Sunday, March 04, 2007

Faggoting



It's an embroidery stitch and therefore most suitable as a womanly post title. Even if the post is about Ann Coulter calling John Edwards a faggot:

Democratic presidential contender John Edwards hopes to make some quick campaign cash off a conservative columnist's slur at a convention of Republican activists.

"I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word 'faggot,' so I — so kind of an impasse, can't really talk about Edwards," Ann Coulter told Republicans attending the annual Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday.

Democrats were quick to condemn her remark.

So were most conservative politicians. But what was astonishing about the whole debacle was the mainstream media's initial reluctance to address it at all. John Aravosis put it like this:

Apparently it's no longer news to the Associated Press and Reuters that a lead conservative voice at THE lead conservative conference, a conference attended by all the GOP presidential candidates (save John McCain) and even the vice president himself, publicly called a lead Democratic presidential candidate a "faggot." And it's not news that the lead gay and lesbian civil rights group in America, and the head of the Democratic party, have called on the GOP candidatees, and the veep, to condemn her hateful comments. No, no story there. But I do hear that Anna Nicole Smith is still dead and Britney shaved her head. Oooh, how exciting.

I don't even need to make the comparisons to whether the Associated Press, Reuters and the rest of the mainstream media would find it newsworthy if Michael Moore or Barbra Streisand, attending the lead Democratic political conference, called a leading Republican presidential candidate the n-word, or a slur for Jews, or Latinos, or any other minority. Hell, the mainstream media was all over the story that Barbra Streisand told some heckler to go shove it - yes, that was apparently news - but a top conservative voice publicly calling a top Democrat a "faggot" at the most important annual meeting of the GOP base, in a month that the word faggot and anti-gay bias has been in the news repeatedly, no, that ain't news.

Because it is a joke! Don't you get it? That's what Ann Coulter said when asked about the comment by Adam Nagourney.

I learned two things from all this. First, the mainstream media is frightened of the wingnuts and prefers to cluck and tut over the nasty and vulgar lefty blogs instead. Second, we should all make it quite clear that our nasty and vulgar language is just a joke and that some people are too stupid to get it.