I wonder if Michelle Malkin is willing to put her children where her mouth is.
Malkin, the always disagreeable right-wing commentator, came down on actress Sally Field's speech during Emmy broadcast Sunday night. Mrs. Field said this: "If mothers ruled the, ruled the world, there would be no god-damned wars in the first place."
Mrs. Malkin's response was to claim that mothers can be categorized as either sheep or lions.
There are sheep moms. There are lion moms. We know which kind Sally Field is.
In the Gidget Guide to Parenting, mothers are appeasers and hand-holders. Our maternal instincts supposedly lead us to shun fights and coddle bullies instead of disciplining them.
There would be "no god-damned wars," Silly Sally, because we'd all be conquered chattel if Field Diplomacy "ruled the world."
A few words about the wild kingdom maybe in order here. My understanding of sheep psychology comes from a month spent on a Wyoming ranch more than three decades ago. The four-legged wool-bearers were easily led astray and tended to clump together in a group. When the flock wandered off for a few days, the ranch's owners were not overly alarmed. They knew the sheep would eventually wander back home.
My exposure to these critters also taught me that they are quite capable of mounting an olfactory assault. To put it bluntly, they stink.
So here we have a group of animals that has a herd mentality and is easily led. Sounds like George W. Bush's constituency to me. I'll leave it for my readers to make judgments about odors on a case-by-case basis.
Now let's consider the mother lion. She is willing to defend her young, even at the cost of her own life. She is willing to kill other creatures so that her children do not starve. She trains her offspring in the art of hunting so that they can one day fend for themselves in the wild.
What the mother lion does not do is launch unprovoked attacks on other creatures for no discernable reason or for an ever-changing list of goals that never seem to be achieved.
The mother who stands up to protect her offspring from having to fight in an unpopular, and some say militarily unwinnable war, sounds more like the actions of a lion than a sheep to me.
Mrs. Malkin's column, as always, omits a few critical pieces of information. She neglects to mention that Mrs. Field's speech was curtailed during Fox's coverage of the Emmys. Apparently, free speech is only the freedom to parrot conservative views on any topic. Thus we have Republicans outraged by an ad from MoveOn.org.
Meanwhile, GOP Senator Mitch McConnell has notoriously conflated money and free speech. Money is not the same as speech. It merely buys access to people who make decisions.
Mrs. Malkin's column quotes one mom who was part of the Gathering of Eagles counter-demonstration in Washington DC last weekend.
"You can't 'take' someone's life who gives it . . . and Mark willingly gave his life. . . . God redeployed Mark to heaven."
Now what Mrs. Malkin neglects to point out that the President's war in Iraq has successfully redeployed almost 3800 troops to the pearly gates. That's just about the same number as the number of troops who will be returning from the Iraqi civil war as part of a post-surge draw down.
Lastly, Mrs. Malkin somehow manages to equate good parenting with sending children into harm's way. One can only assume that the children she raised had days that were filled with playing with matches and running with scissors.
If sending children off to war is the mark of a good mother, then mothers of the President, the Vice-President and many other administration members must be failures indeed.
Are Mrs. Malkin's children old enough to serve in uniform? If they reach the age when they can serve, will they?
I tend to believe that Mrs. Malkin's children, like the current Vice-President, will somehow find a better way to occupy their time.