I got my first taste of call time as a Girl Scout. Hours with a list and a pen were spent calling through my parents' friends, neighbors, and teachers, deputizing my father (who I guess is technically my first supervol) to sell cookies at his office and my mother, or Staging Location Director to be the troop "cookie lady" which meant we stored the cookies in my garage...and always had extras to sell to those who suffered non-orderer's remorse. I sold the most cookies in my troop every year and so, ladies and gentleman, a star was born. So the Tea Party can go after my right to privacy, they can go after my uterus, but when they go after my Thin Mints, it's personal.
Here's what happened. The Girl Scouts official twitter account retweeted this HuffPo Live Discussion about who should be 2013's Woman of the Year (for the record, and this is for another article, HuffPo Women is an embarrassment to women anyway).
The segment included a less-than-sentence-long mention of Texas Gubernatorial candidate and known woman, Wendy Davis, and the conservanet (TM Nancy Leeds 2014) went ballistic. Actually they were already ballistic over the Girl Scouts and many other things, but they chose to rally around this non-incident as their cause du jour. And so CookieCott was born. CookieCott, as the name suggests is a "movement" (if something that is definitely going nowhere can be described as movement) to boycott the purchase of delicious, wholesome, American Girl Scout cookies in response to the Girl Scouts' endorsement of Wendy Davis. This plan is ludicrous for two reasons. First, the Girl Scouts never endorsed Wendy Davis. And second, it's a stunningly terrible PR move. I'm no Olivia Pope (have I mentioned I hate you guys for getting me into Scandal?) but going after the Girl Scouts and their universally-adored cookies is about one step shy of going after puppies.
What's more, you are energizing their base! I mean, I would have purchased Girl Scout cookies anyway because I'm pretty sure Samoas are the edible version of happiness, but now that you've made them the communion wafer of a woman's right to choose, game on. I'm ordering HELLA cookies and my friends and colleagues are too. Heck, when I heard that a friend at a woman's rights organization was helping sell cookies as a sort of boycott boycott, I gleefully ran around my pro-LGBT organization collecting orders. I promise you I did not make that up. In short, it's been a long time since organizing has been this delicious. So I ask you...
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