John McCain plays gender card
September 2, 2008

Critics of Sarah Palin have had no shortage of ammunition to level against her ever since John McCain announced last week that she would be his runningmate.

Indeed, Palin has made it very easy. She abused her power as a governor by pushing to get her ex-brother in law fired from his job as an Alaska state trooper. When the commissioner responsible for firing the trooper refused, Palin had him fired. When she was mayor of Wasilla, she fired the police chief for being at odds with her campaign contributors. Palin has said that the Iraq War is for God. She is so anti-choice that she has said she would oppose her own daughter getting an abortion if she were raped. She has admitted to not knowing what the vice president does. She is a shill for big oil—so much so that she is suing the federal government for classifying polar bears as an endangered species, because the ruling would hurt oil interests in Alaska. She has lied about her support for the famous “Bridge to Nowhere” pork project. She thinks intelligent design should be taught in science classrooms, and thinks that America’s founding fathers were the ones to put “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance.

Wow. She’s awful.

So what is the McCain campaign’s response to all this? The gender card.

That’s right. They don’t respond to any of these charges, but instead accuse their critics of being sexists.

I can’t help but think about when the shoe was on the other foot, just a few weeks ago. Obama was speaking about how the McCain campaign was likely to point out that he didn’t look like the other presidents on the dollar bills.

McCain immediately accused Obama of playing the race card, even though he had put out an ad weeks earlier mocking the idea of Obama on the one hundred dollar bill.

Now McCain is doing the exact thing he accused Obama of doing (even though Obama didn’t). But he’s doing it in a much more dishonest way. McCain knows it’s dishonest to respond to corruption charges by playing the gender card, but he does it with a smile on his face.

So let me be the first to say: McCain is playing the gender card.

It’s the only card he has at this point.