Amused Cynic

“Bullying and name calling passing as humor, on the other hand, is all about exerting control over the audience. The schoolyard bully determines the social order. His targets are shunned both by those who are in the in clique and those who fear becoming the next target of scorn. The comedian-cum-bully has a secondary target as well. In addition to exerting control over the political landscape, he seeks to instill self doubt in his target. For in the realm of the bully, people come to believe that the targets did something to bring it on themselves. This is especially true when the target doesn’t effectively fight back.” Rosslyn Smith

Tina Brown, like her American counterpart, Paris Hilton, is mostly famous for being famous.  And blond.

Whereas Paris Hilton entered the consciousness of main-stream America through her notorious, night-vision sex films, Tina Brown entered American consciousness in much the same way, although she was the one on the top and rear, and she had strapped one on and was doing it to poor Eustace Tilley, the long time New Yorker mascot.  Eustace, and the magazine, were never the same.  The progeny of Tina’s rape of Eustace can be seen below, right.

Having graduated from Brit tabloids, to Princess Di wannabe, to Maureen Dowd wannabe, Tina Brown is now constantly invading my email box as the latest Arrianna Huffington wannabe.  She now calls herself “The Daily Beast.”  How appropriate, on both points.

Her latest spam seeks to further the current narrative that an important governor—of the the largest, and most energy-rich state in the Union—is running aroung playing publicity-whore games, all because a pathetic former comedian chose to make ill-considered “jokes” about her daughters.  Consider these remarks:

“You know, she reminds me, she looks like the flight attendant who won’t give you a second can of Pepsi. No, you’ve had enough. We’re landing. Looks like the waitress at the coffee shop who draws a little smiley face on your check. Have a nice day.”

“She looks like the dip sample lady at Safeway. She looks like the nurse who weighs you and then makes you sit alone in your underwear for 20 minutes. She looks like the Olive Garden hostess who says, ‘I’m sorry, your table isn’t ready yet.’ She looks like the infomercial lady who says she made $64,000 a month flipping condos.”

“She looks like the lady at the bakery who yells out ‘44! 45!’ She looks like a real estate agent whose picture you see on the bus stop bench. That’s who she looks like. She looks like the lady who has a chain of cupcake stores…”

Now, as a long-time traveler on British Airways, I think it would be fair to excuse me for thinking that Letterman was talking about Tina Brown. But no. He was talking about Sarah Palin, and this just in the less-than-a-year period in which she has been on the national screen. Clearly, Letterman has a Sarah derangement problem.

So, Sarah Palin—who was in New York to do a fairly low-profile appearance—took her 14-year-old daughter Willow out to the ball game, in classic American tradition, and can’t even be allowed to do that. No, out-of-wedlock dad David Letterman had to include Sarah in his “list,” saying she was in New York to shop for make-up to enhance her “slutty flight attendant” look. And her daughter, said the funnyman, had been “knocked up by Alex Rodriguez” during the 7th-inning stretch.

Now, this has been done to death, so I’m not going to get into it too far, but I find the apologists for Letterman—who are really supporters of the nasty, nasty innuendo that they want to encourage being spewed—are even more depraved and disgusting than Letterman, who has made those attributes the center of his waning career.

First off, I think it’s disgusting to pick on Sarah in this context, period. She can’t even take her kids out to the ballgame? I was reminded of this excellent piece at the American Thinker:

For years now much of our comedy has gotten increasingly mean. It laughs less and less at the contradictions inherent in the human condition and increasingly picks out and personalizes targets to demean and humiliate. In the world of the comedian-cum-bully, wit has been replaced with name calling and the wry irony of the nerdish observer with the swagger of the schoolyard bully who decides who is among the in group and who are “them”, the outcasts to be made the butt of every mean spirited politically correct joke. Name calling is the stock in trade of the bully. So is telling the target who protests, “What’s a matter, can’t you take a joke?”

The entertainment industry has been bullying Republicans for most of my adult life and I am 56. It started with stereotypes in movies and TV shows. The small town prude, the uncultured suburban hypocrite, the greedy capitalist, the perverted man of God, the southern white bigot. By the 1980s among the self described elite, the very name of Ronald Reagan was treated like the punch line to an inside joke, the way to get a laugh those rubes who supported him could never even begin to understand.

The apologists for Letterman, including Tina Brown, and this “Perez Hilton” wannabe, are claiming (as did Letterman) that they were not “joking” about 14-year-old Willow Palin, but instead, known “slut” Bristol Palin, who became pregnant at 17, but is now 18, and thus “legal meat.”

I don’t accept that supposedly exculpatory premise for a second. Their entire point of mocking the Palin family for the pregnancy of their oldest daughter is to besmirch the entire family….the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, right? Hence the timely “slutty flight attendant” jibe. And yes, since Letterman actually was really referring to the 14-year-old daughter who attended the game with her mother, he was in fact making a joke about statutory rape.

Finally, Michael S. Rulle has this excellent commentary on this subject over at Big Hollywood. Apparently Katie Couric, the most vapid human being ever to win a rigged fight in history, was the commencement reader at Princeton this year.

I had to sit through a 40-minute version of her “I’m Katie Couric, and that’s a page from my notebook, which was plagiarized by my assistant,” when she was the commencement speaker for Williams College’s class of 2007. It was an insult to a massive assembly of intelligence. She is, as I have always called her, nothing but a “human smiley-face.”

Related: “In a nation full of bimbos, Sarah Palin is one who’s not…”