I guess this Duck Dynasty thing is a big deal...

Judging by the conversations I've heard this morning, this Duck Dynasty flap is quite a big deal. Just like the attacks focused on Chik-Fil-A, tolerance cuts both ways.

 

I doubt adding any comment to Matt Taibbi's article could possibly make this cut and paste any better...

Sarah Palin's Impressively Incoherent 'Duck Dynasty' Comments
By MATT TAIBBI
POSTED: December 19, 2:35 PM ET

I miss Sarah Palin. I was bummed when she decided not to run for president the last time around. It would have been hard to find a challenger to Barack Obama less funny than Mitt Romney (notwithstanding Barrett Foa's outstanding "I Believe" Romney-musical spoof), and because the president himself isn't exactly a barrel of laughs, we ended up with one of the unfunniest (and also angriest) White House races in history.

That opportunity is lost, but it's still fun when Palin injects herself into the news. She's done so this week by jumping to the defense of Duck Dynasty's patriarch Phil Robertson, who remarkably got himself suspended from his own smash-hit reality TV show by extolling the virtues of the vagina over the anus in the pages of GQ (in an interview by the always-excellent Drew Magary). Robertson was professing, one might even say over-professing, his ignorance as to the appeal of gay sex – he put it this way:

It seems like, to me, a vagina – as a man – would be more desirable than a man's anus. That's just me. I'm just thinking: There's more there! She's got more to offer. I mean, come on, dudes . . . But hey, sin: It's not logical, my man. It's just not logical.

There's more there. Take that, anus! Robertson went on to provide a less bizarre, more Biblical explanation for his opposition to homosexuality. Then, in a separate piece on the GQ site, he also offered a 20th-century America version of Holocaust denial.

He said that as a young person in pre-civil rights Louisiana, he "never . . . saw the mistreatment of any black person" and that black people were happy (happier?) back then:

Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.

After all of this came out, A&E suspended the show more or less immediately amid a blizzard of "That guy we just spent years turning into a rock star sure as heck doesn't represent the views of our ad-sales department!" denials. This of course immediately inspired howls of protest from Duck fans and conservative politicians alike.

Sarah Palin, ably staying in character in her new role as a professional media ambulance-chaser, was one of the first to rush to Robertson's defense. She posted a photo of herself with the Robertsons and tweeted the following:

Free speech is endangered species; those "intolerants" hatin' & taking on Duck Dynasty patriarch for voicing personal opinion take on us all

Conservatives have always had trouble grasping the difference between public censorship and private enterprise. With a few exceptions, like whistleblower laws and National Labor Relations Board protections against being fired for off-site discussions about work conditions (exceptions that, in almost every case, conservatives bitterly opposed), there is no legal or constitutional right to free speech on private property.

You can be fired for calling your boss a dick, and you can just as easily be let go by a profit-seeking media company for imperiling its relationship with advertisers. And incidentally, this is the way true conservatives, and especially true hardcore speech advocates, have always wanted it.

Could you imagine the uproar if someone passed a law saying that Martin Bashir couldn't be bounced from a broadcast job for saying Sarah Palin was a good candidate to have feces shoved in her mouth? Now that would be censorship.

Remember, nobody heard a peep from Sarah Palin about free speech after that episode. Bashir earlier this year tiptoed across the line in an angry diatribe about Palin's invocation of slavery imagery, which she had somewhat amazingly used to describe the suffering (presumably white) middle Americans will feel when they are forced to pay for the "free stuff" the Obama administration is handing out, i.e. health care:

Our free stuff today is being paid for today by taking money from our children and borrowing from China. When that money comes due and, this isn't racist, so try it, try it anyway, this isn't racist, but it's going to be like slavery when that note is due. Right? We are going to be beholden to a foreign master.

She elaborated:

And it is in a way, it is slavery in a way, because it is making all of us subservient to the government, and it was never about health care. It was about control.

Palin's mind is amazing. Slavery was purely a private-enterprise abomination. It had nothing to do with being subservient to the government. It was the opposite of that, actually. She was also wrong in the sense that the health care program isn't "free stuff" (even those who will receive subsidized care will be paying in one form or another for their policies).

So she pulled off a Friedman-esque anatomical impossibility there, getting three feet in her mouth at the same time.

First, she was wrong about slavery. Then she was wrong about health care. Then, thirdly, she was almost insanely insensitive and inappropriate in her use of the word slavery at all, comparing white middle class angst over having to partially subsidize health care for their poor (and mostly nonwhite) neighbors to being whipped and tortured across generations of institutional racist terror.

Bashir reacted to this by telling a story about slaves who were forced to defecate in each others' mouths, and then suggested that Palin, having "scraped the barrel of her long-deceased mind," was a "good candidate" for the same treatment. Soon after, he was essentially forced out of the network.

Again, Palin had no problem with that. In fact, Palin lauded the network once Bashir was out:

It was refreshing to see though, that many in the media did come out and say, 'Look, our standards have got to be higher than this . . .'

The thing is, Robertson's ouster by A&E was exactly the same sort of move – a network sucking it up and distancing itself from an on-air figure because of controversial speech. But because Robertson's views were ones Palin apparently agrees with, suddenly she wasn't talking about anything being refreshing, but instead cried that "free speech is an endangered species."

Palin's inability to grasp the difference between a first-amendment violation and corporate calculation is amazing because she literally just published a book on the subject. Her newly-released War-on-Christmas diatribe, Good Tidings and Great Joy, is all about the efforts by evil Jesus-hating atheists to sue the Christmas out of our public lives. (It's one of the funniest things ever written, by the way. I would write a review but I don't think I could make it all the way to the end without a cardiac episode).

In writing this new book, Palin presumably spent the whole of the last year or so staring right at the issue of what may be said on private property versus what may be said on public property – the difference between putting up a nativity scene in front of a courthouse and putting one up on your lawn. Yet as this latest controversy shows, the underlying issue is still a total blur to her.

Of course, Palin has a long history of getting things not just wrong, but exactly wrong. In the book, for instance, she describes buying her husband Todd "a nice, needed powerful gun" in the wake of the Sandy Hook shootings and resulting anti-gun fervor. She described this warm act as a "small act of civil disobedience" that was "fun."

As Alex Falcone for the Portland Mercury noted in this humorous review, this gets the term "civil disobedience" perfectly backwards:

Not only is that a hilarious re-purposing of a term with a noble history, it's also a perfect misuse of BOTH WORDS. Buying guns is both legal and dangerous, making it an act of uncivil obedience.

Anyway, this whole episode speaks to a bigger dilemma facing the Republican Party. Like Palin, the party itself hasn't seemed to grasp the fact that the country's broad rejection of its base's more extreme views on things like race, class and gender isn't some injustice to be railed against, but plain demographic truth.

If your "moderate" presidential candidate from 2012, the guy who was bashed by the party base for being insufficiently hardcore, is a guy who essentially said, after a failed speech to the N.A.A.C.P., that all black voters want is "free stuff," then you're just not going to win a lot of elections in a country that's going to be majority nonwhite within a few decades.

Similarly, if your party's political rhetoric is full of suggestions that poor people are poor because they don't like to work, well, you're not going to win a lot of votes from poor people, who also happen to be increasingly many in number. That's not a misunderstanding or an injustice, that's just a fact.

Whether or not Robertson and his entertainingly hairy family should have been fired is beside the point. The point is that A&E realized there was no way to make the numbers work if they had a guy who thinks black people were happier before civil rights as a front man.

It surely wasn't personal, but just a business decision, and not a terribly hard one, either. It's weird that the Republican Party has such trouble making the same kind of call in choosing its leading characters.



Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politic...-duck-dynasty-comments-20131219#ixzz2o9HbwPJM

 

Personally, I've never watched Duck Dynasty, but you have to admire the courage of conviction that Phil Robertson has for speaking his mind. I don't think you're going to hear lies or double-talk from him like you would, say, Barack Obama. Whether you agree or disagree with his opinion, you have to agree that the he has the right to say what he wants. A&E probably should have left his show on the air and let the viewers decide whether he stays.

 

I've seen the show a couple of times but didn't consider it remarkable enough to become a regular viewer and like you, I admire the guy for saying what he thinks & not fearing the backlash. It seems to me, in this "new normal" created under BO, people of faith are the only group that isn't protected against these hate-filled attacks.

 

...and to moron joe...
Are you capable of coming up with an original thought on any subject? Why do you insist on posting the words of someone else?

 

I just love when a Right-winger says anything sexist, homophobic, racist, or just plain stupid, it suddenly becomes a 1st Amendment issue. Then of course you have the idiots on this forum (see post above) admiring people like this for "speaking their minds". I wonder if he will respect me for calling him out for being a complete idiot? After all, I just spoke my mind. I think the truth of the matter is that you can only admire this guy for saying these things if you happen to agree with them in the first place. Enter Sarah Palin and her usual hypocrisy. Let's not forget that Martin Bashir was just speaking his mind.

This usual hypocrisy from the Right is what makes them such easy targets for ridicule. This is just the latest example.

 

So, expressing disagreement with a certain lifestyle & a vile, violent personal attack are similar in your way of thinking? Hmmmm. Says plenty about you.

 

Even though fags, homos, queers, he-shes, LBGT...(whatever name you wish to assign) are abominations of nature, they're still deserving of all the protections and privileges enshrined in the US Constitution...just as Downs Syndrome babies deserve protection from Obamacare eugenics.

However, just because these LBGT freakoids have civil rights, it doesn't mean the Government nor the Media should promote their deviant lifestyles as "normal" to the youth of America. The parents of these impressionable children have rights (and responsibilities), too.

God Bless Phil Robertson!



Sign the petition at...http://istandwithphil.com/

 

Normally I would just make fun of you guys, but watching you defending this guy for being a bigot and a racist is better than anything I could paint you guys with. Please, by all means, keep posting. It really says so much more about you than I possibly could.

 

Oh please...Write more.

 

How funny it is that there is just one person here who wants anyone shut up. Somehow it fits your normal procedures, doesn't it Mr. RB?

 

I pretty much covered the topic. Did you do the right thing and sign the petition?

 

It's admirable that the guy has courage to speak his mind. When you speak your mind, it's just bullshit. BTW, how about speaking your mind/bullshit and tell us your opinion of when you think a life begins? You never answered in the other thread. Come on, be like the Duck Dynasty guy and have some courage.

 

Joe, nothing Phil Robertson said was either bigoted or racist. Do you even know the meanings of those words?

 

AHA--HA--HA--HA--HA...

Keep going, this is gold.

 

Just another ignorant, intolerant southerner speaking his mind. Both of you.

 

Just as I thought - you're a spineless wimp. Why don't you "man up" for a change. Oh, I forgot... you're a liberal.

 

Please just respect my courage to speak my mind.

 

I see this guy as more ignorant than a real hater. He is just plain stupid. He is like most southern bible thumpers. If y'all ain't exactly like us, you're weird. It's just a lack of education combined with a culture of prejudice and white ignorance. He wasn't courageous for speaking his mind, he was just dumb enough to do when someone was listening with a pen in their hand. Go ahead and make him a hero if you want. It only says that you are just as ignorant as he is. That's not exactly news.

 

'Tolerance' does not mean to 'accept as right' or 'to embrace' something. To me, from what I have read of his GQ statements, the guy was not being intolerant in that article. However, from comments I have read here and elsewhere about what he said, I would say he is probably experiencing a lot of intolerance.

From his comments, I am sure the guy puts me in the same category as gays and others since I had my fair share of sex before marriage, lived with my wife 'in sin' before we were married, have enjoyed my fair share of alcohol, etc. Somehow, though, I am not offended by his personal beliefs.