Imagine if you will that Sean Hannity or Glenn Beck called Nancy Pelosi or Hillary Clinton a “dumb T-word” epithet that describes female genitalia, a crudity that is akin to the C-word. Headlines! Righteous (and proper) charges of sexism! Off. The. Air! And rightly so, not just because of the ad hominem, but because the T-word, like the N-Word and the V-word, intends to demean, dehumanize, objectify, and oppress. It is what people of a certain political turn call hate speech that is never supposed to be acceptable—or tolerated.
But Bill Maher has wielded the T-word epithet against Sarah Palin on his HBO show, and there is barely a ripple except on right wing blogs. You can read the story and see the clip here.
I started tracing the unreasoning hatred of Sarah Palin back in 2008, concluding at the time that much of it had to do with her openly bearing—and loving—Trig, her son with Down syndrome (the birth of whom I mentioned here at SHS, long before anyone outside of Alaska had heard of her). Adding evidence to my suspicion, a Canadian medical authority worried that her example could reduce eugenic abortion. One notable blogger so loathes her he still contends that Trig is really her grandson, a despicable meme pursued by the MSM during the 08 Republican Convention—which I thoroughly debunked, and which the MSM ultimately dropped. (See also here.) Can you imagine? (NYT a very notable exception.)
The hatred has since reached full meltdown irrationality—and now has no rhyme or reason other than its own radioactive spewing. I am most reminded of high school cliques that decide to hound the ugly girl or the principle’s nephew to utter despair.
Statements such as Maher’s—and their tolerance by the usually hyper-sensitive politically correct police—tell us nothing about Palin and everything about the core of the spewer and the toleraters who laugh it off—or who, like the members of Maher’s audience, think it’s really funny.
Coming tomorrow, Clarence Thomas called the N-word. What fun!
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Update: Well, this has been a very depressing experience. I am calling an end to this thread. The justifications expressed by some for such crudity and demeaning epithets against Palin–which should be uncontroversially beyond the pale no matter who the target was, as far as I am concerned–illustrate painfully that those of us across the political/cultural divide really don’t have anything to say to each other any more. We can’t divorce, so I don’t know what we do. And note, Maher got in no trouble, just as I predicted. The double standards reek.
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