Playing the woman card

The nomination of 33-year intelligence veteran Gina Haspel to lead the CIA led to a broad range of scrutiny ahead of her confirmation hearing.

I happen to believe Haspel should face rigorous questioning, but is eminently qualified, despite her role in the Bush-era enhanced interrogation program that still proves controversial today even though it is illegal.

Yet some are suggesting that her participation in a program that was deemed constitutional at the time by the president, the Department of Justice and Congress should be disqualifying today.

Among those lines of scrutiny, there is the principled opposition. Glenn Greenwald tweeted that while she did not act alone—former CIA bosses George Tenet, John Brennan and Mike Pompeo have also supported these “black site” interrogation programs—it’s “still notable:

She’s an actual torturer.”

Then there’s the preening opposition. Sen. Rand Paul, whose aversion to enhanced interrogation was supposed to keep him from confirming Mike Pompeo as secretary of state until it didn’t, touted a false ProPublica report, later retracted, to accuse Haspel of being “gleeful” in her defense of torture.

Then there’s the feminist opposition, which makes the case that Haspel—who would become the first woman CIA director—is nonetheless bad for women because of her participation in these programs. But also, because Trump. As Mona Eltahawy writes in the New York Times, “Mr. Trump is certainly no friend to women . . . . However many women he chooses to promote in his patriarchic government, he is no feminist. Feminism, as I see it, is not about counting women in key jobs.”

The left likes to have it both ways, telling us earnestly and often that we do in fact need to count women in key jobs, because we bring important perspectives to boardrooms, Congress and so forth. But electing the first woman president, or women governors, or appointing women to top posts only seems meaningful if they support liberal viewpoints.

But none of these critiques of Haspel, some entirely fair and some convoluted by politics, are as problematic as one high-profile defense of her, from the White House’s own press secretary.

Over the weekend, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, taking a page from her boss, tried to bully opponents into submission by playing the woman card, and not even that effectively.

“There is no one more qualified to be the first woman to lead the CIA than 30-plus-year CIA veteran Gina Haspel,” she tweeted. “Any Democrat who claims to support women’s empowerment and our national security but opposes her nomination is a total hypocrite.”

Wait, what? That’s not how any of this works. But it’s also the kind of thing conservatives rightly mock and criticize liberals for saying all the time.

For starters, if there’s no one more qualified than Haspel, why make it about women at all? This directly undercuts the argument Sanders should be making, which is that Haspel is simply the best person for the job.

Next, there is a gaping chasm between supporting “women’s empowerment” and supporting every policy or position any woman takes, just because she is a woman. Democrats—as well as Republicans—are free to express their concerns about policies Haspel might support without endangering the empowerment of women, or even of this particular woman.

Finally, none of that is hypocritical. In fact, it’s the opposite. For a “Democrat who claims to support women’s empowerment” to nonetheless oppose Haspel, a woman, is at worst partisan, but at best principled.

As conservative women, let’s not do the thing where we pit identity against ideology. Leave that to the left, which insists I’m a traitor to my gender, and that racial minorities who vote Republican are traitors to their race, and that conservative millennials are traitors to their generation.

Sanders should know better than to pick up the left’s talking points and use our political identities as a weapon. But, then, just look at who her boss is.