March 14, 2011 09:14 PM UTC

The Victim Card--It Didn't Work For Sarah Palin, Either

• 19 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

UPDATE: In the interests of our casual readers’ eyesight and unknown propensity for seizures, we’ve replaced the animated image of Rep. Amy Stephens that’s the subject of controversy with one of the individual still frames (below). For those of you without motion sickness problems, the full-size original animation is displayed after the jump. Please note that this change was made strictly because it was making us dizzy on the homepage, not any qualitative judgment.

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Before we address the interview with Colorado House Majority Leader Amy Stephens this weekend in the Colorado Statesman, wherein this blog figures rather prominently, Politico’s Jonathan Martin updates today as well–on former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. If you don’t already know where we’re going with this, you will shortly:

Sarah Palin has played the sexism card, accusing critics of chauvinism against a strong woman…

Most famously, she has played the victim card – never more vividly than when she invoked the loaded phrase “blood libel” against liberals and media commentators in the wake of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting.

Palin’s flamboyant rhetoric always has thrilled supporters, but lately it is coming at a new cost: a backlash, not from liberals but from some of the country’s most influential conservative commentators and intellectuals.

Palin’s politics of grievance and group identity, according to these critics, is a betrayal of conservative principles. For decades, it was a standard line of the right that liberals cynically promoted victimhood to achieve their goals and that they practiced the politics of identity – race, sex and class-over ideas.

Back to the Statesman’s Marianne Goodland, with the above commentary in mind:

When asked, Stephens said she does believe she’s sometimes treated unfairly by the press, but she reserved most of her criticism for blogs. She didn’t name any specifically, but referred to pieces she’s either seen or heard about on ColoradoPols.com.

“Part of that is that you want to be heard, to be portrayed fairly, and that’s all I can ask for,” she said. But she also said it’s different for the “vicious blogs,” and she pointed to a recent piece (on ColoradoPols) that had taken an image of her and altered it in a short video. Stephens said she didn’t see it but someone had written to her about it. [Pols emphasis] “I chose not to [look at it],” she said. “Blogs like that, hate blogs, it’s unfortunate that you have people like that.” When a blog abuses someone who’s a public person, “it’s a form of bullying and abuse” and “a viciousness that on some level at some point we should speak to.”

As to misuse of her image, she said it borders on hate, and it has an unfortunate impact – not only for herself, but for her son. “It’s unfortunate more because I have a son in high school who sees it or hears about it.” She said her son understands about these things. But she finds such attacks “sexist, bigoted, and hate-filled.”

First off, and before we say anything else, let’s not forget that Stephens is being critical of something that she admits she hasn’t personally seen. If you are going to speak critically about something, at the every least, maybe you should first look at it yourself.

Now…we heard before the publication of this interview that the animated image in question (below the fold–see update) has circulated widely around the Capitol in the days following its original publication by one of our readers. The three still images that make up the animation have not been altered in any way–we verified this by closely examining the original video they were pulled from, which we posted a few hours before the reader created the animation. We invite others to confirm this.

In defense of that reader, not to mention our community in general, we absolutely reject the accusation that the above graphic is in any way “sexist, bigoted, and hate-filled.” For one thing, nobody forced Rep. Stephens to turn, face the camera, and deliver those now-infamous air quotes. Just like nobody forced her to tell a reporter that “well-funded,” referring to Colorado’s systemically underfunded public schools, “is in the eye of the beholder.” We sincerely believe that this gesture, and these comments, would have been just as newsworthy–and subject to ridicule–had they been offered by a male politician. To whatever extent Rep. Stephens embarrassed herself, and showed a side of herself that is unflattering and unsuitable for prime time, those who merely captured it on camera are guilty of nothing.

To be honest, we’ve seen Palin depicted in much less flattering ways, sometimes the result of real image manipulation–in some cases, arguably ways that are demeaning to women. We should be able to agree Rep. Stephens has not been subjected to anything like the criticism Palin has, and to use the same terms to describe this self-inflicted embarrassment…well, they say Palin demeans real victims with the terms she throws around, don’t they?

We’d say this is the only part of Stephens’ reply that isn’t very funny.