I wonder if Bill Maher will really get some grief after his crack on his HBO show Friday in a brief discussion of Rush Limbaugh and oxytontin. He said that it was too bad that Rush didn't "croak" using the drug instead of Heath Ledger. His audience greeted it with silence and Bill seemed to realize that maybe he wished he could take that back. It reminded me of Robert Christgau's offhand complaint, after the murder of John Lennon, that it's always the Lennons and not the McCartneys that get bumped off.
Meanwhile, in the wake of the David Shuster suspension at MSNBC for his "pimped out" crack about Chelsea Clinton on the campaign trail, one is reminded of the now-infamous -- but once largely swept under the rug -- Chelsea putdown uttered by John McCain back in 1998. (Will Bunch at his popular Attytood blog brought it my attention again.) The media, by and large, failed to repeat it back then, or since, noting only that it was quite foul and leaving it at that. At a GOP fundraiser, McCain quipped: "Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Because her father is Janet Reno." Here is the full story, and how the media handled it, from my old colleague David Corn.
http://www.salon.com/news/1998/06/25newsb.html
4 comments:
Maybe it was a reaction to the "joke" I thought up when the man crashed a small plane on the White House grounds underneath her window. "She has to stop dating older men." She was 16 at the time and the press reported they were not at home at the time. I was working on the archaeology of the lot that Spielbergs' "Batteries Not Included" had been filmed un Alphabet City, NYC when Bette Midler started saving pocket "parks".
get your 'pimped out.' shirts, hats, buttons, mugs, stickers, magnets, mousepads, and more at pimpedout.dirtyword.net
mccain's ugly-chelsea remark was was never widely reported because it was never confirmed, as even the salon article admits.
The article did not say it wasn't confirmed. It simply stated, at the time, that there was no tape. There were obviously many witnesses!
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