Say Goodnight, Fiorina

How appropriate that in a campaign built on lies, a person can get shitcanned for telling the truth:

Asked by a St. Louis radio station whether she thought Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin could run a company like Hewlett-Packard, Fiorina responded: "No, I don't."

The McCain folks are pissed.

"Carly will now disappear," this source said. "Senator McCain was furious." Asked to define "disappear," this source said, adding that she would be off TV for a while ...

Fiorina was booked for several TV interviews over the next few days, including one on CNN. Those interviews have been canceled.

No $50 million golden parachute on this ride down, I guess. But who will cry sexism on Palin's behalf now?

What's so frustrating is OF COURSE none of these political contenders could run a major corporation. That's not what they've trained to do. Even George W., who *had* an MBA, couldn't helm Hewlett-Packard. But putting Sarah "Bush in a Skirt" Palin in office would be worse than average, an awful lot like putting Norville Barnes in charge of Hudsucker Industries. Except that Norville Barnes was authentically a nice guy, not someone who fired her enemies and appointed old high school friends with no experience to run million dollar agencies.

Sarah Palin is officially Not Fun Anymore, even if she does have an action figure.

Olympic Madness

This is like the movie version of My Fair Lady, with the studio casting Audrey Hepburn instead of Julie Andrews and then using Marni Nixon's voice: the little girl who sang in the opening ceremonies was the face China was looking for, but the voice was provided by a less adorable seven-year-old. God, how depressing. We'll never get over our perfection-obsession, will we?

(Because I can't resist the Biblical reference, I have to admit this quote also sprang to mind: "The voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau.")

Predictably, people are pissed:

The outrage was especially heated over the cold calculation used to appraise the girls. “Please save the last bit of trueness in our children,” wrote one person with an online name of Weirderhua. “They think Yang Peiyi’s smile is not cute enough? What we need is truth, not some fake loveliness! I hope the kids will not be hurt. This is not their fault.”

Another person added: “Children are innocent. Don’t contaminate their minds!”

Though I'll happily debate the "children are innocent" canard, otherwise I agree. It's this kind of stage management that makes people either strive for the unattainable or become cynical about everything. Like the New Yorker article about photoshopping, which made it clear you can never fully trust what you see. Do you think there would be so much conspiracy theorizing -- about the moon landing, 9/11, and Britain's 7/7 -- otherwise?

The idea that a child needs to not only have the best voice but the best look is American Idol-type nonsense. So is the idea that no female Olympian is complete, not even with a gold medal, if we don't know that she also has a husband and a baby in the wings, as a Johnson & Johnson ad last night made clear, or is about to start a family, as the media and announcers during the women's beach volleyball competition kept stressing. Already they have to compete in bikinis, so that we can objectify them even as we admire them.

Seriously, isn't it enough that these athletes do unreal things with their minds and bodies to perform for us on an international stage? Do we really need them to shrink back to human size once the cameras are off?

Lifestyle Justified!

Studies in newspapers exist to confirm what we already know. All the same, sometimes it's nice to get that little refresher, like someone handing you a towel when you've just stumbled into a puddle of doubt. Two studies recently have functioned in this cheerful way: first, this one showing there is no difference anymore between the math scores of boys and girls. And second, this one, letting us know that living together before marriage decreases the likelihood of divorce!

None of this would have happened had Betty Friedan not thrown down her apron.

The researchers found no difference in the scores of boys versus girls — not even in high school. Studies 20 years ago showed girls and boys did equally well on math in elementary school, but girls fell behind in high school. "Girls have now achieved gender parity in performance on standardized math tests," Hyde said.

And as for the "living in sin" business:

The odds of divorce among women who married their only cohabiting partner were 28% lower than among women who never cohabited before marriage, according to sociologist Daniel Lichter of Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.

For people who believe in sin cohabitation can still feel wrong, of course. But I like that it has been proven to have the social utility I instinctively believed it had. What pleasant news to come along right before my very first wedding anniversary.

reader: marry him

It is make or break day for Hillary Clinton! Even Bill says she needs to win both Texas and Ohio to stay in the race; carrying Rhode Island (little ol' Rhode Island) won't be enough. New Hampshire seems so long ago now, and though I distinctly remember how much I wanted her to win under those circumstances, I have fallen out of touch with my intense sympathy for her. At this point I would like her to bow out gracefully. If only such a thing were possible. However, I am also glad that retains certain supporters -- Tina Fey, for one -- because I don't think, for example, that she's been such an utter embarrassment, such a miserable mistake, that she alone has set women back fifty years.

That article, by the way, turned me into a cartoon: my jaw dropped and my eyes bugged out as ten alarm clocks jangled loudly in the background. In that, I wasn't alone. As of right now "How Dumb Can We Get?" has generated over a thousand comments on the Post website. Its author, Charlotte Allen, exemplifies what I don't trust about women who don't have female friends, women who, like Maureen Dowd and Ann Coulter, are disdainful of "women" as a whole and get to think of themselves as "brilliant outliers." Isn't that convenient for them? And mustn't their mothers be proud?

As long as I have my Outraged Feminist hat on (and I'm hoping my hair looks okay when I take it off), I may as well mention an Atlantic Monthly article Marry Him. This has been around long enough for the controversy to simmer, boil over, and then fade to quiet, occasional snufflings of anger already but it's worth checking out if you haven't subjected yourself to its mind-boggling leaps of logic. In short, Lori Gottleib argues that because she, as a 40-something, never found the perfect man and had to proceed to the Plan B of single motherhood, anyone who is still single should settle, and ideally they should do so while they are hot (read: young) enough to command a high price on the open market.

Gottleib's use of the word "settling" is what makes her argument hard to take seriously, but I don't think her overall point -- that some women are led by our Disney-fied American culture to have unrealistic expectations of perfect romantic love with a perfect tall, rich, handsome man that will last forever -- is entirely wrong. I do think everyone learns at some point to adjust expectations to reality. When I was 16, I wanted either Rhett Butler or Noel Airman to rescue me from the doldrums of teenage virginity, depending on the day. Did I hold out for that? Clearly not. And I am extremely happy that I didn't. But if someone had described my going out with a guy who was not dapper, older, cruelly brilliant and forceful as settling, I would have bought a really mean incontinent dog just so the dog could piss all over the idiot's new shoes.

Gottleib gets on the Assumption Train and waves at us as it drives her straight into Crazytown. All women want children, she declares; all women must want what her, Gottleib's, friends want; and being married to a man you don't love is better than being alone, as long as you have a family. It's perplexing that she didn't consider why, if she's right and no married woman would trade places with a single one, the divorce rate is so high in this country. The truth is that people aren't willing, as a general rule, to be unhappy anymore. Women who aren't crazy about a man know that they're not going to be a happy chained to him for eternity, and why should they pretend otherwise? They'll just end up leaving those lackluster husbands for the handsome fiftysomething divorcees they meet and have a smoldering affair with at age 47.

Also, who says that these men want to marry women who are settling? Has anyone asked them? I thought American men these days, in the popular imagination, were the world's happiest bachelors.

Don't you think these ladies should have a picnic? Coulter can bring the salad, Gottleib the alcohol, and Allen the tart of self-hatred, and they can help themselves while gossiping about how they alone have it all figured out. Woody Allen can drop by about midway through the meal so that they can make eyes at him; then he'll catch a glimpse of Scarlet Johannson and go scurrying after her. They will murmur and nod and call this only natural.