caterpillarcowboy:

caro:

Hearing about the MA-Sen race last night was just tiresome for me, given how cynical I’ve gotten about the health care controversy and Congress’ ability to get anything done whatsoever.

But this Mediaite piece, while a little bit indignant, makes a real point about the fact that Senator-elect Scott Brown took off all his clothes for a Cosmo centerfold-hottie contest:

[H]ad a woman candidate done the same, it would have cost her the election. No female politician could hope to make it out of a scandal like that.

Michelle Obama faces daily scrutiny from the media on every one of her wardrobe choices. It’s a national controversy every time she bares her arms – imagine if she’d posed even more bare! (I can practically hear Rush Limbaugh’s tirade already).

Sarah Palin’s background in beauty pageants was constantly mocked during the 2008 campaign, and remains another shot to be aimed at her, another reason why she is taken less seriously as a candidate. “Before Gov. Sarah Palin came flying in from the wilds of Alaska for the Republican convention in St. Paul, there was a lot of sniggering in media rooms and satellite trucks about her beauty queen looks and rustic hobbies, and the suggestion that she was better suited to be a calendar model for a local auto body shop than a holder of the second-highest office in the land,” wrote David Carr in the New York Times in 2008.

She was derided as a dumb beauty queen, but he’s praised as a “hunk.”

Sawickipedia: Two things

- MA elected someone who committed vehicular homicide and tried to cover up the crime initiallly for 46 yrs to the US Senate

- Perhaps it means we as an electorate are overcoming our puritanical and often hypocritical morals on things like sex