In a Los Angeles Times opinion piece last week titled "Wrong Woman, Wrong Message," feminist icon Gloria Steinem asserted that Sarah Palin and Hillary Rodham Clinton share "nothing but a chromosome," that Ms. Palin is the candidate of "right-wing patriarchs" and that feminism is "not about a piece of the existing pie. ... It's about baking a new pie."

A culinary analogy from the women-in-kitchens-are-slaves crowd? Oh Glo, say it ain't so!

But that was the least of the essay's, or the week's, ironic dissonances. Public discussion of John McCain's selection of Ms. Palin as his vice-presidential running mate has been rife with both philosophical inconsistencies and flat-out betrayals of feminism's mantra of choice.

Gleeful conservative pundits have had a field day with the spectacle of liberal pundits wondering, counter to their decades-long crusade, whether a mother should be working outside the home.

The left-wingers were trying, of course, to paint Ms. Palin as a hypocrite -- the "family values" candidate who doesn't take care of her family. What they failed to realize for a couple of days is that the far more obvious hypocrisy was theirs -- and that their strategy could alienate the majority of American women who juggle every day like Ms. Palin does, though on a less exalted plane.

While Ms. Steinem deplored this particular criticism, she assailed virtually every other facet of Ms. Palin's public record, distorting it wherever necessary to depict the Republican candidate as a woman of little accomplishment.

Ms. Steinem claimed, for example, "She was elected governor largely because the incumbent was unpopular." But if you want facts instead of this fictionalized flaying, Kimberley Strassel reports in The Wall Street Journal just how the incumbent, Frank Murkowski, became so unpopular: While he was making a backroom deal with oil executives that would soak Alaskans for a new pipeline, Ms. Palin, his appointee to the state oil and gas regulatory agency, was blowing the whistle on a male colleague for similarly secretive dealings.

When Mr. Murkowski and his GOP colleagues supported the man in question, Ms. Palin resigned in protest, ran against the governor and won. Standing up to the "old boy network" to save billions for taxpayers is a contribution that many women are proud to see a female politician make.

These distortions in Ms. Steinem's blistering essay and elsewhere speak to the need not just to defeat Ms. Palin politically, but to belittle, marginalize or destroy her. It brings to mind the liberal establishment's illiberal treatment of Clarence Thomas and Condoleezza Rice.

What is it about the truly independent that so threatens those who say they're fighting for everyone's liberation? As with conservative blacks, the attacks on Ms. Palin illustrate that the ballyhooed tolerance of the left ends precisely where actual diversity begins.

Where the language of choice falters, of course, is at the threshold of abortion. There can be no choice about "choice."

Ms. Steinem predicts women will reject Ms. Palin as a tool of the patriarchy because her pro-life views are too extreme. But in a 2003 CBS News/New York Times poll, 24 percent of women agreed with her stance that all abortion should be illegal.

No one knows how Americans feel about Barack Obama's vote against providing newborn abortion survivors with life-saving medical care, but the U.S. Senate unanimously voted for such a measure. Which candidate women support in the election may turn on whose position is more successfully portrayed as extreme.

Although feminism has always been useful in drawing attention to social problems, most American women, judging from their lives, apparently reject its ideological excesses. We long ago rejected Ms. Steinem's proclamation that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. We marry and have children and work as much or as little as we want.

The supreme irony of modern feminism has always been its insistence that women find personal fulfillment by becoming good little cogs in the machinery of capitalism. Despite this indoctrination, we continue to report more fulfillment from the care we give our families, on average ranking our jobs 15th out of 16 daily activities. (Commuting finishes dead last.)

It's interesting that Ms. Palin's political life grew not out of career ambition but out of community and family service. Clearly she's good at it; many women serve in the PTA, but not many move on to a governorship. We have yet to see whether service, not careerism, can carry a very independent woman to the vice presidency. Wouldn't that be ironic?