If you watched the performance of Michelle Wolf live or saw the video and aren't familiar with the book, or the Hulu TV version of The Handmaid’s Tale, you probably don't know why comparing Sarah Sanders to Aunt Lydia was such an on-target remark.
"We are graced with Sarah's presence tonight. I have to say I'm a little starstruck — I love you as Aunt Lydia in The Handmaid's Tale.”
ABC News headlined this as one of the best lines in her monologue.
My sense was that the lack of audience response demonstrated that few in the room knew who she was.
Of all the lines addressed at Sanders — "I think she's very resourceful like she burns facts and then she uses that ash to create a perfect smokey eye. Maybe she's born with it, maybe it's lies." — "I'm never sure what to call Sarah Sanders … what's Uncle Tom but for white women who disappoints other white women. Oh I know Aunt Coulter.” "It's like that old saying, 'If a tree falls in the woods, how do we get Kellyanne under that tree?' I'm not suggesting she gets hurt, just stuck.” -— for example, however, the Aunt Lydia one was the most pointed and devastating.
Aunt Lydia is the cruel, sadistic, and psychopathic overseer of all the handmaids. Her job was to teach the handmaids to be handmaids, a task which required her to break their spirits and keep them in line with jolts from a cattle prod and prolonged torture from holding stones at arm’s length to a staged mass execution.
She took great pleasure in having the handmaids stone one of their brethren to death.
I hope she comes to a well-deserved end at the hands of the handmaids.
Wolf compared Sanders to the character in Handmaid’s Tale who represents the worst of the worst in the story about a society many have said is a cautionary tale about where Trump is leading America. This was no accident.
My most recent Daily Kos diaries.
Monday, Apr 30, 2018 · 6:08:14 PM +00:00
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HalBrown
Heather “Digby” Parton got it:\ End this charade: Donald Trump, Michelle Wolf and the White House Correspondents’ Dinner
So now we have much clutching of pearls and rending of garments among members of the press, demanding apologies from Wolf for allegedly insulting Sarah Huckabee Sanders' looks (which Wolf did not do) and for comparing her to Aunt Lydia in "The Handmaid's Tale," which is as spot-on as you can get. (As New Yorker TV critic Emily Nussbaum pointed out on Twitter, "her job is *exactly* like Aunt Lydia: she is the frowning female enforcer for a fascist patriarchal society, punishing those who resist her lies.”) From Salon