Their Raison d’Etre

We already talked about Bill Maher’s lame attempt at humor here. A short transcript of the offensive part follows:

“Did you hear this – Sarah Palin finally heard what happened in Japan and she’s demanding that we invade ‘Tsunami,’” Maher said. “I mean she said, ‘These ‘Tsunamians’ will not get away with this.’ Oh speaking of dumb tw**s, did you…”

And then things got embarrassing for the conspicuously silent National Organization of Women.

The National Organization for Women (NOW) refused to comment on Maher’s use of the derogatory term. A rep told FOXNews.com it is a “known fact” that NOW does not correspond with FOX News.
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Matthew Vadum, Senior Editor at the Capital Research Center in Washington DC, said Maher’s insults spotlight hypocrisy in the media.

“Bill Maher feels he can get away with such jaw-droppingly offensive verbal attacks on Sarah Palin because virtually the entire media-academia-entertainment complex agrees with him,” Vadum said. “Clinging to their political correctness and disdain for her quintessentially American values, the left-wing cocktail circuit regards Palin as a punch line.”

So if a prominent media figure had made such a disparaging remark towards a leading female Democrat, like Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, would the mainstream media have reacted with outrage?

“If a conservative used that language to describe Hillary Clinton, we wouldn’t be hearing very much about Japan or Libya,” said John Ziegler, creator the documentary “Media Malpractice.” “If they said it about Michelle Obama, the media would be going 24/7 with the story.”

“I suspect NOW hasn’t come to Palin’s defense because the group agrees with Maher,” added Vadum. “After all, NOW didn’t have a problem with someone on California Gov. Jerry Brown’s campaign staff calling his Republican opponent Meg Whitman a ‘whore.’ NOW really ought to change its name to National Organization for Liberal Women because as far as it’s concerned conservative women aren’t real women at all.”

Yesterday the heat got to be a little bit too much, and after NOW heard about this from someone other than Fox News, they lowered the thunder down upon the pitiful head of Bill Maher. Sort of.

“Listen, supposedly progressive men (ok, and women, too): Cut the crap! Stop degrading women with whom you disagree and/or don’t like by using female body terms or other gender-associated slurs,” Lisa Bennett, NOW communications director wrote in a statement.

In addition to chastising men (and women) like Maher who use their position as progressives as a shield against charges of sexism, NOW made it clear that their denouncement of Maher’s sexist remark toward Palin is in no way an endorsement of her or conservative policies.

“You’re trying to take up our time getting us to defend your friend Sarah Palin. If you keep us busy defending her, we have less time to defend women’s bodies from the onslaught of reproductive rights attacks and other threats to our freedom, safety, livelihood, etc,” wrote Bennett. “Sorry, but we can’t defend Palin or even Hillary Clinton from every sexist insult hurled at them in the media. That task would be impossible, and it would consume us. You know this would not be a productive way to fight for women’s equal rights, which is why you want us stuck in this morass.”
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“It would be nice to think that you’ve suddenly discovered sexism and are interested in joining us in the struggle for full equality. But this really smacks of the worst kind of hypocrisy: Folks with no history of working on an issue trying to discredit those who have been working for decades on the issue. Ridiculous.”

I’m taking these comments from NOW with a medium-large grain of salt. Lisa Bennett is a real person, but I can’t find any linkage between these quotes and any resource I know to be connected with NOW. So far as I know, Daily Caller is not a satire site. But this reads like satire.

Okay let’s pencil this last part in. Look what you’ve got going on here. A famous liberal “comedian” engages in some “humor” about a high-profile conservative figurehead who is holding no office and seeking no office. Then he calls her a twat. NOW, depending on what you want to believe, is either entirely silent or speaking out only under protest.

If you think they said what was linked above, then I submit Swen is in the running for having delivered the best summation (10:00 PM 3/22/2011):

“NOW further wants to make it clear that it is duplicitous for the right to now be interested in sexism after, what they say, has been years of absenteeism on the matter.”

It seems even more duplicitous for NOW to now be interested in sexism directed against Sarah Palin after 2-1/2 years of absenteeism on the matter. After all, combatting sexism isn’t the raison d’etre for conservatives, but it is for NOW, so they’ve got some cheek accusing the right of absenteeism on the issue.

The Left likes to call itself the “Reality Based Community.”

Nobody who’s been following this should be the least little bit in the dark about how Maher’s brand of “humor” works here…although it’s understandable that the “twat” word made his punchline immediately forgettable. So far as anyone can tell, Sarah Palin has made no such comment about invading Tsunamia or sticking it to those Tsunamis so they stop pushing us around. Just like she never claimed to have seen Russia from her house.

But, altogether now…quit taking it so seriously, it’s just a joke. Yeah right. For daring to notice it or remember it, I’m the problem. Again.

And it’s a joke, why. It’s funny, why. Because although Palin didn’t say it, you can certainly imagine her saying it, it’s perfectly in keeping with this reputation she’s earned. The joke that isn’t a joke, that you aren’t supposed to consciously notice, that was immediately wallpapered over by a vulgar slang term for a woman’s vagina, to guarantee that by the next day everyone would be talking about something else, still manages to make a point. After all, that dumb twat Sarah Palin must have earned this reputation she has, that makes the Tsunami crack believable, right?

So the joke makes a point. And she had it coming anyway. The dumb twat.

Ah, well there’s the rub. The “Reality Based Community” places this level of importance upon things they consciously know to be untrue. And these little anecdotes about the dumb twat Palin that are known to be untrue, figure in large part into her supposed “reputation”; this is by design. Nobody needs to apologize for it. It’s a glorious fight. Reproductive freedom or something.

Here, I’ll go ahead and put the remaining pieces together. If the joke is funny because Sarah Palin didn’t say it but you can certainly imagine Sarah Palin saying it because it would be entirely consistent with her reputation, and her so-called “reputation,” such as it is, relies so very heavily on made-up untrue things just like this spun up by dumb prick comedians like Bill Maher…what do we really know about Sarah Palin? It ends up being a classic case of circular reasoning. The punchline proves the reputation and the reputation prove the punchline.

One other question: Assuming Sarah Palin wanted to do something to make these dumb prick comedians and establishment feminists stop being mad at her — just go with that one, alright? — how would she go about doing this? She isn’t running for anything. Have our leftists, once again, put so much thought and energy into sustaining a satisfying tsunami of hatred that they’ve forgotten what they’re trying to bully people into doing? What’s the payoff? What is Palin’s offense? What’s the complaint?

How dare that dumb twat continue to exist as 2012 gets closer? Something like that?

If Sarah Palin doesn’t have any opportunity to mollify the anger thrown in her direction, what chance do any of the rest of us have? Our “reality based community” that doesn’t really live in anything close to reality, is supposed to be busily constructing a wonderful utopian society in which everybody has a place; everyone is entitled not only to the staples of life, but to some of the luxuries as well, plus guaranteed respect and dignity…as some busybody anonymous bureaucrat defines it, anyway. But when we observe their actions it seems that isn’t entirely true. It’s looking like, once you go on the record disagreeing with them as Sarah Palin has done, the dignity part of it is something you don’t need anymore. And it doesn’t matter if you’re a candidate for elective office, or not. Since she isn’t.

So the rest of us aren’t entitled to dignity unless we agree with the leftist establishment. All right. What else can we not have then? We can’t expect some miracle worker leftist busybody to come out of the woodwork and start organizing our communities, I take it? I’ve been told if I like my health plan and my doctor I can keep those…was that, also, conditional on me agreeing with leftist dogma? Is that off the table too? What about, if I make less than a quarter mil a year, my taxes “won’t go up by one dime”?

Life? Liberty? Pursuit of happiness? Oxygen to breathe? Is there anything out of the entire cornucopia of needs and wants that our frenzied leftists consider to be “rights”…to which, as a matter of fact, none of us are actually entitled unless we agree with those leftists on all the important issues, and work on their behalf? To what extent has the reality-based community been lying to us about the everyone-is-entitled-to thing? What exactly are the conditions? What exactly are we to lose, out of this seemingly endless banquet of promises, for not cooperating? All of it, maybe?

Whether Palin is in it or not, the 2012 campaign ought to be about that. Call her whatever you want to, but a candidate Palin would see to it. I wonder if anyone else has the balls.

Cross-posted at House of Eratosthenes.