Rice-Boxer exchange provides needed distraction

California Senator Barbara Boxer's comment on the Iraq War to Condolezza Rice during a contentious Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing last week: "Who pays the price? I'm not going to pay a personal price. My kids are too old and my grandchild is too young. You're not going to pay a particular price, as I understand it, with immediate family. So who pays the price? The American military and their families."

The reference to Rice's personal status was instantly seized upon by right-wing commentators like Rush Limbaugh. Rice later made a pointed (and completely scripted) response on Fox News: "Gee, I thought single women had come further than that." White House spokesman Tony Snow called Boxer's remark "a great leap backward for feminism." Anti-feminist commentator Christina Hoff Sommers said, "She seems to be saying that an unmarried, childless woman should not be involved in decisions that affect traditional families. By that standard, Susan B. Anthony would be disqualified. And how about Elizabeth I?"

I have to say that I'm completely offended by Rice's characterization of Boxer's remark, and flabbergasted by the deliberate misinterpretation by various right-wingers. And hearing Tony Snow defend feminism surely means that hell has frozen over. The whole brouhaha is an obviously calculated attempt to make political hay and represents a new level of disingenuousness in an administration that has already reached dizzying heights of it.