Jeri Thompson: Boldly Going Where Hillary Clinton Went Before

When Kathryn Jean Lopez says something like this:

In their interview with Sean Hannity tonight, Jeri Thompson brought up the treatment of women in the Islamic world.

The prospect of a First Lady who challenges the liberal feminists to care about women who are actually oppressed is an attractive one.

…it makes me wonder how much attention she, and other conservatives of the XX* persuasion actually pay to this sort of thing. From the Associated Press, April 29, 1999:

Hillary Rodham Clinton urged Americans not to become apathetic about the predicament of women suffering under tight restrictions imposed by Afghanistan's Taliban government.

"We cannot go into the 21st century without doing everything within our power to try to stand against such human rights violations and against the perils of indifference," Hillary Clinton said Wednesday at a Capitol Hill luncheon honoring Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.

"When women are savagely beaten by so-called religious police for not being fully covered by the burqa or for making noises while they walk, we know that it is not just the physical beating that is the objective," the first lady said. "It is the destruction of the spirit of those women as well."
…
"The women of Afghanistan, while other women are moving forward, are being pushed brutally backward in time," Clinton said. "The opportunities they once enjoyed are being trampled by the iron rule of the Taliban, creating one of the clearest examples of the systematic violations of women's rights in any nation in the world anywhere today."

If the Democrats nominate Hillary Clinton, conservatives aren't going to win the "who's more serious about women's rights in the Muslim World" argument. They really won't. They'd be better off fighting over which party likes Fleetwood Mac more. There would be very, very few benefits to a Clinton II administration, but her attitude towards extreme Islamic repression of women would be one of them. (And "liberal feminists" have cared about this stuff for a while. It's more convincing to argue that the Bush doctrine liberated women that feminists had no idea how to liberate than it is to assert that they didn't care.)

*fixed.