Tuesday, June 16, 2009

The Fine Art of Fake Outrage



SKEPTIC: Republicans have made a fine art out of pretending to be outraged. Here's the formula: take something your opponent says, distort it beyond all recognition, and then feign outrage in an attempt to score a few cheap political points by riling up the base. The classic example of this was the "Lipstick on a Pig" episode during the presidential campaign when Obama used the common idiom in a speech when talking about politicians who pretend to want change. Time to crank up the fake outrage. Since Sarah Palin had referenced lipstick while making a lame joke in her big speech at the Republican convention, wasn't it obvious that Obama was calling Palin a pig? 

So apparently Palin, having refined the art of fake outrage during the campaign by continually saying that Obama "palled around with terrorists," thought she'd give it another shot. When David Letterman recently made a joke about Palin's 18-year-old daughter Bristol (who famously had gotten herself "knocked up") getting "knocked up" at a baseball game by Alex Rodriquez, dear sweet Sarah managed to morph it into "David Letterman made a joke about raping my 14-year-old daughter," and insinuated that he was some sort of creepy pedophile. Even Letterman's apology was not enough to get her to back off, not when she thought she could score more political points. Talk about lame-itude.

PREACHER: I guess you caught me sleeping on some of the incidents you mention in your comment above. But doesn't David Letterman kind of make a living on making fun of people anyway? A lot of folks seem to enjoy hearing those on the far left and right get enraged with each other. I find it kind of boring. So the media makes a big deal of it to get the ratings up. Letterman did need to get some some of his viewers back from the new guy on the NBC late night show. What better way to do it than get Sarah Palin riled up with some sexual innuendo? Ladies don't like to be the brunt of men's seedy jokes. As for the fine art of fake outrage, I have had some comments made to me on this blog by a rather left-leaning lady that make me out to be a male chauvinist pig all because I guessed that she was much younger than she really was. Different political leaning, but same lame-itude.

SKEPTIC: I guess you missed the big Letterman-Palin brouhaha. I've included the video above to show how far some people on the right were willing to go to make their point. It wasn't really the media at fault here, though. It was Sarah Palin who made really over-the-top comments about Letterman and the joke in what was a transparent attempt to keep her face in the news, and then she went out of her way to stoke the fires every chance she got. The odd thing was that Letterman was hardly the first comedian to make a joke that referenced her daughter and the situation regarding her pregnancy, but Palin saw an opening and went for it. One has to wonder, though, if her political instincts are really that sharp when she attacks a popular cultural figure in such a way.

5 comments:

  1. I can't believe that Letterman apologized. Any person with a brain on their head knew he was talking about her 18 year old daughter. Only Palin is idiotic enough to take it *there*. I heard much worse jokes during the election and nobody apologized for them, to my knowledge.

    All this did is solidify my opinion of her. Thankfully she is not second in command. I wish she'd just go back to Alaska and be quiet.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Leaving Religion,
    Any person who cared for their children at all and has at least half a brain would back Palin for defending her children. She did the right thing. What Letterman said was wrong regardless of which daughter he was talking to. And, The 18 year old was NOT at the ball game. HE should have been fired. What he said was worse than what Imus said. We would be better off with her than our disaster of a President we have in there now. He is consistently doing ALL THE WRONG THINGS.

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