Newsflash: Karl Zinsmeister Has . . . Issues

According to a new article on Think Progress, Karl Zinsmeister--the current Chief Domestic Policy Advisor to the Bush administration--thinks it's cool to stereotype and bitch about working women:

“He went to his son’s basketball game, and then he would give Jo [Roback-Pal] a hard time about a doctor’s appointment,” Rollins says. … While Zinsmeister frequently complained about Roback-Pal to other staffers at the magazine — telling [then-business manager Garth] Cadiz that she was “useless” and “never there” — her former colleagues say that she never missed a deadline and that he was “abusive” toward her. When she angered him by taking a four-month maternity leave, Zinsmeister told Cadiz, “I am never going to hire another woman because they just get pregnant and leave.”

Yawn. Just another day at the office for Bushco. Family values are all well and good as window dressing--the odd basketball game? Appropriately American and Manly--but pregnant working women who have to see doctors? Stupid bitches, everyone knows that you have to make "choices" in life, and if you "choose" to have a baby, you can't expect the same privileges as everyone else.*

Curious, I did a li'l googling on Mr. Zinsmeister. Folks who attend to these things probably already knew that he was a partisan douchebag, the kind who would argue that the real Abu Ghraib story is about the merciless assaults of the terrorist insurgents. In other words, what we should pay attention to is what those people are doing wrong; our own fuckups aren't newsworthy as long as we can point fingers at someone else. Like his heroic comic book about the Manly Doings of the 82nd Airborne in Iraq, a group he was embedded in as a reporter and therefore obviously draws reflected glory from (just look at that picture of him! So militaristic! So jut-jawed!). The 82nd Airborne's torture of Iraqi detainess? Never mind that: let's talk about exciting things, like bombs and helicopters and high-tech weaponry and cartoonishly two-dimensional soldiers.

Pretty par for the Bush administration course; I can see why they hired him.

He mighta gotten one thing right, though, when he said that

people in Washington are morally repugnant, cheating, shifty human beings.

Most of them aren't; but the people like him certainly are.

*Note that this is illogical: most "everyone else" also has children, but since they don't actuallly give birth to them, possessing them is a kind of property value, and hence as American as apple pie. You can't deprive people (read: rich white guys) of their property in Republican America. On the other hand, it's yet another piece of evidence that paying attention to who is and isn't an asshole about women's rights is a pretty good yardstick to who is and isn't an asshole, full stop.

Cross-posted over at SG