The silver lining of McCain's veep pick, for feminists.

No, I'm not saying that I buy the line about "pro-life feminists." Of course not. But I would argue that the Palin nomination is significant from a feminist point of view both as a marker of how far women's rights have progressed in this country, and hopefully as a catalyst for even more change. Think about it this way. It wasn't so very long ago that we feared that not having a White Male candidate will gravely hurt the Democrat's chances. Now the Republicans seem to be shoving a woman in the veep-seat just to compete. What's more, the very most conservative base of the party love, love, love her. Of course, that's because she shares their views, views that are horrendously retrograde in my opinion, but that goes without saying. What's strikes me as noteworthy is that they are rallying to a female in a leadership position enthusiastically with no trace of belittlement, doubt or fear.

The nice things that Peggy Noonan wrote about Palin in the WSJ now seem terribly ironic after she let slip what she really thought on a hot mike. But I think she is onto something here in this paragraph from her WSJ article.

Because she jumbles up so many cultural categories, because she is a feminist not in the Yale Gender Studies sense but the How Do I Reload This Thang way, because she is a woman who in style, history, moxie and femininity is exactly like a normal American feminist and not an Abstract Theory feminist; because she wears makeup and heels and eats mooseburgers and is Alaska Tough, as Time magazine put it; because she is conservative, and pro-2nd Amendment and pro-life; and because conservatives can smell this sort of thing -- who is really one of them and who is not -- and will fight to the death for one of their beleaguered own; because of all of this she is a real and present danger to the American left, and to the Obama candidacy.

She could become a transformative political presence.

Because she's a Republican, Sarah Palin is immune from a lot of the misogynistic crap that was plastered on Hillary. There won't be any Sarah Palin novelty nutcrackers. This will seem like a terrible injustice to many liberals. But hey, that's the way the mooseburger crumbles. No more bashing her for being a hockey mom or a former beauty queen, m'kay? Certainly nothing about her kids. After the way the Daily Kos disgraced themselves, I think the left as a whole should just STFU on that particular front.

In the long run, that the Republicans are nominating a woman is a sign of progress, for us all. There are plenty of liberals out there bashing her the right way -- for her far-right positions, for her self-aggrandizing fibs. Don't let the sideshow steal the show.