Ah, Sarah Palin. The intellectually vacant loud-mouthed bullet we all dodged last November. For some reason, I thought that while 'book dumb,' if you will, she was a
bit politically savvy. But it turns out she's an all-rounder when it comes to being inept. And, she's still here, around in the blogointermediaspheres saying and doing halfwitted things.
The Letterman scandal is the latest (from
nydailynews). All of this hullaballo about the Letterman comment has brought something to the fore: I'm not sure people even know what being sexist
is anymore.
What Letterman said, in the context of Palin and one of her daughters attending a Yankees game:
"during the seventh inning, [Palin's] daughter was knocked up by Alex Rodriguez."Pailn's reaction:
"Laughter incited by sexually perverted comments made by a 62-year-old male celebrity aimed at a 14-year-old girl is ... disgusting," the Alaska governor said in a statement.The former GOP veep nominee's 14-year-old daughter, Willow, was the only Palin child to attend the game at Yankee Stadium.Alaska's First Dude, Todd Palin, said "any 'jokes' about raping my 14-year-old are despicable."Woah. First of all, it's a terrible joke. But I think there's a bit of a straw man being built up and burnt down by the Palins here. Yes, 14 year old Willow was the only one at the game - but this is clearly a joke about the other Palin daughter who got pregnant at 17, and about the Palins' parenting. It's also a joke about ARod, aka StrayRod. And sorry Todd Palin, no one said anything about rape but you. It was a disgusting joke, and reacting by saying they found it offensive and inappropriate would have been a good move. Calling David Letterman a "62 year-old pervert", more or less insinuating he's a paedophile and a rapist is going a bit overboard.
Joy Behar
mentioned that this is just Sarah Palin "going for the jugular" when someone goes after her kids. Can't you go for the jugular in another way? Palin had the right idea in responding to Letterman's flight attendant comment as
"pretty pathetic" because that's what it was. This was a pathetic joke in poor taste, and they should react to it as such - not as if they'd found pictures of little girls on David Letterman's computer. Not that I'm a fan of sexual jokes about teenage girls, but I'm afraid they're made all the time - and it's a slippery slope if every time the comedian involved becomes a paedophile. The same joke about Jamie Lynn Spears would have gone unnoticed.
When it comes to savvy re: sexist comments, Palin might do well to take a page from Hillary's book (she should take quite a few) -
don't say anything. Leave carefully crafted responses to your machine - the media will get outraged enough for you - and if they don't, that's the breaks. Keep on moving forward. I'm not saying its feminist paradise, but it's how it goes, and if you want to actually get anything done, you're not going to be able to keep up with the sexist comments.
More than this, the idea of the Letterman comment being sexist is slightly misplaced, mostly because a lot of people
seem to think it is sexism towards
Palin. Don't get me wrong - people have said plenty of sexist things about Palin, the flight attendant comment being one of them, but at some point saying anything negative about Palin was all of the sudden sexist. Letterman's comment is sexist in a general sense, in that the term 'she got knocked-up', as if it's something a woman did to herself with a man as an unwilling accomplice, is sexist in and of itself. The comment as a whole smacks of misogyny. Applied to a teenager, well, it's in very poor taste, as Letterman himself later pointed out. But it's not what the suddenly wounded republicans are making it out to be - it's not about Palin as a woman.
Where the
outrage over this goes wrong is that this has nothing to do with Palin's gender. If anything, she should take this as a compliment she's being treated like a real politician. David Letterman is making fun of her like he would any other serious contender. If Lindsay Graham or Harry Reid had a daughter that had gotten pregnant at such a young age, obviously unintentionally, you bet your ass Letterman would have made that joke - and it still would have been in bad taste.
If Chelsea Clinton had turned up to the DNC in 1996 with a bun in the oven, comedians (and EVERYONE) would have had a field day. Stop it with the constant whining of: Why is Chelsea Clinton untouchable and Sasha and Malia Obama are untouchable and we get to go to town on the Palins, and sometimes the
Bush girls? Well, because Chelsea Clinton didn't get caught throwing tequila back at 19, and the Obamas haven't had the pleasure of a teenage pregnancy. If the Obamas are visited by a little unexpected blessing in the future, people are kidding themselves thinking no one would say anything about it. The lesson here is that the Clintons and Obamas have controlled their children's images better, as opposed to parading them at the RNC with their "fiance" and trotting them out as an abstinence spokesperson...and new mother!!
Letterman isn't making fun of Palin because she's a woman or a republican, he's making fun of her because she's
a politician with a scandalous family situation. Moreover, this isn't new -
tasteless jokes about Palin's family have been around for awhile. One of them even featured John Edwards - because guess what - he's a
politician who messed around on his wife - so comedians rip on him and his personal situation.
People are misunderstanding sexism, and thereby misrepresenting feminism, by jumping up to call any negative behaviour towards a female sexism. Whoopi Goldberg pointed out that if we're going to be angry about this 'at large' sexism at the heart of the Letterman joke, where is the outrage at the comments constantly made about young female celebrities? The mob screaming about the constant objectification of women and girls in the media? Shockingly, they're nowhere to be found.
And even
going after Palin's intelligence is sexist. The attitude is that any criticism of what is supposed to be a successful female is sexism - and supporting a female no matter how dumb she is or how completely she represents the opposite of feminist ideals, is what a feminist should do. I'm sorry, but Elaine Lafferty stating "Sarah Palin is smart", and citing as evidence that she sat on a plane with her and says so, doesn't amount to any actual intelligence. She has to actually
do something in complete sentences. She can be smart on the plane with Elaine Lafferty all she wants, but male or female, if you act dumb everywhere else, people will call you out on it. Dan Quayle anyone? George W. Bush maybe?
The joke was gross, and more than anything I want Sarah Palin to go away. I'd like for her to be irrelevant - obviously, she'd like the opposite, which is why she's on about the Letterman comment. She's angling for 2012 in her way, and I'm sure we're not getting rid of her anytime soon.
Let's just hope that by 2012 people realise that it's not sexist to insult a woman when she's being dumb, and its not 'feminist' to vote for an idiot just because she has a vagina.
