The Great Binder Blunder

October 21, 2012

Excerpted from a hilaaaarious article at National Review Online by Mark Steyn:

At a campaign stop outside Cedar Rapids — in what we expert analysts like to call the critical battleground of the Hawkeye State — the president declared: “I’ve got to tell you, we don’t have to collect a bunch of binders to find qualified, talented, driven young women.” No, sir! In the Democratic party, driven young women are dropping into your lap. At the Island Grove Regional Park Exhibition Hall in Greeley, Colo., Joe Biden told the crowd: “When Governor Romney was asked a direct question about equal pay, he started talking about binders. Whoa! The idea that he had to go and ask where a qualified woman was, he just should have come to my house. He didn’t need a binder.” The crowd roared its approval. “What I can’t understand,” continued the vice president, “is how he has gotten in this sort of 1950s time warp in terms of women.”

Yes, indeed. Romney wants to return us to the 1950s, when a woman’s place was in the binder, when every predatory male had his little black binder, and condescending misogynists would interview applicants for lieutenant governor of Massachusetts and smirk, “Why, Miss Jones, you’re beautiful without your binder … ” It was the age of patriarchal sitcoms when the little lady would greet her man at the front door with his pipe and binders, where girls were told they could aspire no further than to ace Home Ec and thereby persuade some eligible young man to put a ring file on their finger. We all remember the careless sexist assumptions of the so-called family shows of those days — Leave It to Binder, Ozzie and Binder, Binder Knows Best, My Three Binders, Gilligan’s Binder, The Binder Bunch — until eventually the mold was broken by The Mary Binder Moore Show in the early Seventies. By then, feminists across the land were burning their binders, and Erica Jong had popularized the “zipless file.”

….Sure, the Republicans still insist on bringing up trivial, peripheral distractions like Benghazi, Obamacare, multi-trillion-dollar debt, unsustainable entitlements, permanent long-term unemployment, and the looming January 1 “fiscal cliff.” But Democrats know that, if Romney gets his way, there’ll be nothing at the bottom of the fiscal cliff to break your fall except binders. In RomneyWorld, when the mullahs drop the big Iranian nuke, there’ll be nothing crawling out from the irradiated rubble except cockroaches and binders — or some hideous mutation of the two: bindroaches, vile creatures prowling the land on three pairs of jointed rings ready to snap shut on your daughters’ ankles as they attempt to access the last Planned Parenthood clinic in America.

(Source: nationalreview.com)

6:00pm

(Notes: 23)