Palin and the Nuge
by digby
National Rifle Association board member Ted Nugent shared an open letter “to all the braindead hippie logic-challenged dipshits in the media” that mocked individuals with mental disabilities with the line, “Not every retard can read, but look at you go, little buddy.”
In two weeks, Nugent will appear on Sarah Palin’s Sportsman Channel show. Palin, who has a child with Down syndrome, has compared the use of the word “retard” to using racial slurs.
She didn’t just compare it to making racial slurs. She went ballistic and a lot of her followers issues very strong condemnations of the practice. I’m not the word police but I discovered long ago that this sort of language was uselessly destructive and hurtful to people who don’t deserve it — even if it’s aimed at people who do. Life is too short to be such an ass.
And Palin had a right to be upset — her son is disabled. Wouldn’t any mother be upset by this?
On the other hand, she is just a teensy bit inconsistent:
On Chief-of-Staff Rahm Emanuel, she said his comments calling liberal groups “f-ing retards” was “indecent and insensitive” and cause for his dismissal.
But the former governor went to great and sometimes awkward lengths to insist that when conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh used the same exact term to describe the same exact group, it was simply in the role of political humorist.
“They are kooks, so I agree with Rush Limbaugh,” she said, when read a quote of Limbaugh calling liberal groups “retards.” “Rush Limbaugh was using satire … . I didn’t hear Rush Limbaugh calling a group of people whom he did not agree with ‘f-ing retards,’ and we did know that Rahm Emanuel, as has been reported, did say that. There is a big difference there.”
Logic, Palin style. Still, it’s an interesting side-note to our discussion of free speech and political correctness this past week. Let’s just say that while everyone’s a little bit conflicted and confused by all this, nobody can even come close to Sarah Palin’s muddled thinking. There’s something comforting about that.
.