Journalism as the Last Draft of Nonhistory—The MSM Has Learned Nothing And Forgotten Everything
10/05/2016
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From the NYT Magazine, here’s an amusing example of how liberal journalists have no sense of how long their views have predominated. In their minds, the barricades must have been just stormed yesterday.
How Republican Politicians Learned to Love ‘Working Mothers’

First Words

By EMILY BAZELON OCT. 4, 2016

A generation ago, when Republican politicians held stay-at-home motherhood as the ideal, they often treated women who broke the traditional mold as slightly radioactive. So the speech that Donald Trump gave on Sept. 13, if nothing else, stands as a marker of how much the party’s campaign rhetoric has changed.

“We need working mothers to be fairly compensated for their work and to have access to affordable, quality child care for their kids,” Trump told a Pennsylvania audience....

Clinton’s advocacy on these issues once earned her a beating from Republicans, who have used her status as perhaps the most iconic working mother in American politics against her. During the 1992 presidential campaign, Patrick J. Buchanan derided her as a “lawyer-spouse,” and President George H. W. Bush called her a “very aggressive lawyer.”

Huh? That’s it? In other words, Bazelon couldn’t find any scare quotes.
Asked about how she was characterized, Clinton told a reporter for The Arkansas Times, “I view it as a hit on working mothers” and “an attack on what’s happening in the lives of most Americans today, as we balance families and work responsibilities.”
That’s an unbiased source!
In light of this history, Trump’s recent swerve is whiplash-inducing.
Oh, boy …

Look, a generation ago, working mothers were already one of the sacred cows of American political rhetoric, along with farmers and veterans. If I search on

Ronald Reagan working mothers
the first thing I get is is a very nice looking Proclamation by President Reagan declaring August 4, 1982 to be Working Mothers Day. This was totally non-controversial at the time

[Comment at Unz.com]

 

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