You probably recall the very funny joke that the old-timey Rick Santorum sugar dad Foster Friess told last week. If not, here it is:
“This contraception thing, my gosh, it's so inexpensive,” Friess told host Andrea Mitchell. “You know, back in my days, they'd use Bayer aspirin for contraceptives. The gals put it between their knees and it wasn't that costly.”
Now, if you're like me, and I know I am, you probably thought to yourself, "self? Looks like Rick Santorum is having his ridiculous presidential campaign financed by a horrible wealthy ancient asshole. Why am I not surprised? Because this isn't surprising, that's why." And then you didn't even bother mentioning it on your lame-ass liberal comedy snark-blog, because while it is kind of entertaining to drop grenades into fish-barrels, no matter how clever you are, the 9,145,213rd joke on any given topic is going to suck. (See Facebook, et passim.)
But then, if you rummage through the Corner, you'll note that the inmates are still playing poo-catch about this shit, days after everyone else reached the obvious conclusion that Foster Freiss is an embarrassing ancient madman trying to breathe life into serial dipshit Rick Santorum's chances to become King of the First World. (Cue a frizzy-haired Freissenstein placing a coprolite at the top of a Transylvanian tower, sticking a metal rod in it, and screaming "give this turd... LIFE!")
It begins with this depressing emanation from Michael Poterma.
Anybody who knows me knows how much I love awful jokes — including the real wheezers that everybody else thought were funny in the schoolyard, but somehow I am the only one who continues to think they’re funny decades later, as I enter advanced middle age.
Anybody who knows him thinks "fuck me I want to die, make him stop!" would be more precise. Do you know why whenever I am driving the car and my children are in the car and we pass a cemetary I say "people are dying to get in there"? Because I am a meanspirited sonofabitch, that's why. Also my dad did this to me, and besides, I have some sort of vague whiteguy notion that this will keep them from joining the Wu-Tang Clan.
So it's not clear what Poterma is blithering about. Besides this:
True: A joke shared among friends after a half-dozen scotches sounds rather different on a stone-cold-sober national MSNBC broadcast. I trust my feminist bona fides are in order: I reject the point of Friess’s joke as the dinosaurial misogyny that it is, and I reject the anti-sex, demeaning-to-women ideology that it represents.
To be fair, Poterma says that if you go to Freiss's blog you will discover a Compelling Excuse for His Joke. I myself did not get any farther than the hilarious banner picture of gay cowboys farting.
True comedy fans, however, will note that Poterma has said that an obviously misogynist anti-sex joke is what it is... at The National Review Online. Bourdieu would describe what happens next a "call to order":
The sooner we move beyond this, the better, but: What “anti-sex, demeaning-to-women ideology”? It was ill-advised, as he quickly appreciated, and I’m not sure it represents anything more than a lapse of judgment and a lack of an editing filter. And I trust the ideology you reference has nothing to do with the most liberating one I’m aware of – see my recent Q&A on In the Heart of the Gospel — (that which Rick Santorum is known to buy into)?
Edna O'Brien had this cold in 1960. But still. There are just some things you can't say at NRO -- that climate change is caused by humans, or that the Catholic Church may have in some isolated incidents been guilty of sexism. This is why people who know what they are talking about take NRO seriously.
Fortunately the Old Poop exists to recklessly paste stray facial hair on poor innocent bunny rabbits just trying to escape:
If, as I do, you live in the country, you have dozens of neighbors like Miss Strader – nice high-school girls who babysit your kids; you lose touch, they move to the next town, and you bump into them a couple of years later doing the late shift at the diner or the general store; they’re 23 or 24, with three kids by three different guys. And they’re still nice, and still kinda pretty, if aged beyond their years. But life and its opportunities are fled.
Hence birth control, more money for rural schools, better pay for teachers in rural schools...
“Free love” is free in the same sense all those government programs funded by Chinese debt are.
"Go to school, get a job." That is the Modern Left, motherfucker. A promise. Not a threat.