OPINION:
Former President Barack Obama, at a leadership event in Singapore that he attended with wife, Michelle, told the no-doubt adoring crowd that women were awesome, men were scum and people of the world, unite! It’s time for the fairer sex to take over both boardrooms of business and power offices in politics. To paraphrase, that is.
“[M]en have been getting on my nerves lately,” he said, The Hill reported.
Gag. Barf. What’s Obama trying to do — score points with his wife or start a fire of feminism?
Likely: both.
“Now women,” he said, the BBC reported, “I just want you to know, you are not perfect, but what I can say pretty indisputably is that you’re better than us [men]. I’m absolutely confident that for two years, if every nation on earth was run by women, you would see significant improvement across the board on just about everything … living standards and outcomes.”
He then went on to bash “old people, usually old men,” for serving and leading past their primes — for “not getting out of the way” of the women folk.
“I want you to get more involved,” he told the women. “Because men have been getting on my nerves lately.”
As if all the world’s problems were due to men.
As if sex were a predictor of solid political leadership.
This is not just a lie of the lowest denominator on the left — the radical feminist flamethrowers who simply hate males and manliness and would like nothing more than to rid the world of that pesky “Y” chromosome.
But this is — well, a lie. A blatant, big whopping, big flopping lie.
“Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields,” a 2014 book by Wendy Lower, gives one example of the lie.
From the Amazon description: “In a surprising account that powerfully revises history, Wendy Lower uncovers the role of German women on the Nazi eastern front — not only as plunderers and direct witnesses, but as actual killers … [who] were present at killing-field picnics, not only providing refreshment but also shooting Jews.”
The world would be a better place with women in charge?
Bloody Mary. The Blood Countess. Empress Wu Zetian, topping the list of History Collection’s “The Seven Bloodiest Queens in History” page. Those are just three women noted for their reigns of terror, from England to Hungary to China.
“Would the world be more peaceful if there were more women?” QZ.com asked.
The Washington Post answered: “Women won’t save us from violence.”
Women, of course, make great leaders. But so do men. And the women and men who fail at leadership don’t do so because of their chromosomes. They fail for a variety of reasons, most of which comes down to character flaws. They’re too arrogant. They’re too stubborn. They’re too stupid, to name a few.
But let’s stop the feminist nonsense that women are automatically better leaders — more peaceful, more unassuming, more cooperative, yada yada — simply because they’re not men.
It’s a lie.
And those who perpetrate the lie do so for only two reasons: They’re trying to impress some woman, or they’re trying to score political points with women.
Either way, it reeks of brown-nosing and condescension.
As if a bit of flattery from Obama were enough to make women swoon and seek more leadership roles.
But as the horrible (purported) acts of an Elizabeth “Blood Countess” Bathory show — who was said to have lured young girls to her castle so she could torture them to death and bathe in their blood — women are quite capable of evil.
There’s a danger in dismissing morals and virtue and character as the roots of proper leadership, and it’s one that goes like this: History repeats.
If we can’t identify what separates the good from the bad, then it’s just as easy to fall in with the bad as the good.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley.
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