The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

‘Civility,’ Unless It’s Sarah Palin

Posted on | January 28, 2011 | 52 Comments

“Yo, let me tell you something about Sarah Palin, man. She’s good masturbation material. Glasses and all of that — great masturbation material.”
— Tracy Morgan, TNT, Inside the NBA

You can’t make this stuff up, nor can you explain it. At Salon.com, Ethan Sherwood Strauss flounders around with an attempted intellectualization:

It takes a certain social judgment to grasp that our TV mores accept the vague objectification of famous women, but not the explicit stating of how this objectification manifests. Of course, Tracy might have known better, and cared less.
In non-televised life, I’ve heard many guys say exactly what Morgan said. And it’s undeniable that Palin is fetishized in conservative circles and that this fetishization gives her a certain political cachet. But, we’re a Puritanical culture, replete with public euphemisms. We also have modern gender sensitivities that I wouldn’t dismiss as mere “political correctness.”

This completely misses the point, although I must confess to being somewhat shocked to hear a writer for Salon proclaim that among his acquaintances it is commonplace to “say exactly what Morgan said.”

No, Mr. Strauss, what happened here was not about “the vague objectification of famous women,” nor was it about our “Puritanical culture” or “modern gender sensitivities.” Rather, what happened is the result of Tracy Morgan correctly reading signals from the liberal commissars of pop culture who have decided that Sarah Palin is the demonized Other, about whom it is permissible to say anything at all, except praise.

Remember when a reporter moved in next door to the Palin family and no liberal objected? Remember when Palin was blamed for the Tucson shooting and no liberal objected? Remember when Janeane Garofalo called Palin “small-minded and mean-spirited“? Remember what Kathy Griffin said about how Palin got the 2008 vice-presidential nomination? “That must have been some blow job.”

Liberals never raised any objections to any of that, because they fear Palin as a threat to Obama’s popularity. Sarah Palin has been made a latter-day Emmanuel Goldstein, except that her “Two-Minute Hate” has lasted more than two years.

Of course, TNT makes the perfunctory apology, but all of Tracy Morgan’s show-business friends will high-five him for those remarks. He will not lose any work as a result. He will not be made a pariah. The demonization of Sarah Palin has been made entirely acceptable by liberalism’s culture commissars, who declared open season on her in August 2008.

And yet they consider themselves the proper persons to lecture the rest of us about “civility.”

Category: Hollywood, Liberals, Sarah Palin

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