Barbara at the Mahablog does a great job fisking The Wall Street Journal's recent editorial on the gender wars, which argues, in all seriousness, that the true threats to women are union pension rules, overtime provisions in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, and other such items that you and I might have thought were actually good for working people, of both genders. But Barbara wants you to notice, most of all, the Journal's headine:
BooMan sees that and writes,
I know it's supposed to be ironic or something, but its real irony is unintentional.
I'm not sure it's meant to be ironic. I just think these people don't quite understand that they're not supposed to describe women as the enemy.
And, well, there's a lot of this going around on the right, apparently, because here's the header for an opinion piece on the same subject by Matthew Continetti in the Washington Free Beacon:
No, you are not mistaken: that's General Patton.
These wingers really don't understand that this point is that they're not supposed to be at war with women. Here's a sample paragraph from the Continetti article:
What the war on women really amounts to is a battle for political power between a group of pro-life, pro-religious liberty men and women and a group of men and women who want to maintain abortion on demand and the government provision of abortion, contraceptives, abortifacients, and sterilization procedures as mandated under Obamacare. On one side are people such as Sarah Palin, Mitt and Ann Romney, and Cathy McMorris Rodgers; on the other side are Wasserman Schultz, Obama, Kathleen Sebelius, Hilary Rosen, and others. If this is the war on women, we should accept nothing less than unconditional surrender.
"Unconditional surrender"? What's the plan to achieve that? Drop Fat Man and Little Boy on the headquarters of Planned Parenthood and NOW?
And, of course, this is rather bellicose imagery from a guy who is rather averse to actual wars, which we know because he was a 20-year-old right-winger when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan and a 22-year-old right-winger when we invaded Iraq but he -- somehow -- never got around to enlisting in the military. In this, of course, Continetti is following in the footsteps of his father-in-law and mentor, Bill Kristol, who is a notorious chickenhawk.
