Well, it finally happened. I suppose it was only a matter of time before one of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s well-rumored, profanity-laced harangues would surface while he was in office. Indeed, it was only a snippet of his Chicago-sharpened talent, but it was worth the wait.
Apparently, in a meeting this past summer concerning plans for Democrat-on-Democrat attacks over the health care bill, Emanuel referred to the idea of such measures as “fucking retarded.” Awesome. His statement’s bold, brutal, South Philly-esque candor in contrast with the established decorum of his administrative position achieves a monumental horse-head-in-silk-sheets-level juxtaposition.
Naturally, every P.C.-touting paladin came out of the woodwork, chiding Emanuel for his insensitivity, inappropriateness, offensiveness, etc., and among them, of course, was The Pitbull. It should come as no surprise that Sarah Palin chose to speak out on the matter, her special interest stemming from her son Trig Palin having Down syndrome. In fact, she called for President Obama to fire Emanuel over the issue, stating the phrase was equivalent to that of a racial slur. Well, let me save Emanuel some time in responding by saying that Palin’s line of reasoning is “fucking retarded.”
Had Emanuel characterized the aforementioned group’s constituency by garbling his words and pounding his chest with his hand or noted the irony of Palin naming her son after a branch of mathematics, the offended groups and Palin would have had something to shake their fists at, as those actions would be, and are, distasteful.
Palin’s comparison of “fucking retarded” to a racial slur is absurd. The phrase, as I implied above, is a general referent, not a personal one, so her likening is off-base from the get-go. Even if Emanuel described the group as “retards,” the disparity in the magnitudes of her comparison’s components still remains. The kind of malignant mentality a racial slur is indicative of emphasizes the historically universal and still-pervasive shortcomings of social perception, the victims and injustices of which being prevalent to such an extent as to render the intellectual prejudice Palin has in mind as merely inconsiderate and unfair.
In this very sense, Palin’s call to oust Emanuel makes a mountain of a mole hill. But still, why the fervor? I believe it’s simply Emanuel’s irascible reputation being in the public mind combined with Palin’s proneness for being wantonly inconsistent. (Now, if there was some way to provide evidence for my theory and also introduce it with a completely ridiculous statement.)
Luckily, Rush Limbaugh decided to speak up. Last week, he purposely misquoted Emanuel several times in an effort to disparage the concerned groups’ members, calling an upcoming meeting between them and Obama a “retard summit.” It was a thinly veiled attempt to take some cheap shots and perhaps push Palin’s buttons. She evaded immediate response, relying on her spokesperson to indirectly refer to Limbaugh’s comments as “crude and demeaning.” She appeared on “Fox News Sunday” to backtrack her non-criticisms of Limbaugh by excusing his usage of “retard” as being purely satirical. You betcha, and so was my “trig” joke.
Furthermore, to make her inconsistency even more unbearably evident, I’d like to ask where Palin was last month when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s “Negro dialect” quote surfaced? She literally could have used the same exact argument she had against Emanuel, albeit in a different, if more appropriate, manner.
It seems Palin has definitively identified herself as less of champion and more of a charlatan. And as for Emanuel, if people wanted to get on his case for anything, it should only have been for being vulgar. But, then again, we already knew that, didn’t we?
