And this is bad how?

A couple of "progressive" writers conned the New York Times into giving them op-ed space, it seems, and they used it to wish that gender feminists of their own ilk had someone like Sarah Palin to admire.

The key sentence in their argument is pure comedy gold:

"Democrats have done nothing to stop an anti-choice, pro-abstinence, socialist-bashing Tea Party enthusiast from becoming the 21st century symbol of women in politics."

Don Surber decided to shoot a few fish in that barrel. As DavidL pointed out on Surber's blog,
"Holmes and Traister fret that Mrs. Palin will steal [gender] feminism. Can’t be done; Gender feminism is dead."

The denizens of "Free Republic" also had some fun with the column. Best reactions there:

"It took two women to write an op-ed about one woman" and "In a nutshell, it all boils down to abortion for these leftist hacks. I bet dollars to doughnuts if Palin was pro-abortion, none of the crap that she endured for 2 years would have happened."

I think the point about gender feminism being dead (Ace says drab and unimaginative) has merit, and it's not unrelated to legacy media attempts to keep race-based politicking on life-support (as coverage of the "Restore Honor" rally in Washington, D.C. over the weekend demonstrated again, with columnists like Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post claiming "authenticity" in their umbrage because they don't understand people like Alveda King.)

If I may generalize shamelessly, the progressive world view suffers from cognitive dissonance because it speaks often of "equality" but requires winners and losers to provide evidence for its claim that any society short of its own utopian vision must be a zero-sum game for the people in it.