants to look at old footage of all those angry, karate-chopping, humorless, castrating Amazons anyway? It might suggest that anniversaries involving women are just as important as those involving men.

The pundits chose a variety of touching tributes to commemorate these feminist milestones. Evans and Novak, on CNN (with Fred Barnes sitting in for Rowland Evans), gave a half-hour of deeply respectful air time to Bob Packwood--a.k.a. "The Tongue"--and didn't treat him like the pathetic, obnoxious, justice-obstructing boor he clearly is. Packwood pooh-poohed those trivial charges of sexual harassment as twenty-year-old news and then jovially recounted a story about how another Senator came up to him during the Senate Ethics Committee hearings and said, "Boy, I'm glad that's not me. If that was me, we'd have to hold hearings in RFK Stadium." Har, har, har: big, goofy, boys-will-be-boys chuckles from Barnes and Novak, whose laughter endorsed the notion that forcibly french-kissing your seventeen-year-old intern, not to mention twenty-some-odd other women, is simply a Senatorial perk, nothing the skirts should get so riled up about. Novak, in his closing encomium to Packwood, hailed him as "a fighter."

The commemorations didn't stop here. Over on This Week With David Brinkley, the lead question was, "Is Hillary Clinton's decision to go to China the right one?" Oh boy, more Hillary bashing. Guest pundit William Kristol announced that "there's no national interest in Hillary Clinton going to China" for the international women's conference because "it's not an important conference." Yeah, well, anything that might draw attention to the millions of women around the world who live in abject poverty, suffer genital mutilation, the unnecessarily in childbirth, or are battered by male relatives is probably inconsequential. And the estimated 50,000 women in...

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