This is quite hilariously funny:
From the February 7 edition of Talk Radio Network's The Savage Nation:
SAVAGE: How can a schoolmarm like Condoleezza Rice conceptually deal with the complex problems of this world? She was appointed to the chancellorship at Stanford because of affirmative action. She was chosen by George Bush as part of an affirmative action program in order to make his Cabinet look like America. I mean, do we have to mince words for the rest of our life? She's over her head. She's way over her head. Now, you could have picked an African-American person, if you want to call people of color that, but it wouldn't have been Condoleezza Rice. It should have been a man, it should have been a man who speaks Arabic, it should have been a man because he would have more respect in the Middle East than does a woman to begin with. It has nothing to do with race, it has to do with the fact that she is a schoolmarm who has been pushed up the ladder all of her life because of social engineering.
A wonderful concoction from Savage's fevered brain. First Rice is called a schoolmarm, the kind of epithet people use about women in power who don't like women in power. Then comes the whole affirmative action complaint. Social engineering, yanno. (No, you silly libural. Social engineering is NOT forcing people to be abstinent until they're thirty. That's just traditionalism.) And then, if that is not enough, Savage resorts to the D'Souza argument that we shouldn't let women be in power because our enemies don't let them be in power.
I love the paragraph, because it shows so neatly what we face when we try to talk about these things. On the Savage-side the argument doesn't have to be based on anything logical and the basis can change from general slurs to reverse discrimination to accepting the gender roles of radical Islamists as the correct ones. All in one paragraph.
The use of the affirmative action argument deserves extra scrutiny. Have you noticed how all the wingnuts assume that every single hire of women or minorities is an affirmative action hire, and that they also assume every single affirmative action hire means that someone less capable was hired. Less capable than who? A white Christian man, presumably. But if you think of this a little more what do you realize? That these people assume that all women and all minorities are less capable or that at least the percentage of capable women or minorities is much smaller than the percentage of capable white guy persons.
It's interesting.