National Review Writer Asks Women To Give Up The Right To Vote

By Wendi Petit

Michael Walsh doesn’t think that your mother, grandmother, sister or wife should be able to vote. You read that right. In a recent post on the National Review’s site, The Corner titled simply The 19th Amendment he suggests that women should lose the right to vote. He makes light of it. It’s all funny. After all, wasn’t it funny when actors wore blackface in those black and white films? Well, no, but he tries to make it that way.

And women’s suffrage . . . well, let’s just observe that without it Barack Obama could never have become president. Time for the ladies to take one for the team.

The truth is, he understands that the 19th Amendment could never be repealed. He’s so full of himself, and thinks himself so amusing that women should just give it up. His attitude is ‘sorry ladies, but if you can’t vote the way I think you should, you don’t deserve the right’. Of course we should not take him seriously. He’s doing it to get attention.

Just who is Michael Walsh? Well, for one, he’s a former music critic, but most recently he’s a fiction writer who uses conservative punditry to sell his books. The book that has brought him to the fore is Rules for Radical Conservatives. It’s written under the fictional name, David Kahane. The fictional character is portrayed as a pompous know-it-all, not too far off from Michael himself. ‘David’ spills the beans by telling all the secrets that liberals supposedly hide. There’s nothing to hide. In fact, it’s really just a self-portrayal. He uses lots of adjectives peppered in his many run-on sentences. To the right, he sounds intelligent and funny. To the rest of us (you know, the truly intelligent ones), he just sounds like the class bully who just happened to be smart. He smiles at the teacher, and then when the teacher goes back to writing the day’s assignment on the chalkboard, he pulls the pig tails of the little girl behind him.

As part of this character, he writes two columns in the National Review, both of which supposedly became viral. The first was titled I Hate You Sarah Palin, and the follow-up was named I Still Hate You Sarah Palin. In an interview with The Hill, he likens the humor he portrays in David Kahane to Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, and Bill Maher. He may get a few laughs when he speaks to core conservatives, but he’s no Colbert. There’s a reason why those guys have a huge following and Michael Walsh does not. They’re funny, and Michael Walsh is not.

Knowing all of that, I can understand why you still might feel a bit outraged. However, if we remember that he’s doing this to get attention, then we should act accordingly. We should ignore his childish behavior. After all, why does a bully feel the need to bully in the first place? It’s because they feel insecure about themselves. Case in point.

While Walsh didn’t really love the choice of Mitt Romney for president in the 2012 election, he backed him just because he was not Barack Obama. If he really had courage, he would say that he wouldn’t vote for anyone. At least he’d be showing that he acts on his convictions of principles over party. But the horror comes when you find out about his idealization of Nixon.  He mourned him as a great conservative who never got the chance because of some pesky journalists named Woodward and Bernstein. Yes, he’s one of those.

So yes, we should feel sorry for Mr. Walsh. He’s all about sticking to the brand even when the brand has failed miserably.  He’s in the same class as ‘say it ain’t so’ Karl Rove. Never accept defeat, but instead continue to dig your own grave. Oh, well. Maybe if he calls up Sarah Palin and asks for an apology, she’ll agree to do a two-bit road show with him. Now that would be funny.