If you’ve never seen the movie The Women, don’t feel bad. You can get a much better lesson in girl-on-girl bitchiness by reading Gail Collins’ much nastier New York Times op-ed “Sarah’s Amazing Race.”

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With all the outrage over frivolous stimulus spending projects, the government should fund a study of the nexus between hatred of Palin and the absence of the Y chromosome in liberals like Collins. Finally we’d see stimulus money well-spent. Here’s the first of Collins’ ad feminam mud-balls:

… Palin is on a roll. She’s got her own TV show, not counting Fox News. And she twitters! Or somebody does it for her. Hard to tell which. Her twit on the president’s Iraq speech was: “may make u want to dig out ur old Orwell books so rewritten history can be deciphered.” On the one hand, the sentence construction does have that Sarah ring to it. On the other, how many of you think that Palin has old Orwell books hanging around the house? May I see a show of hands?

In this embarrassingly mean-spirited column, Collins drips elitist superciliousness like a human IV-bag. The above excerpt alone shows Collins staking out both Twitter and the entire George Orwell oeuvre as the sole property of the left.

Her implication? Conservative women—especially non Ivy-league-educated women such as Palin—have no business reading big books like 1984 or using high-tech innovations like Twitter.  Those are reserved for women on the left. Only they possess the intelligence to understand Orwellian admonitions or to articulate intelligent thoughts in 140 characters or fewer.  Hence—as Collins so charitably implies—Sarah undoubtedly has somebody “do it for her.”

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By the way, that same “somebody” should inform Collins that when attempting to discredit your opponent for using Twitter, you might want to get your lingo straight. Sarah doesn’t “twitter,” she “tweets.” She doesn’t send “twits”—she sends “tweets.” No doubt a correction is forthcoming.

Now that Collins has (in her own mind) dispensed with Sarah’s intellectual shortcomings, she turns to Palin’s television success. Itching to dismiss Palin as a vapid celebrity-seeker, Collins does a verbal lap-dance that would earn her her own pole at PoleKatz, The Pink Monkey, Heavenly Bodies, or any of the other fine gentlemen’s clubs in those savory outlying areas of my hometown, Chicago.

“Sarah Palin’s Alaska,” is set to premiere in November on TLC… One of the episodes will reportedly involve an educational visit to Alaska by Kate Gosselin and her twins and sextuplets, who also have a reality show on TLC that used to be known as “Jon & Kate Plus Eight” until her husband ran off with a large number of different women… The Palins are now reality TV royalty, like the Blagojeviches and the Ozzy Osbournes.

The implication? Palin’s corrupt like the Blagojeviches, weird like the Osbournes, and irresponsible (Collins’s insinuation) like Gosselin. To label Collins’ so-called logical linkage a stretch would be like calling World War II a dust-up.

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Collins hopes to minimize Palin’s TV success by painting her as small-screen, low-life Kardashian noveau riche. And why? Because The Learning Channel deigned to offer the former governor of Alaska a venue to educate the all-too-ignorant denizens of the continental U.S. (not to mention, the world) in the beauties of Palin’s home state.

Shockingly, Collins observes the liberal de rigueur silence about any possible merits of Sarah Palin’s Alaska. No doubt limited column space prevented her from mentioning that the program’s British producer, Mark Burnett, has a list of Emmy and other TV award nominations and wins longer than the Health Care Bill’s table of contents. Or that in 2004 Time Magazine named him “One of the 100 Most Influential People in the World Today.” Or that last year Burnett received the 2,387th star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for “revolutionizing television.”

No. The pusillanimous (for you conservative women readers , that means “small-minded”) Collins would rather focus on whether Palin really knows how to hunt or not.

To review:  Collins despises Palin if she hunts—or if she doesn’t hunt. The twit despises Palin if she tweets—or if she doesn’t tweet. And Collins despises Palin if she’s a small-town hayseed with a University of Idaho diploma or if she’s got a flourishing national speaking career and a program on an educational cable TV channel.

To me it all smacks a little of the Fool’s gripe to King Lear: “I marvel what kin thou and thy daughters are: they’ll have me whipped for speaking true, thou’lt have me whipped for lying; and sometimes I am whipped for holding my peace.”

I think I’m going to send Gail Collins a copy of King Lear. She obviously has The Women down pat.