Media Matters, Meghan McCain Accuse Me of Responding With "Brain-Dead Sexism"

Here's the thing: Actually, when I dashed off that post, I did notice that I was hitting the sex-put-down button more times than I usually would want to, and did notice that several of the jokes about McCain were pretty damned lame and couldn't even be justified by the "You Can't Fight The Funny" standard.

So: Actually, I agree. The post had a single good joke in it. It was about her weight, and usually I stay about from fat jokes about women as below the belt and too harsh, but if I had to do it again, I'd keep it, because I thought it was funny:

"Incidentally, she goes after Sarah Palin as if the poor woman were a pork chop sauteed in Haagen-Dasz and Axe body spray."

I'd keep that. Mean or not I thought it was sort of funny. Not bring down the house funny, but funny enough to be mean.

Media Matters completely missed another line from the next post:

"In related news, Meghan McCain just got a new tattoo of a rack of spare ribs eating a burrito."

I really like that one, as it's so absurdist. So I'd keep that one -- even if mean and caddish.

On the other hand, there was a lot in the post that I would say just wasn't funny at all, just mean. I used to always criticize this lefty blogger I sparred with on Slate's Fray comment section: I would tell him "That's not funny, it's just flip."

I think bulk of this post was that -- flip, not funny.

"Less ha-ha and more ta-ta. Stick to what you're enhanced at."

Not funny and yeah, kind of brain-dead. Oh, everyone knows what I'm getting at (the notorious Twitter boob shot), but yeah, this is sexist, and it's not funny enough to justify.

Follow that up with this just completely lame attack, which Media Matters didn't even quote:

The more she fails at everything the more attractive she seems, because, come on, she's got to be good at something, right?

It's like the law of averages, right? Or just the idea that the universe is merciful?

If she's this bad at everything else -- come on, gotta be, right?

Not funny! Just flip! And just thoughtless "would you hit that" type stuff.

And that's particularly bad because here I was knocking her for not being funny, just putting together a brain-dead "this will get links" not-funny-but-flip attack on Palin, and the comedy hypocrisy is there.

Yeah, basically, I think that whole post sucked and descended into juvenile taunting and not even good juvenile taunting. And while a couple of the jokes were decent enough to justify breaking the typical rule against cheap shots, the whole thing, in total, with its mean-for-meanness'-sake unfunny jabs was in fact "sexist" (I just never really got off that, did?) and pretty brain-dead.

So I apologize to Meghan McCain, for what it's worth, and will say of Media Matters "It's a fair cop." It was a crappy post, and a very thoughtless post (in both meanings of the word), and sexist, and by and large "brain-dead," on vituperative autopilot, and if I'd given it five minutes to breathe before hitting "POST" I would have edited it down to almost nothing.

I screwed up. I was nastier than I would have liked to have been and I can't even claim the thing was so studded with comedy gems it was "worth it." It wasn't.

It was unfair and mean, and definitely not for the highlight reel.

The other thing was that it wasn't perfectly honest, because while McCain's post was a stack of FAIL and just your standard "people will link me if I slam Palin for the bazillionth time," it did have at least one sorta funny line which was better than half the stuff I wrote. Something like, when Palin (in McCain's skit) is asked to sum up her philosophy, she says "Freedom and Ronald Reagan and freedom," which isn't going to into the Comedy Hall of Fame or anything, but it was at least a decent joke, and better than most of the ones I was tossing in her direction.

So, yeah: Guilty. And not proud.

Oh: In building its case against me, Media Matters bizarrely fails to quote a part that is undeniably sexist and instead quotes this, which isn't:

This seems to be the go-to topic for un-bright women posing dishonestly as conservatives.

Sorry, you're wrong there. That's not sexist. It's also not funny, but it's not meant to be funny: It's just a true, declarative sentence. Meghan McCain annoys the right because, of course, like many I-Play-A-Republican-On-TV "Republicans" she is relentlessly promoted by a media always looking for the next fake Republican to interview about how bad all other Republicans are.

If Meghan McCain has written posts advancing any sort of Republican policy goal, apart from her breezy "I believe in limited government" prefatory nonsense before she starts in on "But here's why all those people who believe in limited government actually suck," well, I have not read it.

What I read from her again and again is how much I suck, and what makes that obnoxious is not that she's saying I suck (take a number, the media is full of such people eager to tell me I suck) but she does so under a false flag.

That's dishonest. I don't credit Meghan McCain with the savvy to understand that is the game being played here; nevertheless, that is the game, and she is an unwitting pawn in it.

Let me propose that Meghan McCain spend the next three months supporting what she likes about mainstream Republican positions in her columns and then report back to me about how often MSNBC asks her to appear on camera.

posted by Ace at 01:39 PM

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