Yeah, people often like the victim role.

Conservatives (in my neck of the Indiana) are totally fruit loopy over Palin. (Knowing nothing about her. Hell, who really did? Until they looked?)

5 books of interest on that tell of what is currently, or what is to come:
Bad Money – Kevin Phillips
Trillion Dollar Meltdown – Charles R. Morris
Chain of Blame -Mathew Padilla, Paul Muolo
Twilight in the Desert – Matthew R. Simmons
The Dollar Crisis – Richard Duncan

There’s plenty more, but I think those tell some interesting things about where we are at.

Good Blog.

If I’m not mistaken, John Adams’ supporters were the ones who originally uncovered Thomas Jefferson’s affair with his slave, Sally Hemings, and turned that into a talking point and the subject of political cartoons (the original SNL, really.) The worst example of this was when Andrew Jackson’s opponents drug out his wife Rachel’s no-good ex-husband to proclaim that he never signed the divorce papers, effectively turning her into a bigamist. She was supposedly so traumatized by the subsequent shaming that she died soon after the election.

Justified or not, lampooning presidential candidates and their families is about as American as apple pie. And while people have always called foul, only now does it seem to be something that’s regarded as a character flaw of the opposing politician instead of sticking to the person who’s the subject of the innuendo and parody and the grain of truth that might be there.

I really don’t know which way I will vote at this point, but my inability to take celebrities serious has pushed me away from the Blue side of things. All of the jokes, the skits, the cute videos, the celebublogs, the personal digs, and the whole humor-bullying have turned this important political decision into a middle-school slam book.

That said, if you look at the comment streams coming from the New York Post site and on the SNL site, you’ll find quite a bit of indignation that anyone would attack the Palin family with such a preposterous lie, and nary a peep about whether incest should be the subject of a joke.

You’re approaching this from an objective, firm position. The misplaced anger is in trying to read this as a smear on the Palins instead of as the setup to highlight the absurdity of mainstream media. Incest isn’t “the punch line,” nor should it ever be.

(When will you make it out this way? Would love to see you and meet the family.)

However, there’s a just a little piece of me that wants to say that some topics aren’t funny. And SNL’s use of a topic that is so emotionally charged and brazenly loaded (incest) isn’t comedy, it almost appears demeaning. I’m not suggesting a form of censorship or control over SNL’s humor or that a particular topic is ‘offlimits.’ One can argue that humor is in the ear of the beholder, but I find it difficult to imagine a way in which a joke about children being sexually abused by an adult in the family is humorous.

There’s a joke about Tiger Woods dropping in at a country club in south Georgia – the butt of the joke is clearly the redneck country club manager, with a side-dressing of sympathy for what it must be like to be a highly successful black man in the deep south (and yes, I’m a southerner, so that gives me license to make fun of rednecks?). But I don’t tell that one much because if you only half-listen or cut me off in the middle you might think I was telling a racist joke.

Lesson in here somewhere about people hearing what they want to hear?