UPDATE: Hah! I just clicked over to NewsBusters and see they’ve done a piece on the same subject as this one!
Remember that old joke when you ask a woman how much it would take to sleep with her, and she starts out offended then by the time she’s told she’d be paid something over a million dollars (or some high price) she’s interested? She’s then reminded that a minute ago she was offended because she didn’t want to be thought of as a slut, so she remembers herself and shifts back to protest. Undeterred, the man keeps throwing out dollar amounts higher & higher while her protests grow louder & louder, then, finally, exasperated with her reconstituted righteousness, the man silences her by saying “Well, now that we know what kind of woman you are, we’re just negotiating the price.” That’s the gist of it, though I relayed it rather ham-handedly.
Well, the left – like a memo went out – is UP IN ARMS about Rush Limbaugh building on that joke about Sandra Fluke. I heard him do it live, then just heard both Chris Matthews and Alan Colmes devoting entire segments of their show to eviscerating him for saying that there’s a name for “wanting to be paid for having sex” i.e. having someone else pay for her contraception.
I thought it was rather clever. There was no malice in his rant. He did answer his own question by saying “she” would be called a “slut.” I cringed a bit when he said that, but he was building on a theme. Now, if I were his wife, I would have said “Honey – don’t go there.” I would have said to leave the thing unsaid. He chose to cross a line from clever to crude, and for that he should get a slap on the back of the hand, but not be fired which is what the lefties are calling for.
This is particularly ironic since Matthews shares a network with Ed Shultz who just last year called Laura Ingraham – directly – and just for having an opinion – a “conservative slut.” And Colmes was just forced to apologize for making Mrs. Santorum cry – literally – because he didn’t like the way she mourned her dead son.
I’m perfectly willing to call out my own when they screw up. And I can absolutely make an argument that Rush went too far and might want to just send Ms. Fluke a note telling her that if his riff hurt her feelings he certainly meant no harm, but his inference was once removed and indirect, and not meant to describe her, as a person, but rather her assertion that it was someone else’s responsibility – financial responsibility – to pay the freight for her sexual activity. But this level of outrage? From these people? And fired?
No.