This morning my wife and I were having one of those conversations married people often have when they haven't had much of a chance to talk for a while. All the stuff each of you have been saving up for days about politics, TV and that weird picture you saw on the web, everything comes rushing out all at once. Somewhere near the end of this marital info-dump we started talking about the silliness related to the Tea Party. We were both coming around to the idea that much of this stuff has been bubbling up for years due to the loss of manufacturing jobs and the country's dramatic demographic shifts. In that sense, the headwaters of the Tea Party's river of crazy lie in the fear of marginalization among a group of people who had been at the center of the country's economy and culture for most of the period we commonly refer to as "forever." In the process, she casually offered up the notion that this fear and vitriol was coming from a specific group of people: not just white folks but white males in particular. I took umbrage to this, not only because she said it in a way that suggested that it was a settled, established fact but also because as a guy I feel the need to disagree with her on matters of gender.

Hours later, I realized that I may have been accidentally right after all.

Currently, many of the extreme right's biggest stars are women: Michele Bachmann, Sharron Angle, Sarah Palin, and Jan Brewer. And those are just the ones actively involved in electoral politics. The most powerful ones spit their firebrand bull-pucky from the safety of the sidelines on talk radio and Fox News: Michelle Malkin, Laura Ingram, and Ann Coulter. Certainly, hate-speech-as-entertainment is a field traditionally dominated by men such as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, but if you judge influence based on screen time on cable news the women are making dramatic strides. That's right. Women may still be underrepresented on corporate boards and demonstrably underpaid for equal work but when it comes to the art and science of politically motivated race baiting they've smashed the glass ceiling like a German jewelry shop window in 1938.

No doubt about it. Women have arrived. If 2009 was The Year of The Sign-Carrying Unmedicated Nutjob Enabling An Obstructionist GOP To Shit In The Nation's Hand And Call It Hamburger then 2010 must be the Year of The Amiably Racist Woman.

There isn't any hard science to support this (and even if there were it would be a combination of sociology and psychology which are soft sciences, anyway) but it looks like women might be better at this because they take a slightly softer approach. Whatever the reason, women seem to get away with this sort of thing much better than guys can. When a male politician asserts that the President is a foreign-born secret Muslim with ties to terrorist groups, reporters begin asking tough questions like "how do you know this?" and "do you realize your fly is undone?" Meanwhile, ladies like Palin and Bachmann say this stuff all the time and sail by with no significant push-back from the press. Why? How? First of all, laying out your crazy ideas plainly for all to see will only invite unwelcome scrutiny. These ladies don't say things outright, they imply them strongly. And they do so with that delicate balance of smugness and urgency that gives people the impression that these incendiary accusations are not only hard facts but facts that have been established long ago. Besides, they're girls. Reporters, even female ones, don't take them all that seriously.

So, it turns out that the same sort of dismissive sexism that has held honest women back for centuries now allows the less-than-honest ones to succeed beyond their wildest dreams. I'd call that ironic, but these days using a word like that is dangerous because it reminds folks of that awful Alanis Morissette song. Too late. Sorry.

You've hate a long way, baby!

Though, it might be more accurate to say "you've hate a long time." The key to this phenomenon appears to lie in biology. Men are born with a Y chromosome, commonly known as the "bro chromosome", which allows them to expel stored anger through physical activity or willful forgetfulness. We've all seen it. Two guys can get into a fist fight, run each other over with their cars and brutally abuse each other with flatware but the next day all is forgiven as if it never happened. That's the bro gene at work. Meanwhile, two women can grow up together like sisters then one day one of them makes a snide comment about the other woman's hair and they never speak again.

Sadly, women lack this bro chromosome and thus have no means of dispelling these feelings. So, year after year tension and resentment build up in the bloodstream in much the same way salmon gather mercury from polluted seawater. And just like mercury in salmon, this contamination does not kill them but rather it renders them poisonous to others. Sometimes the hatred leaks out in strange ways: drowning your children in the bath or promoting laws that force brown people to carry papers proving their citizenship. If you can see a difference between those two, it's probably because you want to see one.

Regardless, there can be no doubt that women are making their mark in the field of hate, America's last remaining growth industry. There may come a day when women's studies classes teach a unit on Sarah Palin portraying her as the pioneer she seems to think she already is. With any luck that day will come a week after I'm very, very dead.