Now that excerpts from Weekly Standard writer Matt Continetti’s new book on Sarah Palin are in wider circulation, it’s worth revisiting a great post on the subject from earlier this week by my friend Matt Gertz at Media Matters. Here’s the relevant excerpt from Continetti’s book, via US News‘ Washington Whispers blog:
Liberal-leaning feminists, especially comic Tina Fey, the 30 Rock star who portrayed Palin on Saturday Night Live, were jealous of Palin. “Palin’s sudden global fame rankled those feminists whose own path to glory had been difficult. To them, Palin was less a female success story than she was the beneficiary of male chauvinism,” writes Continetti. He holds out Fey and her TV character for special criticism. “It was telling that Fey should be the actress who impersonated Palin. The two women may look like each other, but they could not be more dissimilar. Each exemplifies a different category of feminism. Palin comes from the I-can-do-it-all school. She is professionally successful, has been married for more than 20 years, and has a large and (from all outward appearances) happy family. And while Fey is also pretty, married, and has a daughter, the characters she portrays in films like Mean Girls and Baby Mama, and in television shows like 30 Rock, are hard-pressed eggheads who give up personal fulfillment-e.g., marriage and motherhood-in the pursuit of professional success,” he writes. “On 30 Rock, Fey, who is also the show’s chief writer and executive producer, plays Liz Lemon, a television comedy writer modeled on herself. Liz Lemon is smart, funny, and at the top of her field. But she fails elsewhere. None of her relationships with men works out. She wants desperately to raise a child but can find neither the time nor the means to marry or adopt. Lemon makes you laugh, for sure. But you also would be hard pressed to name a more unhappy person on American TV.”
There is so much wrong with this that it’s hard to know where to start. Dave Weigel at the Washington Independent notes that “even the fictional Liz Lemon has fewer problems than the real-life former governor of Alaska, who quit her job under the pressure of frivolous ethics complaints and who seems to get into monthly feuds with her daughter’s ex-boyfriend.” But I think Gertz takes an even better tack on this:
Continetti claims that Fey and Palin “could not be more dissimilar.” Why? Well, Palin “is professionally successful, has been married for more than 20 years, and has a large and (from all outward appearances) happy family.” On the other hand, Fey… well… is also apparently married with a daughter, but the CHARACTERS SHE PLAYS are not. In short, his evidence that Fey and Palin “could not be more dissimilar” is that Palin and LIZ LEMON are different.
Liz Lemon, of course, is not a real person. As Gertz says, this is like comparing Barack Obama and Will Smith (subject of many Obama biopic rumors) based on the number of alien motherships they’ve blown up.
