Looks like we’re holding the victimization pageant over for a second exciting week.
A top aide to John McCain said Monday she thought comedian Tina Fey’s impersonation of Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin on NBC’s Saturday Night Live over the weekend was sexist because it portrayed the Alaska governor as lacking in substance…
“The portrait was very dismissive of the substance of Sarah Palin, and so in that sense, they were defining Hillary Clinton as very substantive, and Sarah Palin as totally superficial,” Fiorina told MSNBC earlier Monday. “I think that continues the line of argument that is disrespectful in the extreme, and yes, I would say, sexist in the sense that just because Sarah Palin has different views than Hillary Clinton does not mean that she lacks substance.”
Please. This is the same show that used a kid to play Dan Quayle. If a joke about the two of them being lightweights magically becomes sexist because she’s a woman, then the perennial GOP argument that Democrats are elitist must magically become racist as applied to Obama since now it can be misinterpreted as code for “uppity.” The writers aren’t calling her a bucket of fluff because she’s a woman or even because she’s a Republican (McCain isn’t portrayed that way on the show); they’re calling her that because she seemed to the left — and to some conservatives — as ill informed in the Gibson interview. Which brings us to our exit question, via Patterico fave Jan Crawford Greenburg: Is Team Maverick guilty of reverse sexism, i.e. demanding a lower standard for Palin than they’d demand for a male politician? Between Fiorina’s lame bit of demagoguery and McCain himself insisting that Obama’s lipstick comment was “the wrong thing to say” without being able to say why, they’re certainly doing nothing lately to ease Heather MacDonald’s worries.
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