Joking about Down Syndrome. How hilarious.
Fox could be heading to Sarah Palin‘s doghouse after the animated show “Family Guy” appeared to mock her son’s Down syndrome on Sunday night.
In the taste-challenged episode, one of the show’s characters dates a woman who apparently suffers from Down syndrome. The woman makes comparisons to Palin’s 22-month-old son, Trig.
“My dad’s an accountant, and my mom’s the former governor of Alaska,” the mentally disabled character said, without mentioning any names.
One day someone will explain to me why it’s apparently OK to step way the heck over the line when making a show of disliking Sarah Palin, right? Good. Because I really don’t get it.
by 
Political comedy. Everything is acceptable.
Sarah Palin has everything as a plus in our politically correct world. A strong, bright, attractive, determined, woman. What’s the problem? Do her critics really have any basis for the criticsm? Hmm? I remember similar furor and harsh criticism about some TV ad for the Super Bowl. Apparently no one new what the ad was about and yet opposition was fierce and all the way to the White House. I wonder if there is some connect?
i don’t like the Family Guy. But Palin set herself up for this one. What the NY Daily News fails to mention is that Palin backtracked her criticism of Rush Limbaugh’s use of the word retard. So, once more she shows herself to be a hypocrite. When Rahm Emanuel calls people retarded, it’s offensive and says he should resign but when Rush Limbaugh calls people retarded then Palin calls it “satire”.
this was from her interview with Chris Wallace:
CHRIS WALLACE (host): OK, but, Rush Limbaugh weighed in this week, and he said this: “Our politically correct society is acting like some giant insult’s taken place by calling a bunch of people who are retards, retards.”
PALIN: He was satirical in that —
WALLACE: Wait, let me finish. “I mean, these people, these liberal activists are kooks.” Should Rush Limbaugh apologize?
PALIN: They are kooks, so I agree with Rush Limbaugh. Rush Limbaugh was using satire to bring attention to what this politically correct —
WALLACE: But he used the “R” word.
PALIN: Using satire. Name-calling by anyone — I teach this to my children. You teach this to your children and your grandchildren, too. Name-calling by anyone, it’s just unnecessary. It just wastes time. Let’s speak to the issues and again, let’s move on.
WALLACE: But you know what some people are going to say, Governor, and have said. They say, look, when it’s their political adversary, Rahm Emanuel, she’s going to call him out — he’s indecent, apologize. But when it’s a political friend like Rush Limbaugh, oh, it’s satire.
PALIN: I didn’t hear Rush Limbaugh call a group of people whom he did not agree with “f-ing retards,” and we did know that Rahm Emanuel, it’s been reported, did say that. There’s a big difference there.
the interview http://mediamatters.org/research/201002070015
Family Guy is superb, and it’s one of those comedies that avoids discrimination by happily insulting everyone.
To be honest, this po-faced denunciation of humour is something that has made the Left insufferable since they embraced political correctness. One thing the Right should do, especially since we tend to support freedom of speech where the Left are all too keen on suppressing it, is to avoid playing their stupid game and just shrug this stuff off. Let the Left be the political movement who campaign to stop people using the “wrong” figures of speech and clamp down on comedians telling the “wrong” jokes. The Right have everything to gain and nothing to lose by disassociating themselves from such totalitarianism.
What Palin should have done is to point out that the Democrats are big fans of speech-policing and that it is therefore hypocritical and revealing of Rahm Emmanuel to call his opponents “retards”, while also saying that she herself is a bit more laid-back and, unlike the Democrats, doesn’t go into conniptions every time someone uses a word that they want banned. There are votes to be won there.
JR,
I do however agree with Palin that those are two entirely different things. The word “retard” has a technical and correct meaning when applied to mentally disabled people. Limbagh was saying that there is nothing wrong with calling a retard a retard. That’s not what Emmanuel did: he simply used the word “retard” as an insult against people he doesn’t like. I’m sure you can understand that there is also a world of difference between calling a woman “a woman” and calling a man “a woman” in order to insult him. The latter implies that being a woman is a bad thing where the former doesn’t.
Squander Two,
these are Rush Limbaugh’s words:
“Our political correct society is acting like some giant insult’s taken place by calling a bunch of people who are retards, retards,” Limbaugh said on the show. “I mean these people, these liberal activists are kooks.
“They are loony tunes. And I’m not going to apologize for it, I’m just quoting Emanuel. It’s in the news,” he continued.
“I think their big news is he’s out there calling Obama’s number one supporters f’ing retards. So now there’s going to be a meeting. There’s going to be a retard summit at the White House. Much like the beer summit between Obama and Gates and that cop in Cambridge.”
Rush Limbaugh is clearly calling liberals “retards”. These are his exact words: There’s going to be a retard summit at the white house. Much like the beer summit between Obama and Gates and that cop in Cambridge.”
Limbaugh’s comments a very clear, Palin initially criticized him and then backtracked because it’s obvious that she doesn’t want to get on his bad side.
I must say in the humour wars, I agree with Squander Two. It’s not my job to jump to tremendously offended status everytime a word is used… I recall when Obama made his Special Olympics joke. I had no problem with it.
I listened to the Rush Limbaugh clip and was not offended. Considering it’s Rush, I’d say it was quite…tame. I couldn’t find the Emmanual clip to listen to.
This Family Guy joke seems to be against Palin, not disabled folks, from what I can tell… and I’m used to people making fun of Palin. Must say it’s getting old, it’s not terribly creative, and yes, to ask the same question as Brigitte, why is this perfectly acceptable in an ongoing fashion? Furthermore, I doubt very much I would have found it funny. But am I offended? Not really.
Well, it looks like the only person who was “offended” was Sarah Palin. She was so upset that she called for Rahm Emanuel to be fired. But she excused Rush Limbaugh’s comments as just “satire”. Now she sent out her daughter Bristol, to be her attack dog and call the Family Guy out so Sarah will minimize looking so hypocritical.
So, to go back to the original question”why it’s apparently OK to step way the heck over the line when making a show of disliking Sarah Palin, right?”
Because she is a hypocrite. And when things got tough in Alaska, she quit. And because she was never qualified to be vice-president of the United States.
I criticize Sarah Palin but i don’t have a problem criticizing democrats too.
I have never seen “The Family Guy”, first, because I hate talking dogs and, second, because my early-teen nephews think it is absolutely hilarious. Unlike Andrea, though, I am offended by a storyline that features a young woman with Down syndrome. And not because it has anything to do with Sarah Palin but because it ridicules vulnerable and innocent human beings. Sarah Palin, like all people who choose to insert themselves into the media spotlight, is fair game. People with Down syndrome are not. When we lose sight of that, we become a coarser and crueler society. I guess I’m not progressive enough to think that shouldn’t offend me.