The GOP’s woman problem is that it has a serious problem with women

From New York Magazine, new Frank Rich:

At the very top of the Washington GOP Establishment, however, there was a dawning recognition that a grave danger had arisen—not to women, but to their own brand. A month of noisy Republican intrusion into women’s health and sex organs, amplified by the megaphone of Limbaugh’s aria, was a potentially apocalyptic combination for an election year. No one expressed this fear more nakedly than Peggy Noonan, speaking, again with Stephanopoulos, on ABC’s This Week. After duly calling out Rush for being “crude, rude, even piggish,” she added: “But what he said was also destructive. It confused the issue. It played into this trope that the Republicans have a war on women. No, they don’t, but he made it look that way.”

Note that she found Limbaugh “destructive” not because he was harming women but because he was harming her party. But the problem wasn’t that Limbaugh confused the issue. His real transgression was that he had given away the GOP game, crystallizing an issue that had been in full view for weeks. That’s why his behavior resonated with and angered so many Americans who otherwise might have tuned out his rant as just another sloppy helping of his aging shtick. It’s precisely because there is a Republican war on women that he hit a nerve. And surely no one knows that better than Noonan, a foot soldier in some of the war’s early battles well before Rush became a phenomenon. In her 1990 memoir about her service in the Reagan administration, What I Saw at the Revolution, she recalls likening Americans who favored legal abortions to Germans who favored killing Jews—a construct Limbaugh wouldn’t seize on and popularize (“feminazis”) until Reagan was leaving office and Anita Hill and Hillary Clinton emerged on the national stage.

More here.
I've loved Frank Rich for some years now. He tends to write about political issues in the way I like to think about them, as more than simply bits and pieces of policy or rhetoric, but also illuminating how the flashpoints relate to and are embedded in the overall culture, from religion, to entertainment media, to the arts, to regional customs and beliefs, and on and on. Rich sees the direct connection between, say, the death of Michael Jackson or the antics of The Jersey Shore and the narcissism that brought down Wall Street. And he's solid, packed with good shit, always, especially now that he's writing the less frequent but longer pieces for New York Magazine since he left the New York Times some months ago. Of course, that last statement is something of a problem for me as a blogger: Rich is so solid as an essayist, I usually have nothing to add or ponder for my blog. He just takes an idea and exhausts it. So I don't usually post his work here at Real Art.

From time to time, however, he writes something that, even though I have nothing to add, is so compelling that I think I ought to do my part to transmit it into the overall body of knowledge. And this piece on the GOP's latest flareup in their apparently ongoing war on women is one of those pieces. There's been a great deal of coverage of this issue over the last year or so, coming at times on an almost daily basis, so it's very nice that Rich sort of steps back and takes stock of the whole thing, tying it together, revisiting Republican history, and contextualizing it all against the Republican presidential primary context. That is, it's not simply that the Republicans suddenly seem to be falling all over themselves in order to show their base how much they want to control and humiliate women: rather, it's that these kinds of positions and rhetoric have been floating around the GOP universe in various forms for some four decades now, but are only now all coming down at once, the perfect misogynistic storm.

Go check it out. Good stuff.

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