The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Bristol Palin, Margaret Cho, Kathy Griffin and the Politics of Sexual Destruction

Posted on | December 6, 2010 | 41 Comments

“Everyone was trying to pit me against Bristol, but the truth is, we got along well. She never asked me to babysit Tripp or anything like that, but I consider her a friend. . . . I really like Bristol as a person. . . . I am proud of her for shaking her ass!”
— Margaret Cho

You might think Hollywood liberals would embrace it as a feminist Cinderella success story: The teen mom, seduced and abandoned by a two-faced cheater, gets a once-in-a-lifetime chance at a nationally televised dance competition. (Plot complication: She’s never danced in her life!) And yet, despite all odds, overcoming her own awkwardness and the disparagement of critics who call her “fat,” the small-town girl makes it all the way to the finals, becoming the object of worldwide admiration and a role model for young mothers everywhere.

But there have been no reports of bigtime producers bidding for the rights to make The Bristol Palin Story, and instead the heroine is predicably scorned and mocked, used as yet another weapon to attack Sarah Palin because . . . well, Sarah Palin is a conservative Republican, and therefore deserves to be attacked — by any means necessary.

(Quick aside: Note how accurately liberals identify their targets. If they wanted to mock chubby daughters of famous GOP politicians . . . uh, no, that won’t mock that one, because she’s a liberal, just like them.)

So here’s Margaret Cho, claiming to be Bristol’s friend and being “proud” of Bristol’s performance. Bristol had never said anything negative about Cho, and yet Cho could not resist the opportunity to use Bristol as a weapon against Governor Palin:

I heard from someone who really should know . . . that the only reason Bristol was on the show was because Sarah Palin forced her to do it. Sarah supposedly blames Bristol harshly and openly . . . for not winning the election, and so she told Bristol she “owed” it to her to do DWTS so that “America would fall in love with her again” and make it possible for Sarah Palin to run in 2012 with America behind her all the way. Instead of being supposedly “handicapped” by the presence of her teen mom daughter, now Bristol is going to be an “asset” – a celebrity beloved for her dancing.

And don’t miss the viciousness of Cho’s let-me-call-her-fat-while-I-pretend-to-be-sympathetic shot:

It’s heartbreaking that people are so awful to her about her weight. I think she looks fantastic, and why does everybody think they have a right to comment on our bodies? . . . If people call her fat what kind of impact does that have on women who have similar body types – which is most of us?

Can we talk bluntly here? Feminists who claim that “body image” issues are a product of oppressive male patriarchal misogyny are full of crap. Normal, traditional, heterosexual guys aren’t the ones telling women they have to be rail-thin to be attractive. I think I speak for a majority of Regular Guys in saying that we evaluate a woman’s attractiveness based on the package deal. It’s more than looks, and even if we are evaluating women on looks alone, the formula “skinny = sexy” doesn’t add up.

There are sexy skinny women and ugly skinny women, and there are big women who are totally hot. Most guys are hestitant to say that out loud, and there’s a good bit of joshing about chubby chasers, but when push comes to shove — er, so to speak — most fellows don’t mind a girl “with a little meat on her bones,” as we say down home.

More cushion for the pushin’.

Never missed a biscuit.

Baby got back.

Beauty comes in all sizes, and it’s not Regular Guys who are driving women to anorexia. The fashion industry isn’t dominated by Regular Guys. The editors of Vogue and Cosmo, the designers and photographers and fashion reporters aren’t Regular Guys. No, the beauty industry is run by women and gay men, and so if you want to point the finger about “body image” issues in the fashion culture, don’t point the finger at the “oppressive patriarchy.”

Back in the Good Old Days, when men were men, and Ike was president, and godless commie pinko traitors were sent to prison where they belong, the ideal of beauty was Marilyn Monroe, who certainly wasn’t skinny.

But I digress . . .

Nothing is so risibly misguided as Margaret Cho’s claim that Sarah Palin believed herself to be politically “handicapped” because Bristol is a single mom. Conservative voters love Bristol and consider her unmarried motherhood to be infinitely preferable to the kind of “choice” that liberals like Cho would have urged upon her.

Trust me, I know. My first reaction to the news of Bristol’s pregnancy, in September 2008, was a mixture of political exasperation — “What a P.R. disaster!” — and fatherly disapproval. My own daughter is almost exactly the same age as Bristol and, had I been in Todd’s shoes, Levi Johnston would have been presented with the choice between (a) a shotgun wedding, (b) his own funeral, or (c) fleeing Alaska and praying to God I never caught up with him. Where I come from, that’s what we call “traditional family values.”

When I initially expressed disapproval of Bristol’s pre-marital pregnancy, however, I got a double earful of outrage from Christian conservatives — to be more exact, Christian conservative women — who defended Bristol for having “done the right thing,” deciding to keep the baby when abortion would certainly have been the more convenient option.

You can’t be a populist and ignore that kind of grassroots feedback. So I took a second look at the situation, decided to make lemons into lemonade and wrote a column called “Punished With a Baby” (the title from an infamous remark of Obama’s) and — lo and behold, contrary to my own initial expectations — the attacks on Sarah Palin provoked a sympathetic backlash against her critics, producing a surge in the polls that made her “The Miracle Worker,” as I titled my next column.

All of which goes to show that Bristol Palin is no “handicap” to her mother’s political career, at least so far as conservative pro-life Republicans are concerned. And despite the inevitable hardships imposed by the utter indifference of The World’s Most Notorious Deadbeat Dad — Levi is a selfish punk who hasn’t done anything to help Bristol or the baby — the Palins are understandably proud of their daughter and their grandson.

So Margaret Cho invented this “Sarah Palin forced her to do it” story for the same reason she made those cheap-shot “fat” remarks about Bristol: Out of pure political spite.

Rather than to reciprocate this viciousness Bristol posted a gracious, cheerful response on Facebook:

Why do I want to set the record straight? Because it is this type of hurtful and false narrative that people promote to make my mom look bad. For 20 years my mom had my back — and for the rest of my life I will have hers.

Which brings us to the atrociously tasteless Kathy Griffin’s misguided attempt to “entertain” U.S. troops by making fat jokes about Bristol:

“What about Dancing With the Stars? . . . We got two words: Bristol Palin. . . . She’s the only contestant in the history of the show to actually gain weight. … She gained like 30 pounds a week. I swear to God, it was fantastic — she’s like the white ‘Precious.’”

In case you missed that pop-culture reference, Precious is a movie about an obese, illiterate ghetto girl who is an incest victim. God bless our troops, who had the courage to boo Griffin:

Griffin and Cho, like the members of the liberal media who applaud and encourage them, are engaged in a political search-and-destroy mission that began the moment Sarah Palin was announced as the 2008 GOP vice-presidential candidate. The threat she posed to Obama was clear from the outset, and was quickly proven by a phenomenal poll surge for the Republican ticket, and they embarked on an unrelenting anti-Palin campaign that continues to this day.

There are no rules to this warfare, no boundary of decency the liberals will not transgress in pursuit of their intended prey. Everything is fair game to them, so long as they think it can hurt Palin. The sheer hatefulness of their attacks is enough to make me nod in agreement at Professor William Jacobson’s remark: “[A]s I reflect back on the past two plus years since Palin’s nomination, I’m wondering if an all-out, knock-down, drag-out fight with the Palin haters is just what this country needs most, not least.”

As a partisan political strategy, Professor Jacobson’s idea probably won’t win approval from all the Smartest Guy in the Room types. Yet when you imagine the head-exploding batshit insanity that a Palin 2012 campaign would provoke among liberals, it’s kind of hard to resist the temptation. If nothing else, it would be a wonderful chance to expose the Democrats — who claim to be the party of tolerance, the party that really cares about women — as the hideous hypocrites they are.

“There seems to be a media competition at work, a sort of championship tournament. Every reporter, anchor, and pundit in America is engaged in a frantic effort to be the hero who fires the silver bullet that slays the Republican werewolf from Wasilla. . . . Why do they hate her? Because Sarah Palin is guilty of a sin for which liberals can never forgive a Republican: She’s more popular than they are. And everybody knows it.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, “Palin’s Popularity vs. Media Mania,” The American Spectator, Dec. 17, 2009

Category: Celebrities, Culture, Feminism, Sarah Palin, Sex

Comments

41 Responses to “Bristol Palin, Margaret Cho, Kathy Griffin and the Politics of Sexual Destruction”

  1. RightWingMole
    December 6th, 2010 @ 7:40 pm

    The teen mom, seduced and abandoned by a two-faced cheater

    OH PLEASE![Remainder deleted. If you can’t make your point without that kind of language, you can fuck right off, Chumley. Most sincerely, Wombat-socho]