Another memory lapse: Coulter claims "people didn't go after Chelsea Clinton"
SUMMARY: On Hannity, talking about David Letterman's references to Gov. Sarah Palin and her family, Ann Coulter falsely claimed that "people didn't go after Chelsea Clinton." In fact, Sen. John McCain and Rush Limbaugh both reportedly went after Chelsea Clinton.
On the June 10 edition of Fox News' Hannity, host Sean Hannity and conservative columnist Ann Coulter talked about David Letterman's references to Gov. Sarah Palin and her family, with Coulter claiming that "people didn't go after Chelsea Clinton." In fact, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) reportedly told a "joke" about Chelsea Clinton in 1998, saying, "Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Because her father is Janet Reno." Additionally, referring to nationally syndicated radio host Rush Limbaugh, the late columnist Molly Ivins reported:
On his TV show, early in the Clinton administration, Limbaugh put up a picture of Socks, the White House cat, and asked, 'Did you know there's a White House dog?' Then he put up a picture of Chelsea Clinton, who was 13 years old at the time and as far as I know had never done any harm to anyone.
When viewers objected, he claimed, in typical Limbaugh fashion, that the gag was an accident and that without his permission some technician had put up the picture of Chelsea -- which I found as disgusting as his original attempt at humor.
As Media Matters for America previously documented, on September 1, 2008, referring to Internet rumors about Palin's daughter, Hannity said: "[T]hey tried to make the attack that she has a young daughter, pregnant and engaged. Is that fair that they would attack that? I mean, I don't remember Chelsea Clinton being attacked."
From the June 10 edition of Fox News' Hannity:
HANNITY: All right. You know, I guess people say, "Oh, it's David Letterman." He also referred to, you know, the "slutty flight attendant" look of hers. And I'm thinking now, David Letterman --
COULTER: Right.
HANNITY: -- from what I understand, he just got married. He has a wife. He has a child. I think David Letterman would react if people started making similar attacks against his wife and child.
COULTER: Right. And now that the families are open to this, have you seen the wife? I think every time liberal males see a female who is identifiable as a female, they think -- they call them slutty stewardesses. I think that's his way of saying she's attractive.
For both of these lines, I mean, it seems to me the two rules are -- have been that you can't attack the family members -- but I guess Sasha and Malia are fair game for comedians now. And the second rule is that it has to be funny. And that's the problem with the herpes joke. I'm not seeing the humor there, OK?
HANNITY: Well, I'm not seeing --
COULTER: Sarah Palin is not going away.
HANNITY: I'm not seeing the humor --
COULTER: So is Obama.
HANNITY: I'm not seeing the humor in any of this, and maybe, it's played itself out because it got killed by Leno, killed by Nightline, and now he's getting apparently killed by Conan O'Brien. So, apparently, he's --
COULTER: He's been killed for years. I mean, he has -- I think since he and -- up until recently, he and Leno were competitors. Leno has, like, twice his ratings. I think we know what keeps him on air.
HANNITY: Yeah. But Leno was funny. I mean, Leno -- I always enjoyed watching him.
COULTER: Yeah. That's why he had twice the ratings of Letterman.
HANNITY: Yeah. You know, look, I wonder if --
COULTER: No, but, Letterman is a reliably -- Letterman is reliably left wing, and that'll keep you a job in the mainstream media.
HANNITY: All right, now, I've watched you speak in public and I can't see you going after Barack Obama's daughters. I can't see you going after the children of politicians. You know, the politicians are fair game. They put themselves in the public arena. We're fair game. People say awful things about Ann Coulter on a pretty regular basis. Obama has attacked me by name -- all fair game.
But when you go after kids the way he did here -- this is a young girl we're talking about -- when you go after a woman this way --
COULTER: Well, and it's not just -- right. Right. And people didn't go after Chelsea Clinton, and they have not gone after Sasha or Malia. This is a rule that has never been subscribed to by liberals, and it isn't just comedians. If MSNBC is the official Barack Obama station, CNN is the official Levi Johnson station. He's on that network more than Cooper Anderson is now.
This has become an obsession with attacking this young girl of Palin's.
OK MMfA. How ya gonna defend this one?
The election is over. Why the hate for Palin now?
Please tell me precisely which mainstream radio or TV host make a joke about Palin's daughter being RAPED (oooh bold face AND caps, must be one of those appeal to emotion logical fallacies) by Alex Rodriguez, and we'll see if you are trying on another fallacy, that of false equivalence. I'll bet you're two for two already this morning.
Hypcrisy? Absolutely!
1- You are aware that SNL has more than one writer, right?
2- Do you also think that Chris Farley resembles Andrew Giuliani and/or a Chippendale's dancer? If you watch a Farley SNL skit, you'll see that the humor in them was far more at the expense of Farley's appearance than that of any character or figure he was playing.
3- Answering your own rhetorical questions (with exclamation points) is quite possibly the douchiest thing ever invented.
Grampy McSame thought it was funny to ask why Chelsea Clinton was so ugly, therefore not even making it a funny joke, but declaring it was true in order for the joke to even be told.
Of course shoes89 doesn't remember that, her hypocrisy filter is solidly in place.
However, the deepest cut of all was Anne's reference to the (on a scale of 1 to 10 where 10 is hot) fact that Dave hides his at best '2' of a wife.
Yeah, those drug charges can be pretty brutal.
Letterman is despicable and his comments not only corssed [sic] the line but ended in the next county.
Oooh, a folksy colloquialism. Maybe you ARE Palin. What with the spelling skills and all.
However, the deepest cut of all was Anne's reference to the (on a scale of 1 to 10 where 10 is hot) fact that Dave hides his at best '2' of a wife.
Yeah, clearly you're no fan of sexism. Letterman's joke was particularly heinous because you wouldn't do his wife. I'm sure she's crushed.
WTF? How is this a joke about raping Palin's daughter? How absurd! What's more, the joke was not aimed at mocking Willow, but rather A-Rod himself and the Palin family's propensity for unplanned pregnancy. Tasteless? Perhaps, your entitled to you opinion. On par with Limbaugh / McCain's comments? Not even close.
Letteman's joke was aimed at the VP Candidate and her daughter Bristol who was brought into the campaign BY HER MOTHER, and featured prominently in the campaign. (IOW: Publoic Figures.) Although Willow was the daughter being refered to, the joke was not about, or aimed at, HER. Plus there a HUGE difference between saying "She scored with A-Rod" and saying "She's SO ugly!" You people just get your panties in a knot everytime a joke involves sex.
Letterman's joke was far LESS offensive, in terms of insulteing the actual PERSON IN IT, and his humor involved more public figures. Plus: The Palin's were ACTUALLY dealing with TWO unplanned pregnancies accross two generations at the SAME TIME. That's fact. And what makes it funny is the lunacy that this family wants to push abstinence-only education onto the rest of the country after it worked out so well for them. He's not saying that Willow, OR Bristol is easy, he's pointing out Simple Sarah's transparent hypocrisy, along with the lunacy of her policies. So Letterman's joke was not only LESS TATSELESS, it was ACTUALLY FUNNY, and rather IMPORTANT politically speaking. Limbaugh and McCain simply felt like making fun of a 13 year old girl for NO REASON AT ALL. (Not to mention that UGLY is a matter of opinion. The Palin prgnancies are a matter of fact.)
You're cracked if you think these are even CLOSE to being the same thing.
There's no hate for Palin from the left. She's merely the target of ridicule as Republicans present HER as the last best hope for their party in its current incarnation. There's no reason to point out why Palin was/is an inferior V.P. candidate. Republicans are fully aware of her shortcomings in actually executing the duties of the office had she been on the winning ticket. Obviously they're familiar with nominating an electable-during-the-campaign but incompetent-to-hold-office candidate. Their problem is that they just can't believe that all the things that they thought made her a good candidate weren't enough this time to get the McCain/Palin ticket elected. So they're striking out at anything that moves. This week, it was a stupid joke by David Letterman.
Yeah, those are the kind of people I want running my country...
If the girl is under the age of consent, then is that not rape?
There's nothing wrong with this joke.
Glad to see you assume a Hispanic having sex with a white woman is automatically rape. Keep on truckin'.
So, by your own logic, had Letterman referenced Derek Jeter instead of A-Rod, and the Palinites been as upset as they are now, would you say the exact same thing and try to tie it into a coded racist comment?
On another note, if any of Palin's daughters ever do get raped, I wonder if she'll withhold their allowance until they've paid for their own rape kit.
Speaking of staying on topic...
Palin's action is precisely on topic.
MMfA gets this one right, but I would even expand on it. I don't believe the children of politicians generally should be the target of anything, especially Chelsea Clinton, primarily because she was a minor. Making fun of her should have been completely out of bounds, it's in extremely poor taste.
That being said, Palin paraded her daughter around and propped them up publicly, and she was not a minor. I don't think she deserves being targeted either, but I don't have near the problem with it as I do if she were a teenage minor.
Oh, wait. It isn't.
But let a joke backfire, then they "are just comedians"?
P.S. The Word doesn't count.
(And when Wanda Sykes "joked" about LImbaugh, THIS liberal admitted that there wasn't anything funny in it: Because there really WAS no prescient point being made, and quite frankly she's could have done a lot better.)
is. Coulter, on the other hand, is usually brought on as an "author," or a "constitutional scholar" (that is actually a very funny joke in itself), but never as a "comedian."
I find it interesting that the humorless right tries to lecture someone else about what is funny and what is not.
Bottom line is that no one is allowed to tell jokes about Palin or Reagan. Period.
Also when they made fun of the ugliness of Helen Thomas most of you here went crazy but it's ok to smear a teenager and a child barely in puberty about being molested by Eliot Spitzer? I think ALL the children are off limits, period.
People know who Bristol Palin is. She's not a child, she's a woman and a mom. I wouldn't say she's off limits.
Also, thanks to right-wing faux outrage, we all know who Willow Palin is now, too.
"When they accuse you of not being able to think for yourselves, here's what you tell them..."
And Letterman was not "going after" the kids. He was "going after" the Pol that preaches about abstinence-only sex-ed then has an unplanned pregnancy herself at tha same time that her daughter does. It not about the KIDS, moron, it's about the hypocrisy pf the pol and the stupidity of the policies that she promotes!
Just because the kid was mentioned in the joke DOES NOT mean he was "going after the kids." If you need every joke explained to you, maybe you should just pipe down and not look like such an idiot. (Or maybe you like to explain why calling Chelsea Clinton (then 13 years old) a DOG is some how funny, or somehoe NOT aimed at her?)
You people aren't funny. You people can't do funny. You people wouldn't know funny if it let the air out of your tires and shoved a banana in your tailpipe.
Only Democrat Party children are to be protected and "off limits", while "Republican children are always "fair game".
That's the Calvinballesque rules the Media and the Democrat Party (BIRM) have put into play: ipse dixit, and what we say shall always be the rule.
Democrat children are always off limits, while the other side seem to always be fair game.
As for the Laura Bush car accident, I notice Family Guy ran something about it.
http://www.jumptags.com/tag/laura%20bush%20car%20accident
From Wiki: (as well as several other sources)
"In 1963, Laura ran a stop sign resulting in a fatal car accident that killed her friend in another car.[8][9] The driver of the other car was her classmate Michael Dutton Douglas. According to the accident report released by the city of Midland, neither driver was under the influence of alcohol or drugs, and no charges were filed.[10] According to Bush's spokesperson, "It was a very tragic accident that deeply affected the families and was very painful for all involved, including the community at large. To this day, Mrs. Bush remains unable to talk about it."[10]"
A 17-year-old girl runs a stop sign and tragically kills a friend and you compare it to Chappaquiddick??
No alcohol or drugs, she has felt terribly her entire life.
Let's see, did she go home and not report the accident for 12 hours? Did she need to give some phony televised address to remain 'politically viable?'
I'd be willing to bet she expressed remorse to her friend's family. Did the Drunk Senator ever say a word to the Kopechne family.
To compare it to Kennedy's 'accident' is beyond dishonest. It's downright hateful. Another example of the delusional, hating left.
More Bush family values. Get rid of the competition.
If only that were true we'd all be much better off.
You sound like anything but a nice guy. Why do you have to resort to calling me names? You are a real brave man aren't you? David Letterman made a joke of how Sara Palin was busy trying to keep her young daughter away from our former Governor. Try to get the correct info before you make such a fool of yourself.
So let me get this straight Eddo, when you were teaching YOUR daughters about sex, you did not tell them to wait until marriage before they had sex? You took your teenagers to the clinic and said here girls have afew birth control pills and condoms and go have sex whenever you want because I can't stop you? Or did you TRY and teach them absitinance like all our parents before us?
I remember Bill O'reily making a joke about Helen Thomas who literally makes death look good and many posters here went crazy. But for you Eddo the conservative kids are ok. And for the record I hated what that moron Schuster who spits all over himself when he speaks said about Chelsea Clinton and ANYBODY who goes after a politicians children or elderly parents.
I have continuing conversations with my 16-year old that sex should not be not engaged in casually or recklessly and that one should be emotionally ready and comfortable before considering it. I reminder her that abstinence is the SAFEST approach to avoid pregnancy and STDs but when she feels she is ready to engage that she MUST protect herself.
Stop painting all liberals as sex-crazed hippies and we'll stop trying to paint all conservatives as puritanical hypocrites.
Did you remain chaste until marriage? Did you practice safe-sex if you did not?
Family members of politicians should be off-limits period unless they are members of the campaign staff or public officials in their own right.
I think Letterman crossed the line and what he said was cruel rather than funny.
Safe to conclude they are LYING
Safe to conclude you are a moron
THANK YOU.
njguy93@yahoo.com
conservatives and their selective amnesia. It was just so en-vogue to bash everything Clinton in the 90s. I imagine they never thought it would come back to bite them on the arse. I actually remember seeing that show where Limpbaugh said that about Clinton and was surprised when no one called him on it.
Bottomline is this,
Letterman's Joke was bad and he should apologize.
We(liberals) should tell him to.
However,
Rush Limpbaughs (and other conservatives) treatment of Chelsea was just as bad. Instead of trying to be so self-rigtheous, in denying or comparing which of the two is a worse insult, they need to humble themselves and say they were wrong.
If they were so moral, they should HAVE done the right thing then!
Instead of denying it now, you NEONUTs need to 'fess up.
In the meantime, this political Pandora's box of trashing politicians kids is alive and well.
I hope someone at MM, after taking several doses of Pepto, is listening to past episodes of Shammity. Since, bashing everything Clinton, was so en-vogue in the 90s, I'm almost sure you will find a spot or two where he probably trashed Chelsea, also