Let's Please End This Phony 'Girl Fight'

This week's blather over Hilary Rosen's never-worked-a-day comment regarding Ann Romney wasn't so much a battle over substantive issues as a "peashooter contest in the Twitter Lounge," writes Kathleen Parker in the Washington Post. Start with the basics: Rosen spoke the truth in that Romney has never held a job outside the home. She wasn't trying to insult but to question whether Romney—and by extension, her husband—could relate to the everyday problems of most women. (Parker, for the record, gives Ann Romney the benefit of the doubt: Her lack of a job "has no bearing whatsoever on her ability to empathize with the challenges of others or whether she is attuned to women’s concerns.")

Rosen herself has admitted that she chose her words poorly. But her "comment should have been treated as off-point rather than conflated as some absurd attack on the stay-at-home mom," writes Parker. Suddenly we were talking about the "mommy wars" of 20 years ago and the GOP's supposed "war on women" this year. Don't be angry at Rosen or Romney, "who are entitled to both their opinions and their choices without fear of censure or condemnation," she writes. "Anger is better directed at those who take tiny utterances and inflate them into phony distractions." (More Hilary Rosen stories.)