Classy tools and morons

Why don’t you like Sarah Palin?  People are ALWAYS asking me this.  (Not really.)  There are lots of reasons, but this thing with David Letterman has really awakened the semi-dormant disgust that I felt toward her all during the latter end of the presidential campaign.  Last night, I saw this (I saw it on Huffington Post, but can’t seem to embed from there):

First of all there’s a semantics issue: Letterman did not call her slutty.  He referred to her look.  Not the same thing.

Anyway here in Madrid I don’t watch our 24-hour news channels, and until I watched this I had no idea who Contessa Brewer was, but I might kind of like her, and I know I like her more than Campbell Brown, who kind of gets on my nerves because she’s alright but I don’t understand why everyone loves her so much.  (Although I was listening to a Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! from winter on my iTunes last night and she was the celebrity guest and I have to say that I have a little more respect for her now.)  This Ziegler douche clearly needs a swift kick in the nuts, but I’m not sure it would be worth the trouble.

So then this morning Huffington brought me this:

I wish Letterman hadn’t been so nice, but I SUPPOSE if he REALLY wants people to understand that he doesn’t think raping 14-year-old girls is funny, then it’s okay.  That aside, there are two things about this that really piss me off, and that show Sarah Palin as the vacuous carcass of ridiculousness that I believe her to be.

First: Ziegler went for the sexism angle when Brewer addressed the “slutty” thing and he was all, ‘I dunno, you’re the female, you tell me!’  Look, I would never dare say that there is no sexism in the media, but not every single thing ever said about a female politician is sexist, and just because the word “slutty” is used does not make the statement inherently sexist.  If comedians and entertainers and journalists can endlessly poke fun at Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, Larry Craig, Eliot Spitzer and every one else whose personal shenanigans get brought into the spotlight, then Sarah Palin is fair game.  She wants to be a politician, and she clearly likes the attention, so she can’t be okay with all the other politicians and public figures getting made fun of and then whine when it happens to her.  And if we can all happily make fun of Phil Spector’s terrifying face/hairpieces and Michael Jackson’s disconcerting physical appearance, and Donald Trump’s hair, and Angelina Jolie’s lips, and Pamela Anderson’s boobs, and Larry King’s age, and if we can obsess over what Michelle Obama is wearing every second of the day, then we can make fun of Sarah Palin’s clothes.  Either we’re equal, or we’re not.

Second, and this is the worst: Have we been gossiping about Sarah Palin’s 14-year-old daughter since September?  No.  I don’t even know what that kid’s name is.  The media frenzy has always been over Bristol.  Obviously.  (And who, as Letterman pointed out, WAS knocked up and is now an adult.)  No one in their right mind would ever think that in those jokes Letterman was poking fun at any of Palin’s children other than Bristol.  What does that mean?  It means that the only people bringing up the sex life of her 14-year-old daughter are Sarah and Todd Palin.  No one else.  Now that’s good parenting, good politics, and high class.

UPDATE:

I hate that I’m even paying attention to this, but Sarah Palin went on the Today Show this morning to talk about this “feud”.  Turn the volume down if you’re sensitive to shrill:

To be fair, the first in this post above didn’t play the A-Rod joke, and I hadn’t realized that it was Palin’s younger daughter at the game with her .  (But they look really, really similar, and if I’d seen photos in the paper I probably would have assumed it was Bristol since she’s the one in all the tabloids, and it wouldn’t surprise me if others mistook her also.)   And maybe the joke was in poor taste, as Letterman has readily said.  But do you really think that the joke was making fun of Willow Palin?  Is it fair to decide that Letterman thought statutory rape is funny?  I admit that I can’t argue about this one much more because, while I can understand how some might think it crossed the line, I’m a young woman and I simply didn’t find it offensive — in the slightest.  It seems to me that the butts were: Alex Rodriguez, obviously; Bristol Palin, obviously, because she DID get knocked up as a teenager and, because teen pregnancy is generally something that is frowned upon in our culture, we make fun of it, regardless of how tasteful that is; Sarah Palin, because she and her husband exude a certain trashiness while attacking others for having a lack of class, and she would oppose an abortion even if her daughter were raped and she’s a fervent supporter of abstinence-only sex education and was so before her teenage daughter got knocked up.

Her complaints about the “slutty flight attendant” thing hold no water whatsoever.  Putting the word “slutty” before a profession doesn’t necessarily say anything about the profession itself.  Saying she looks like a slutty flight attendant, which she frequently does, just means that she looks like a flight attendant who is slutty.  It would be more insulting to flight attendants if we said that they looked like Sarah Palin, or that Sarah Palin just looked like a flight attendant, because THAT would imply that flight attendants look slutty.  The fact that “slutty” is put before something means we’re qualifying that thing, which we wouldn’t need to do if we felt that all flight attendants were slutty.  We don’t say that a scantily clad woman in cheap thigh-high boots looks like a slutty hooker, we just use “hooker” because, well, duh.  Saying that Palin looks like a slutty flight attendant isn’t sexist, it’s reality.

Ultimately, even if you do decide that Letterman’s joke really was inappropriate, doesn’t Palin’s comment about keeping her daughter away from Letterman void her complaints?  Not only did she initially imply that Letterman might be some sort of pedophile, Matt Lauer immediately gave her the chance to clarify and she didn’t budge.

Okay, hopefully this is the end, unless Letterman needs to defend himself which would be understandable.  But otherwise, please can Sarah Palin just evaporate or something now?  I’m embarrassed to have her speaking out on behalf of my gender.