Because violence against conservative women is funny...

...and doesn't count.

CNN anchor, liberals give grins and thumbs up to violence against the 'Right' women

Catholics v. Christians.

Sarah Palin falls into the trap, but so do a lot of person....hence, the useful term "Protestant" or "Evangelical."

National Review takes note of an item in a recent interview with USA TODAY, wherein the former candidate for Vice President says:

[Billy Graham’s] message transformed my mom’s life,” Palin, one of the dinner’s speakers, said in an interview with USA TODAY.

“In the 70s, she would tune into the Billy Graham crusades, televised. My mom was raised Catholic, and she . . . was yearning for something more,” she said. “His invitation for people to know that they could have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ — my mom understood that from the way that he could articulate it. She became a Christian, led the rest of the family to Christ, and that I believe transformed our family.”

The implication, of course: Catholics aren’t Christians.

Bigotry? No. I think Palin is just showing garden variety ignorance here. Over at the blog Crossed the Tiber, commenters are noting this sort of language is common among some Protestants. And, frankly, a lot of Catholics aren’t much better. I remember a woman who came to see me about a baptism. When I told her that one of the godparents had to be Catholic, but the other could be Christian, she looked at me blankly and asked, “What’s the difference?’

Palin, like so many churchgoers, doesn’t know what she doesn’t know.

This is so grating for Catholics.

Smearing Palin.

I don't know why this story should be shocking, but it still is:

We wrote here about the absurd and even contradictory claims about Sarah Palin that are circulating in the news as a result of McGinniss’s about-to-be-published book. But making an absurd allegation isn’t enough to libel a public person; you have to say something that you know to be false, or subjectively believe is likely false. Since authors rarely confess, that standard has proved more or less impossible to meet in practice.
What is intriguing about McGinniss’s email, which has fallen into the hands of Big Government, is that McGinniss bluntly admits that there is no evidence to support the lurid rumors about Sarah Palin and her family, some of which he passes on in his book. The emphasis is mine:

Legal review of my manuscript is underway and here’s my problem: no one has ever offered documentation of any of the lurid stories about the Palins. Shailey Tripp is the latest example. …


[E]ven you write frequently that you know things you can’t yet post, but that soon “all will be revealed.” This has been going on since I first became aware of your blog, but as far as I know you haven’t substantiated a single claim or provided verification for a single rumor that you’ve posted about Sarah’s personal life, or the personal lives of any Palin family members. Thus, she gets to denounce what she calls “lies.”


Neither from you, the Enquirer, AlaskaWTF, palingates.com or anyone else, have I seen a credible, identified source backing any of the salacious stories about the Palin family.


Thus–as Random House lawyers are already pointing out to me–nothing I can cite other than my own reporting rises above the level of tawdry gossip. …


No one has ever provided factual evidence that:


a) Todd had sex with a hooker, or with anyone else outside his marriage.


b) Sarah had an affair with Brad Hanson, or anyone else.


c) Track was a druggie who enlisted in the army to avoid a jail term. Or that he vandalized Wasilla school buses.


d) Willow was involved in the vandalism of the empty house in Meadow Lakes. Or that Sarah rushed back from Hawaii to put the lid on that.


e) Trig is not Sarah’s natural born child.


f) Bristol was promiscuous as a high schooler and drank and used drugs, or became pregnant again after Tripp’s birth.


For any or all of those who’ve told you they’ll speak out, but not yet, now is the time. My book represents the last best chance to put the truth about Sarah in front of the American people in a documented, verifiable way. But I need facts that I can rely on. I didn’t live this long and work this hard over so many decades to wind up as AlaskaWTF between hard covers.

Despite those admissions, McGinniss’s book apparently consists in large part of passing along the very rumors which he admits to be baseless. Could McGinniss possibly have done the unthinkable, i.e., expose himself to a defamation claim by a public figure? Without reading the book one can’t say for sure, but it is highly unlikely. I assume that not just McGinniss but Random House’s editors and lawyers couched his innuendoes in careful terms, stopping just short of factual assertions that could expose McGinniss to liability (assuming that Palin were interested in bringing such a suit, which would no doubt be a poor decision in any event).

The hatred that the liberal elite have for Palin is pathological.

"Syntactic Linguini."

Mark Shea views Sarah Palin as having gotten lucky on the "Paul Revere warned the British" issue:

Palin Throws Racket, Accidently Gets Ball over Net

Proclaimed a genius at tennis by adoring fans.

I have no doubt at all that Palin was *totally* well-read in the minutiae of American Revolution lore and absolutely had this obscure 1798 letter in mind when she was babbling her syntactic linguini last week. This isn't any kind of after-the-fact attempt to patch up an illiterate gaffe or anything. I look forward to her teaming up with Newt Gingrich to deliver her erudite lectures on American history.

"Babbling syntactic linguini" seems like a fair characterization of the comment that Palin made, but, then, not everyone talks in coherent sentences and paragraphs under such casual circumstances.

Likwise, my feeling was that Palin started with the idea of "warning" which mentioned the British and then had to stretched into a warning of existential disaster. Her recitation of Paul Rever's ride was obviously wobbling badly, since most people aren't going to view the gist of Revere's importance to be the warning he gave the British.

On the other hand, Biden can't open up his mouth without shooting himself in the foot and insulting random ethnic groups.  Gore had a regular pattern of showing the oddest ignorance such as when he asked who "those guys" were in George Washington's house and he was referring to a bust of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.  Likewise, a media that couldn't bring itself to mention Obama's "57 states" gaffe, shouldn't be setting the standards of improptu coherence. Of course, those worthies were and are given a pass on their malapropisms.

These things happen, and pace "sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander," when the one-sided gotcha game of the media backfires, then we ought to fairly delight in the media's discomfort.

However, that's only because my disgust for the political class pales before my disgust for the media.  If I was to focus only on our political class, I would agree with Shea's obsertions as follows:

The great groove she's got going is that she can literally do no wrong with her adorers. If she bails on her responsibility as governor to chase after riches and celebrity, it's because the media was too mean. If she runs for President, it's because she has the courage to Face the Heat (though "facing the heat" means "only allowing her image to be channeled through propaganda organs" rather like Obama). If she says something stupid, it's because she's a Woman of the People who isn't beholden to those Pointy-Headed Intellectuals and their Book Learnin' because she has the pulse of Real America. If she's accidently kinda sorta right by dumb luck, then that's because she's actually the True Scholar of American History and the pointy heads don't know anything about real American History. Wondrous.


And yet another indictment of the bankruptcy of our political culture.

Pretty much.

57 states?  No problem.  The Austrian language?  No problem.  Signing a register in 2011 with the date "2008"?  No problem....

...but say that Paul Revere warned the British that they had a fight on their hands? Big problem.

Except, according to the LA Times, it turns out that Sarah Palin was right.

You may have heard recently something about that Sarah Palin telling a reporter that Paul Revere warned the British on his famous rousing revolutionary ride.


Now, that so many Americans have wallowed in their smug confirmation that Palin is an idiot unqualified for anything but repeating sixth-grade history, how far, wide and fast do you think the contradictory news will spread that the former governor of Alaska was indeed correct?

That the Republican non-candidate, in fact, knew more about the actual facts of Revere's midnight ride than all those idiots unknowingly revealing their own ignorance by laughing at her faux faux pas? How secretly embarrassing this must be, to be forced to face that you're dumber than the reputed dummy.

As it happens, though, such phenomena are regular occurrences in American politics, reminding consumers of news to be wary when some fresh story seems to fit contemporary assumptions so absolutely perfectly.

The well-known fable is Revere's late-night ride to warn fellow revolutionaries that....

...the British were coming. Less known, obviously, is the rest of the evening's events in which Revere was captured by said redcoats and did indeed defiantly warn them of the awakened militia awaiting their arrival ahead and of the American Revolution's inevitable victory.

Palin knew this. The on-scene reporters did not and ran off like Revere to alert the world to Palin's latest mis-speak, which wasn't.

Andrew Breitbart responds to Wisconsin Leftist Hecklers.

From Gateway Pundit.




Breitbart scores a solid point about the Obama strategy of pitting Americans against each other via "class warfare."

Civility Watch.

Chris Matthews expands on his disturbing misogynistic fantasy objectification of female politicians with a clip from "Funny or Die."

Here's what Matthews showed:




And here's the original source:

Sarah Palin Media Addict from Gina Gershon

The War on the Normal, Continued.

Troops boo Kathy Griffin for mean Bristol Palin joke.




Vox Day nails the problem that the Left has in these mean-spirited attacks on the Palin clan - the more the left attacks Palin and members of the Palin family - and the meaner and more personal the attack - the more that "average people" rally around Sarah Palin:

I never cease to find it amusing watching one clueless, shallow, and ignorant individual castigate others for their clueless and shallow ignorance. While Blow is correct and the attacks from the Left and the elite moderates of the Republican party only add to Palin's already formidable popular appeal, it's far too late to declare a moratorium on discussing her. No one cares if she's hollow, (she's a POLITICIAN, after all, and is therefore hollow by definition), no one of any political sophistication believes she's any more dim than the average politician, and she's demonstrably far less mean than her critics.

The Corruption of Celebrity.

Eli Johnson - the father of Sarah Palin's grandson - admits that he lied about the Palins:

He’s trying to make amends with the Palins, apparently, by admitting that he made up all that crap he said about them. And where else would a prevaricating media creature like Levi Johnston make his confession but People magazine?

“Last year, after Bristol and I broke up, I was unhappy and a little angry. Unfortunately, against my better judgment, I publicly said things about the Palins that were not completely true,” he tells PEOPLE exclusively. “I have already privately apologized to Todd and Sarah. Since my statements were public, I owe it to the Palins to publicly apologize…”

Johnston and the former vice presidential candidate had been engaged in a war of words, with the 20-year-old accusing Palin of complaining about her job as governor of Alaska and claiming “there was a lot of talk of divorce” in the Palin household…

“So to the Palin family in general and to Sarah Palin in particular, please accept my regrets and forgive my youthful indiscretion,” Johnston says in the statement. “I hope one day to restore your trust.”

To see how Johnston was exploited to defame the Palins, check out this Andrew Sullivan homage to the prevaricating Johnstons.

Once your 15 minutes are up, you have to go home.

Perspective

Victor Davis Hanson responds to a Letterman apologist:

The intent of Letterman's tripartite sexual reference was to suggest that the Palins were synonymous with female promiscuity. (cf. Letterman's further references to the governor's "slutty" look, and remarks about former governor Eliot Spitzer's interest in a Palin daughter, e.g., the "toughest part" of Palin's visit "was keeping former New York governor Eliot Spitzer away from her daughter.")


Cf. that logic: (a) Palin is in N.Y. with her 14-year-old daughter; (b) former N.Y. governor Spitzer was caught visiting a young prostitute. Ergo . . . (c) Sarah Palin will naturally have to "keep" a randy Spitzer away from a likewise randy 14-year-old with dug-out propensities.


Zengerle then finishes with "P.S. VDH says Letterman would never make jokes about the offspring of the Obamas, Kerrys, Bidens, or Gores. Not true." (He then references a Letterman pun to a speeding ticket by the Gore son. Some moral equivalence that — a pun on speeding versus a pun on the statutory rape of a 14-year-old.)


First, Zengerle cannot read. I did not write that Letterman does not generically attack others; rather that in this particular context he would not have used such grotesque references to the children of iconic liberals: "But the reason he picked the Palins, and not the Obamas, Gores, Bidens, or Kerrys, was precisely because he knew it would not equate to his "last show."


Letterman would never make a joke about an underage daughter of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, John Kerry, or Al Gore having sex with Alex Rodriguez or Eliot Spitzer. Sorry, he would not. Any idiot knows that.


Letterman offered no apology, but more of his usual postmodern, I'm goofy; feel sorry for me; "got the wrong daughter;" I'm Dave after all junk. The fact remains that in three separate references he slurred the female governor of Alaska and her 14-year-old daughter on a recent visit to his New York. And when he tried to contextualize it, all he did was make it worse by suggesting that he meant instead Governor Palin's 18-year-old daughter, who recently delivered an out-of-wedlock child.



So follow the additional sick logic there: Having one illegitimate son naturally implies inherent promiscuity of the sort that would send you down to the dugout to have sex with a baseball player or draw in a frequent patron of prostitutes?


Letterman has devolved into a mean-spirited, demented sort. Good luck to his apologists, like Zengerle, who try to explain what he said was not quite what he said. All they accomplish is to end up as foolish and creepy as Letterman himself.

Also - miracle of miracles! - NOW has bestirred itself into a grudging defense of Palin. Apparently, the constant stream of condemnation at its blatant hypocrisy had an effect on the usual full throated lionesses of feminism, but even their defense came with qualifications and slams at conservative women for basically deserving jokes about raping them or their daughters.

Politically Correct Apology

Letterman explains that he really meant to smear an 18 year old girl - who was no where near New York - as a rape victim or prostitute:

"We were, as we often do, making jokes about people in the news and we made some jokes about Sarah Palin and her daughter, the 18-year-old girl, who is — her name is Bristol, that's right, and so, then, now they're upset with me . . ."

"These are not jokes made about her 14-year-old daughter. I would never, never make jokes about raping or having sex of any description with a 14-year-old girl. I mean, look at my record. It has never happened. I don't think it's funny. I would never think it was funny. I wouldn't put it in a joke..."

Because it's obviously wrong to joke about sex with a 14 year old, but the moment she turns 18, it's all good.

Classy.

Victor Davis Hanson - grounded in reality - points out:

Third, he strangely amplifies his joke by confessing it really was about "raping" and "having sex of any description," but just not with a "14-year-old girl," suggesting it would have been okay had he just been more explicit and named Bristol, the 18-year-old. In Letterman's world, because Bristol is 18, she is a year past most statuary rape clauses and thus the joke would have only been about "raping or having sex of any description with a [18-year-old] girl."

Sure, so long as it's not technically illegal, it's perfectly alright.

VDH also offers:

The self-serving, creepy apology was as bad as the initial slur. Letterman is emblematic of an aging, baby-boomer culture, that dresses up street vulgarity with a tie and coat. The only thing that saves him is his care to do this with the Palins from Alaska that don't figure into the usual no-go race/class/gender paradigm.

God help us now that they - my deranged, spoiled, unhinged Baby Boomer generation - is in charge.

14 or 18, I can imagine Todd Palin horse-whippin' Letterman for smearing the names of his children, whether or not they are beyond statutory rape charges.

There was a time when we instinctively understood this. As Harry Truman wrote to music critic Paul Hume after Hume gave a particularly bad review of Truman's daughter:

THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON

Mr Hume:

I've just read your lousy review of Margaret's concert. I've come to the conclusion that you are an "eight ulcer man on four ulcer pay."

It seems to me that you are a frustrated old man who wishes he could have been successful. When you write such poppy-cock as was in the back section of the paper you work for it shows conclusively that you're off the beam and at least four of your ulcers are at work.

Some day I hope to meet you. When that happens you'll need a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter below!

Pegler, a gutter snipe, is a gentleman alongside you. I hope you'll accept that statement as a worse insult than a reflection on your ancestry.

H.S.T.

The insult that Hume gave was nothing compared to Letterman's classless antics.

Keeping it Classy

I just love how those newly-minted eternal truths go out the window when its the left's turn to act decently. For example, supposedly, there is the rule that the children of politicians is off-limits for ridicule or personal attack, unless, of course, it is the fourteen year old daughter of Sarah Palin.

Here's a video of Dave Letterman's comedy gold about Willow Palin being "knocked up" by Alex Rodriguez:



Beyond the crassness of Letterman's child-rape joke, Letterman is just not funny, although the audience seems to appreciate the joke, in the same way, perhaps, that crowds in ancient Rome applauded the humiliation of their foes in the Coliseum.

Here is VDH's take on David Letterman's "decline into dotage":

Letterman attacked in crass sexual terms both Palin and her daughter: Two of the rhetorical cornerstones of the feminist movement used to be zero-tolerance for sexual slurs by men alleging promiscuity ("slutty flight-attendant look"), and jokes about something as serious as rape (e.g., Palin's 14-year-old daughter "knocked up by Alex Rodriguez"). David Letterman, who has become ever more creepy in his dotage, on both counts proved a boor — and receives only silence? (Personally, I admire flight attendants a great deal: They put up with a great deal from jet lag to obnoxious passengers, and somehow remain polite and hard-working — and with a modest and professional look.)

Ah, more child sex humor about Palin's fourteen year old daughter:



Jim Treacher suggests some jokes that Letterman could use if he wanted to be really edgy:

realize I’m just an inbred backwoods moron who can’t abide by any criticism of Sarah Palin whatsoever, but is this really the precedent we want to set for our politicians and their families?

After all, Samson Obama, one of the president’s many half-brothers, isn’t allowed in the UK because he tried to assault a 13-year-old girl. Are we to impose the Letterman standard there? Is it okay to make a joke like this?

“How come the First Family never invites Uncle Samson to visit? Because whenever Sasha and Malia sit on his knee, it takes six Secret Service guys to pry them off!”

Or how about this?

“Joe Biden keeps saying he’s not really sure where all that stimulus money is going. In other news, Ashley Biden’s coke dealer just bought Luxembourg.”

Hey, I didn’t say they were good jokes. But are they really worse than what Letterman just got away with on national TV? If so, why?

But, then, the trained seals in Letterman's audience might not laugh.

The Palin parent's comments are here:

"Any 'jokes' about raping my 14-year-old are despicable. Alaskans know it and I believe the rest of the world knows it, too."

- Todd Palin

"Concerning Letterman's comments about my young daughter (and I doubt he'd ever dare make such comments about anyone else's daughter): 'Laughter incited by sexually-perverted comments made by a 62-year-old male celebrity aimed at a 14-year-old girl is not only disgusting, but it reminds us some Hollywood/NY entertainers have a long way to go in understanding what the rest of America understands - that acceptance of inappropriate sexual comments about an underage girl, who could be anyone's daughter, contribute to the atrociously high rate of sexual exploitation of minors by older men who use and abuse others.'"

- Governor Sarah Palin

A good rule of thumb for Letterman in this area might be whether he would have made these remarks in front of Todd Palin, or any father.