Update: Click here.
Since the most important story in the world right now is a popular radio host referring to someone by a rude name because he disagreed with her, I thought it might be a helpful exercise to look back at some of the glowing compliments paid to women throughout the years by our good friends on the left. How did they earn their absolute moral authority, anyway? Let’s take a look!
(WARNING: The following contains language that is offensive to women. And also men. At least the ones who aren’t already consumed with hate.)
Let’s start with a warm-up, somebody who’s not well-known and for good reason. Back in June 2009, a Playboy.com writer named Guy Cimbalo wrote a piece called “So Right It’s Wrong.” It was all about… well, look for yourself.
(Screenshot courtesy of the New Agenda) You get the idea. The other women on his list were Megyn Kelly, Mary Katharine Ham, Amanda Carpenter, Elisabeth Hasselbeck, Dana Perino, Laura Ingraham, Pamela Geller, Michele Bachmann, and Peggy Noonan. Playboy quickly took the story down, so we’ll just have to assume Cimbalo paid tribute to those women with every bit as much charm and wit. So: Why did Playboy allow it to be published? Why was it considered acceptable? Why give more ammunition to people who think Playboy demeans women? It’s one thing to publish pictures of naked women with their consent. It’s another to say you want to hate-f*** a woman because she doesn’t share your politics.
A few months later, in October 2009, Keith Olbermann also paid tribute to Malkin:
“Mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick on it.” Because she’s the one who’s full of hate. Olbermann might as well be muttering “Why are you stalking me?” as he smears orangey noseprints across her bedroom window. He wrote that, had them load it up on his teleprompter, and said it out loud in front of the whole country. Well, that is, the minuscule portion of the country that watched his show. And nobody at MSNBC had any problem with it. Why?
Back to June 2009. David Letterman made this delightful joke:
Only one problem: Sarah Palin didn’t bring Bristol to the game. She brought Willow, who was then 14. Letterman claims he didn’t know that, and therefore he wasn’t actually talking about A-Rod committing statutory rape in the stands at Yankee Stadium. Even if so, he knows the Palins have more than one daughter. Wasn’t it worth checking to make sure he was maligning the correct one before he picked that joke to read on the air? Does Willow Palin not matter because David Letterman has a sick obsession with her mother? If he really did have Bristol in mind (and, given his proclivities, it’s safe to assume it wasn’t the first or last time he’s had her in mind), why is it okay to basically call her a slut? Because she had a baby out of wedlock, which she kept, with someone she says she loved? Does that make a woman a slut? Is that what Letterman and CBS want us to think?
Jump forward to just a few months ago. In Nov. 2011, Michele Bachmann visited Late Night with Jimmy Fallon:
What a pleasant welcome. Say, what’s that peppy little tune they played?
Ah, okay, so they welcomed Bachmann to their national TV show by calling her a bitch. Interesting. Why was that considered acceptable? (If you listen to the original, they even say… “slut.” OMG!)
April 2011. Keith Olbermann can’t be on TV 24 hours a day, so the rest of the time he uses Twitter to spew his misogyny:
(Screenshot courtesy of Verum Serum) He links to a CNN transcript of Joy Behar talking to S.E. Cupp. Since Olbermann both agrees with Behar politically and has no interest in her sexually, we can presume the object of his ire is Cupp. He thinks her mom and dad should’ve visited Planned Parenthood. He thinks she never should have been born. Why did he think it was okay for him to say this?
Back to April 2009.* Remember Carrie Prejean? At the Miss USA pageant, she gave this answer to a question presented by blogger and aquatic mammal Perez Hilton:
Hilton’s response was as measured and well-reasoned as you’d expect:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YI1u6bZ39YEAnd then there were these two geniuses:
So that happened. Why was it considered acceptable to say all that stuff about her?
And then there’s Mike Tyson.
I don’t know Tyson’s politics, or if he can even spell the word, but why did he think it was okay to say that? Why did the other guys in the studio encourage him?**
I feel like I’m missing somebody… Oh yeah. Bill Maher. Damn, that one would be a whole other post. It’d be quicker to list the things he’s said that weren’t misogynist. I hope the Obama campaign spends his $1 million donation wisely, secure in the knowledge that his hatred toward women is okay because one of them is Sarah Palin.
And speaking of Obama, it should be noted that none of the women mentioned above have received a phone call from him to make sure they’re holding up okay. I’m just glad he was able to patch things up with Hillary after this one:
And I’m assuming he made amends to this reporter:
Because of his respect for women and stuff.
This is by no means an exhaustive list. I’m sure you can think of examples I’ve forgotten. That’s because it happens all the time.
For more on this, see Kirsten Powers, who is neither conservative nor male. So you’ll just have to find some other reason to dismiss her, lefties.
*You may have noticed that a lot of these happened in 2009. Y’know, right after Obama’s election brought us all together. It’s almost as if lefties felt like it was okay to finally take off the mask and really get down to some serious woman-hatin’. As long as those women were political opponents, of course.
**The Daily Caller took a lot of heat for doing a story on this, and I still don’t understand why it shouldn’t be a matter of public record. I hope now those critics can see why it’s necessary, however distasteful, to report on this sort of hate speech against conservative women. It comes in handy at times like right now, when the people who think it’s okay to say this stuff about Palin are scolding us for “hating women.”
P.S.
P.P.S. If only Limbaugh could be as civil as President Obama and his supporters:
P.P.P.S.
P.P.P.P.S. Louis CK is hosting this year’s Radio and TV Congressional Correspondents’ Dinner. Not the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, where it’s become a tradition for comedians to tell Obama’s enemies to die already, or to otherwise humiliate them, and he sits there laughing at it. But Obama is expected to be at this one too. So, as much as I like Louis CK, it seems fair to include his tweets about Sarah Palin.
(Warning: Even worse than the rest of this stuff. But pretending they’re not saying it won’t make it go away.)
Why is what Limbaugh said so awful, but what Louis said isn’t? Do these organizations pick hosts based on how savage their attacks on Obama’s opponents are?
P.P.P.P.S. Will Obama Super PAC Return Misogynist Bill Maher’s Million-Dollar Donation? It would be the intellectually honest thing to do, but I suppose it’s possible they’d do it anyway.