Hilary Rosen's failed attack on Ann Romney [updated]

Wimmin, shwimmin. Aren't we getting tired of this? But I'm grateful to the Left for making my bumpy transition to defending Romney a little easier. First Pravda, now Hilary Rosen:

"I am raising children too," Rosen tweeted at Mrs. Romney. "But most young American women HAVE to BOTH earn a living AND raise children. You know that don't [you]?" Rosen's tweet was a follow-up to her claim that Ann Romney "has actually never worked a day in her life" and "never really dealt with the kinds of economic issues that a majority of the women in this country are facing."

Ann Romney tweeted, after Rosen's initial insult, "I made a choice to stay home and raise five boys. Believe me, it was hard work."

It's not surprising that Ms. Rosen can't relate to Ann Romney's experience, but it's a real leap for the former, a fifty-something lesbian, to assume she can speak for "most American young women." She certainly doesn't speak for me, most of the young mothers I know, or for my twenty-something daughters and daughter-in-law.

Michelle Malkin points out that conservative women just can't win:

This is how the Left’s war on conservative women works:

We’re damned if we do stay home and we’re damned if we don’t.

We’re damned because we conservative moms drive the Left and its feminist shills mad with our mere existence, our exercise of free will, our fierce belief in protecting our families from the Nanny State, our embrace of free-market principles, and our rejection of the perpetual victim/grievance mentality.

From Hillary Clinton to Hilary Rosen, progressive feminists have shown nothing but the most reflexive, regressive contempt for women on the other side of the ideological aisle.

If doesn’t matter if you’re a conservative stay at home mom, work at home mom, or work outside the home mom. If you’re Right, the Left is gonna hate.

Yup. But they reserve a special fear and loathing for women who've given birth to  more than four children. A few excellent Twitter responses to Ms. Rosen:

@Greg Pollowitz: Too bad Ann Romney didn't do something meaningful with her life like lobbying.

@charlescwcooke: Actually, @hilaryr, if Dept of Education was half the teacher my mother was, we wouldn't have a nation in which people bought your nonsense.

@charlescwcooke: Actually, @hilaryr, if the federal government ran its budgets like most mothers do, we wouldn't have a $900bn structural annual deficit.

@charlescwcooke: An astonishing number of liberals on Twitter have feeds featuring both nonsensical "war on women" claims and mean comments about Ann Romney.

Twitchy has lots more, including David Axelrod and Jim Messina hastily washing their hands of Rosen's comments.

And speaking of women being forced by difficult financial circumstances to work when their kids are small, here's Barack Obama on his own wife's titanic struggle:

President Barack Obama said that after his two daughters were born, he and his wife—both Harvard Law School graduates—could not afford the “luxury” of having her stay home with the children.

In 2005, when Obama began serving in the U.S. Senate (and his daughters turned 4 and 7), he and his wife were earning a combined annual income of $479,062. Barack Obama was paid a salary of $162,100 by the U.S. taxpayers, and Michelle Obama was paid $316,962 to handle community affairs for the University of Chicago Medical Center.

$162K? How could a family of four survive on that?

“Once I was in the state legislature, I was teaching, I was practicing law, I'd be traveling,” he said. “And we didn't have the luxury for her not to work.

“And I know when she was with the girls, she’d feel guilty that she wasn’t giving enough time to her work,” said Obama. “And when she was at work, she was feeling guilty she wasn’t giving enough time to the girls. And like many of you, we both wished that there were a machine that could let us be in two places at once. And so she had to constantly juggle it, and carried an extraordinary burden for a long period of time.”

Et cetera. Suffice it to say the Obamas clung bitterly to their lucrative sinecures and personal chef. But they were crying inside all the while, so that makes it admirable.

Back to Ms. Rosen. Is there anyway this can't backfire on the Left? Howard Fineman tweets: "Great idea to win suburban swing voters: attack MS-suffering mother of five."

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Just heard Laura Ingraham quote from this 2007 Vogue piece on Michelle Obama, entitled "The Natural" (irony apparently unintended):

Then, too, there is that little-discussed fact that staying home with children can be—how else to put it?—less than intellectually stimulating. "The days I stay home with my kids without going out, I start to get ill," she says. "My head starts to ache." When she mentioned it to her mother, Marian Robinson told her daughter she didn't think Michelle could handle the boredom of staying home with kids. Obama was surprised to hear that taking care of her had been boring, but now she embraces the idea of discussing it openly.

Because she was so brilliant, staying home with her little girls made her physically sick. Lol.

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Wow. Jim Geraghty:

White House visitor logs indicate that “Hilary Rosen” visited the White House 35 times.

Gen. David Petraeus, head of our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the current CIA director, nine times.

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Linked by Michelle Malkin -- thanks!

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