Are Sarah Palin's "Mama Grizzlies" much like REAL grizzlies in the wild, "aggressive, irrational and mean?" Oh I think we know the answer to that question.



Cover courtesy of TPM

 From Newsweek:

Palin first described herself as a mama grizzly during her 2008 vice presidential run. She floated the current usage—as a movement—in a speech before a pro-life women’s group in May, and soon she was reflecting on the special qualities of mama bears on her Facebook page. “Mama bears not only [forage] for themselves to prepare for winter, they [work] twice as hard to slay salmon for their cubs, too.” By late June, Palin’s political-action committee had realized the emotional power of the image, and made an Internet ad—nearly half a million views to date, titled “Mama Grizzlies”—which is as plaintive and urgent as a 1960s protest song. It calls America’s women to a sisterhood of grizzlies “because moms kind of just know when there’s something wrong.”

With few exceptions, the grizzlies have been disinterested in the issues and policies that their political opponents say are good for children—despite new numbers from the census showing that rising numbers of America’s children are poor. Most of these candidates have vowed to fight to repeal President Obama’s health-care plan, for instance, and Bachmann and Haley have taken special aim at CHIP, a federal program aimed at helping low-income kids get health insurance. In 2001, as a member of Nevada’s state Assembly, Angle voted no on a domestic-violence bill that would recognize restraining orders issued in other states. In 2007 Haley, a state representative, voted against a measure that would have created a kindergarten program for at-risk kids. As governor of Alaska in 2008, Palin slashed funding for Covenant House that included resources for teenage mothers. In 2009 Bachmann voted no on a bill that would give federal employees four weeks of paid parental leave.

Palin, Haley, Bachmann, Angle, and O’Donnell all declined to comment for this story. (Most grizzly candidates regard the mainstream press as the enemy.) But a review of their positions suggests that a grizzly’s first priority is to protect her cubs by keeping government the heck out of their lives.

“Government,” in this sense, generally means broad intrusions, such as taxes, the U.S. Department of Education, and federal stimulus money, as well as smaller ones, such as proposals to increase Pell Grants (designed to make college more affordable, opposed by Bachmann). From a grizzly’s point of view, the government is everywhere, and it needs to back off. “We’ve watched the tentacles of big government weasel their way into every part of our lives,” said O’Donnell at a Values Voters speech in Washington, D.C. “Bureaucrats and politicians in Washington think they should decide what kind of lightbulb we use, what kind of toilets we flush, what kind of car we drive…They’ll buy your teenage daughter an abortion, but they won’t let her buy a sugary soda in a school’s vending machine.” O’Donnell, who doesn’t have children, refers in speeches to “our grandchildren,” thus forging a conceptual alliance with her sister bears.

Fundamentally, the mama-grizzly phenomenon is not really a movement or even a political term that represents a fully coherent set of ideas. It’s mostly a marketing tool, meant to draw attention to Americans’ broad dissatisfaction with the way things are. Fair enough. Many people are dissatisfied, and they want to vent and they want to change Washington. But in the wild, real mama grizzlies are known to be aggressive, irrational, and mean. The issues facing the country are complex, and bears are not.

I know that Newsweek is going out of business so perhaps they do no feel they have much to lose, but I am VERY gratified to see them joining Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and a number of courageous blogs  in refusing to allow the Palin media machine to intimidate them into avoiding important stories that might piss a certain ex-half term governor, and her crazy ass followers, off.

My feeling is that the more people who speak out and hold their ground against the backlash from the Palin-bots and Fox News, the more people will then be willing to speak out in the future. 

As my daughter says "She is only one little nothing of a person, who is not even a politician anymore, why are people still afraid of her?"  Why indeed?

BTW please take the time to click the link above and read the entire Newsweek article.  There is much more to it than what I cut and pasted here, and they certainly deserve the hits.