Call it a storm in a cradle. Call it partisan politics at its spinning worst. Or just plain call it idiotic.
Here's what happened: at a Senate hearing last week on President George W Bush's plan to send more troops to Iraq, Senator Barbara Boxer (California Democrat) (inset) asked Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice: "Who pays the price? I'm not going to pay a personal price. My kids are too old and my grandchild is too young. You're not going to pay a particular price, as I understand it, with immediate family. So who pays the price? The American military and their families."
Cue chaos. Tony Snow, the White House spokesman, went into overdrive, accusing Boxer of denigrating Rice's unmarried status.
On cue, the right wing echo chamber led by Fox News picked up the gauntlet, argued that Boxer had set the cause of feminism back by a few centuries, immediately and abjectly apologise.
Radio host Rush Limbaugh -- who, except when trying to explain how and why he got his illegal Latino housemaid to go out and buy drugs for him, is none too picky about his words -- went into ecstasies of indignation: "Here you have a rich white chick with a huge, big mouth, trying to lynch this, an African-American woman, right before Martin Luther King Day, hitting below the ovaries here."
The left wing, as per usual, picked up its shield of words and rushed to the defense. Futilely, also as per usual, because the more the left defended, the more the right's allegations got play.
The blogosphere added its bit, taking sides, and filling message boards with pro- and con- name-calling.
Rice, at the center of the storm, milked it for all it was worth. At a press conference, when the topic came up, she cut loose with an Oscar-bait sight, and said, "I think that being a single woman does not in any way make me incapable of understanding not just those sacrifices [of bereaved families] but also that nothing of value is ever won without sacrifice."
Boxer, punching air, tried to `explain' her comment: "I spoke the truth at the committee hearing, which is that neither Secretary Rice nor I have family members that will pay the price for this escalation."
It is a sign of the times, that the great issues of the day -- and what greater, than the question of how to bring the war in Iraq to an early conclusion? -- are not debated, so much as exploited, like a circus sideshow.
Just to underline the illogic, here: what if it was President George W Bush appearing before the Senate? And what if Senator Boxer had said the exact same thing: "I'm not going to pay a personal price. My kids are too old and my grandchild is too young. You're not going to pay a particular price, as I understand it, with immediate family."
Would that comment have been interpreted, then, to mean that Boxer was taunting Bush and First Lady Laura for having produced only girl children?
Photograph: Karen Bleier/AFP/Getty Images
