The American Spectator

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Don’t say that something is gay when you mean that something is dumb or stupid. It’s insulting. It’s like if I thought this pepper shaker is stupid, and I said, “Man, this pepper shaker is so 16-year-old boy with a cheesy mustache.”

Somehow, though, liberal rules of civility are relaxed, if not disregarded entirely, when liberals are attacking conservatives. In May, performing at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Sykes herself benefited from this double standard. President Obama grinned widely as she told the following joke:

Rush Limbaugh said he hopes this administration fails, so you’re saying, “I hope America fails,” you’re like, “I don’t care about people losing their homes, their jobs, our soldiers in Iraq.” He just wants the country to fail. To me, that’s treason.

He’s not saying anything differently than what Osama bin Laden is saying. You know [addressing the president], you might want to look into this, sir, because I think Rush Limbaugh was the 20th hijacker. But he was just so strung out on OxyContin he missed his flight.

Rush Limbaugh, I hope the country fails, I hope his kidneys fail, how about that? He needs a good waterboarding, that’s what he needs.

With this joke, Sykes ran afoul of at least five taboos: She equated dissent with treason. She likened a domestic political opponent to a foreign enemy. She made fun of the disabled (Limbaugh’s past addiction to painkillers would entitle him to protection under the Americans with Disabilities Act). She made light of a form of interrogation that some people consider torture. And she wished somebody dead.

Possibly excepting the last one, these are all specifically liberal taboos. If a conservative violated any one of them, he would be on the inside track to be named “Worst Person in the World” by MSNBC blowhard Keith Olbermann—as CBS Sports golf analyst David Feherty had been a few days earlier for this joke, which he told in a column for Dallas’s D Magazine:

Despite how the conflict has been portrayed by our glorious media, if you gave any U.S. soldier a gun with two bullets in it, and he found himself in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Osama bin Laden, there’s a good chance that Nancy Pelosi would get shot twice, and Harry Reid and bin Laden would be strangled to death.

CBS Sports issued a statement saying that the joke was “an unacceptable attempt at humor and is not in any way condoned, endorsed or approved” by the network. Feherty himself later made a written apology: “In retrospect, it was inappropriate and unacceptable, and has clearly insulted Speaker Pelosi and Senator Reid, and for that, I apologize.”

Sykes, by contrast, did not apologize. Her joke drew only mild mainstream media criticism, along with cheers from many quarters on the left. Obama’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, did try to distance his boss from the joke—but he criticized Sykes only for making light of 9/11, which he called a subject “better left for serious reflection than comedy.” (This is a taboo that fell long ago. As a presidential candidate in 2007, Joe Biden disparaged the GOP’s then front-runner: “Rudy Giuliani—there’s only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun and a verb and 9/11.”)

In a 1992 decision striking down a hate-speech ordinance, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that the government may not “license one side of a debate to fight freestyle, while requiring the other to follow [Marquess] of Queensberry rules.” It’s still an apt description of how our politically correct arbiters of taste operate.