My Send off for Helen Thomas

By now you know about Helen Thomas’ anti-Semitic flame out.  So let me give you my send off to her.  Its an apropos bit of dialogue from Clint Eastwood’s movie “White Hunter, Black Heart.” (note, this is the only awesome moment in the movie, but it is awesome.) Clint, some dude and a pretty woman were having dinner together, when she said pretty much Hitler had the right idea about the jews. The dude reveals he is Jewish and she keeps going saying anti-semitic stuff anyway. And then Clint pipes up (you can read it or watch it on video here and jump to the end):

The Fallacy of Assuming Everyone Thinks Like You (or “Fisking Keith Olbermann”)

Yeah, several posts ago I wondered if it was necessary to fisk Olbermann, but I am compelled to, here.

But first let me tell you a story.  Now I have said that I support affirmative action in a limited sort of way, based on the present reality of racism and other forms of bigotry.  And I remember saying that once in a Constitutional History class back when I was an undergraduate and a man vehemently disagreed with me that racism was a real problem.  He said something like this:

I don’t think racism is so bad.  At my fraternity, a black guy wanted to join.  And one guy said we shouldn’t let him join because he was black.  So I stood up and said that the fact he was black didn’t matter.  And we voted to let him in.

That’s a paraphrase, of course.  And this is what I said in response.

OMG, Did you Hear what Rahm Emanuel said?

So White House Chief of staff was talking strategy with liberal democrats and when they suggested going after conservative democrats he called them, or the idea, “fucking retarded.”

So then, Sarah Palin is facebooking about this, getting angry at him using retarded in a pejorative sense.

Well first off, I defend any mother’s right to be ferocious in defense of her young.  I call it Momma Bear syndrome.  I always felt that this was what was going on when Palin made her acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in 2008.  If you remember they had announced she was the Vice Presidential nominee, and then the Democrats went after her with frankly a viciousness I had never seen before in politics.  I mean the phrase The Wilding of Sarah Palin describes the lunatic attacks on her and her family better than any other phrase I had read.