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Jewish World Review June 15, 2005 / 8 Sivan, 5765 Snobbish women of ‘The View’ By Michelle Malkin
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Have pity on Barbara Walters. Barbara Walters is, after all, Barbara
Walters. And Barbara Walters should not be made to suffer the gross
indignity of flying in first-class while a common woman breastfeeds
her baby.
Barbara Walters for those few of you left on the remote islands of
Fiji who don't know is a world-famous, Very Important Person. She
has, according to her official bio, "arguably interviewed more
statesmen and stars than any other journalist in history. She is so
well known that her name and a brief biography is (sic) listed in
the American Heritage Dictionary."
Barbara Walters is the prolific profiler of Hollywood stars. She and
she alone possesses the papal-like power to anoint the world's "Most
Fascinating" celebrities and render the rest to the basement of
dullard-dom. Barbara Walters has interviewed "such world figures as
Russia's Boris Yeltsin, China's Premier Jiang Zemin, Great Britain's
former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Libya's Moammar Quadaffi
and Iraq's President Sadaam Hussein." And every American President
and First Lady since Richard Nixon. And Fidel Castro. And, uh,
Monica Lewinsky.
So when Barbara Walters gets on an airplane accompanied by her
hairdresser what world-famous, Very Important Person doesn't? You
can imagine the distress of being seated next to an ordinary mom who
had the nerve to nurse her child in Barbara Walters' presence.
The nerve! (Or, rather, the newve.)
"It made me very nervous," Barbara Walters complained last month on
"The View," her ABC morning talk show hosted by a klatch of elitist
women posing as your chatty best friends next door. (If, that is,
your door happens to located in Manhattan or the Hamptons or Beverly
Hills.)
Barbara Walters attacked the offensive nursing mom further: "She
didn't cover the baby with a blanket. It made us uncomfortable."
How dare that hungry baby make Barbara Walters and her hairdresser
feel "uncomfortable?" Selfish child. Don't you know who Barbara
Walters is?
After being forced to endure the insufferable sight of a woman
providing nourishment to her child, the feminist icon Barbara
Walters (winner of the International Women's Media Foundation's
Lifetime Achievement Award, the Women's Project and Productions
Lifetime Achievement Award, and the NY Women in Film and Television
Muse Award from) reportedly pronounced it "gross and disgusting."
Alert viewers of "The View" note that Walters' co-hosts have
expressed similar disdain for nursing women on prior shows with Star
Jones Reynolds making puerile faces when the subject arises.
As you may have heard, 200 women from across the country and from
many different backgrounds held a highly-publicized "nurse-in" at
"The View's" studios last week to protest Walters' breast-feeding
bigotry. I'm not the biggest fan of the radical "lactivists" the
whole La Leche scene is a bit too much for me but having breastfed
both my children (one for 13 months, the other for 6), I completely
sympathize with their outrage at Walters' remarks. Nursing a child
takes time, dedication, and selflessness. No mother should be made
to feel ashamed of that.
Barbara Walters, naturally, cannot comprehend what all the fuss is
about: "Nobody here is against breast-feeding," she says with
condescending bewilderment. It's all a "misunderstanding." She is
now reportedly blaming her hairdresser for the mess. And she has
comforted herself by retreating into her sycophantic coven. New
mother and "View" co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck was wildly applauded
by Walters' coterie when she announced she was giving up nursing her
newborn daughter and switching to bottle-feeding.
No doubt seeking approval from her world-famous, critically
acclaimed mentor (who are we to argue with a woman who is listed in
the American Heritage Dictionary?), the young Hasselbeck confessed
on the show that she was "uncomfortable breast-feeding in general."
Working around the nose-crinkling Barbara Walters and her squeamish
hairdresser, who wouldn't be?
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
JWR contributor Michelle Malkin is the author of, most recently, "In Defense of Internment: The Case for Racial Profiling in World War II and the War on Terror". (Click HERE to purchase. Sales help fund JWR.)
© 2005, Creators Syndicate |
Mitch Albom | |||||||||||
