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Wednesday, February 15, 2006 12:00 AM

Writing about feminists? Just make stuff up

The Gray Lady won't mind!

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  • Wednesday, February 15, 2006 03:30 PM

    Writing about feminism.

    Why, you ask? Because setting up straw men/women is an essential tactic of the far right. Depicting feminists as unsmiling schoolmarm types who find "politically incorrect" slights in any sort of light discourse, environmenatlists as naive oafs for whom the livelihoods of a few thousand loggers count as nothing compared with saving some rare fish's habitat, and anti-war protesters as anti-American surrender monkeys who'd hand the South Atlantic Coast over to Osama rather than risk fighting. It's been going on since Buchanan was Nixon's speechwriter (Safire, too) and will continue as long as they realize that they'd come up way short in any fair battle of ideas. I've gotten used to it and I think the editors of "Broadstreet" should, too.

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