Topic: Decline of the West
You know, I think that the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto is on to something in this article on the Rush Limbaugh uproar:
There is, to say the least, a tension between the feminist ideal of equality between the sexes and special pleading on behalf of feminine sensibilities.
A Facebook friend of ours, a middle-aged female professional, posted a series of sanctimonious status updates denouncing Limbaugh and his defenders—a few days after she posted one approving of the Rick Santorum "Google bomb." The latter, which originated in 2003 with a gay left-wing columnist, is an obscene scatological insult that "wouldn't normally appear in a family newspaper," as our colleagues Ian Sherr and Geoffrey Fowler discreetly put it. It has been cited with a wink and a nod by, among others, former Enron adviser Paul Krugman of the New York Times.
One could argue that it's worse to insult Fluke than Santorum because it is punching down: Although she has made herself a public figure, she has considerably lower status than a U.S. senator. But several of the women [Kirsten] Powers mentions as having been targets of left-wing "misogyny"—Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann—are of roughly equal status to Santorum. If women and men are equal, and if ugly sexual insults are acceptable when directed at a male politician (Powers, let us note, does not say they are but ignores the question altogether), then isn't that just sauce for the goose?
Good question! So therefore, if it’s OK for Bill Maher to call Sarah Palin a “cunt” and Michelle Bachmann a “bimbo,” then it's all right for me to observe that he, Maher, has the face and mannerisms of a sex offender.
Finally, by way of illustrating what today’s (presumably liberal) “middle-aged female professional” considers acceptable political discourse, here’s the Santorum Google bomb of which she so heartily approves. And this lowlife vulgarian is mad at Limbaugh…?
