WASHINGTON — I like to think of Miss Sandra Fluke’s contretemps
with the madly admired Mr. Rush Limbaugh as, well, a fluke. She
objected to his joke about her being “a slut” and “a prostitute,”
and hesto presto the part-time Georgetown University law
student struck pay dirt. You object to my characterization of her
as “part-time”? How could she be a full-time law student and still
be appearing before Congress explicating the plight of co-eds with
$3000 contraceptive bills or others suffering the heart-break of
being rejected publicly at the pharmacy for insurance-coverage of a
birth control bill? Then there was all the other media attention
that came from Rush’s little joke. Yes, I see it as a fluke,
defined by the Dictionary of American Slang as “a
fortuitous accident.” Was not Miss Fluke felicitously named years
ago before anyone ever thought of talk radio?
Surely Miss Fluke will now become an outspoken advocate
for contraception, fighting the good fight for free birth control
five decades after the development of the pill — could anyone have
imagined the birth control pill’s ability to engender controversy
52 years after it became a staple of American life? Surely Miss
Fluke will branch out, defending all kinds of gynecological
innovations that trouble some, say, Catholics, or Southern
Baptists, or secular humanists, who are skeptical of Obamacare.
Perhaps she will become a champion of the manly condom. Of course,
she will pronounce on abortion whatever her religious convictions.
She will become a latter-day Gloria Steinem. But my guess is her
season of splendors will be short lived. I mean, who
is going to get exercised over birth control or other gynecological
innovations in the 21st century? Once the election is
over, and the Democrats have no need to corral the mindless women
who fall for this claptrap, Miss Fluke will be back at law school
immersed in the mysteries of contract law. Her moment of fame
really was a fluke.
Yet, it did open my eyes and probably Rush’s too. Every
few days for over two decades he has been hazarding a reckless joke
and seeing how it plays. I have too. Now, however, an audacious
woman, Miss Kirsten Powers, has shown us the rancor and absence of
standards that diminish our public discourse. She says she is a
Liberal, and I shall take her at her word, but she seems to me to
be a very old-fashioned Liberal, one that does not flinch at the
evidence.
Writing for the Daily Beast, Miss Powers has come
up with a lot of foul-mouthed media personalities far fouler than
Rush. I was not aware of their existence and I doubt Rush was. They
lack wit and humor and they have no ideas, just irritable
one-liners. In fact, after the desperate pursuit of an idea they
settle for scurrility. Thus the physically disfigured Bill Maher
calls Sarah Palin a “dumb t***” and a “c***.” He jokes about Rick
Santorum’s wife using a “vibrator,” nothing about the immensely
more humorous spectacle of his using a vibrator or even a dirty
book. Miss Powers quotes some slug by the name of Ed Schultz as
saying Palin set off a “bimbo alert,” and calling Laura Ingraham,
can you believe it, a “right-wing slut”? Then there is Keith
Olbermann wishing that right-wing columnist S.E. Cupp had been
aborted by her parents and describing Michelle Malkin as a
“mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick” — how very
literary.
This is the quality of mind that holds forth on Liberal
cable television. No one there objects to the gutter talk, which is
hurled at conservative women. No sponsors threaten to pull their
advertisements. That probably should not surprise me. I have been
arguing for months that Liberalism is dead. Here is proof that it
is brain dead.
Yet I cannot believe that this election is going to turn
on the question of whether the federal government is going to pay
for birth control procedures that have been around for 52 years.
The Democrats are aiming at the moron vote, and let them have it.
The real question here is religious liberty and the matter of
choice. Should churches and individuals have to pay for medical
procedures they do not approve of? The Democrats, the party of the
straitjacket, says yes. The Republicans, the party of choice and of
personal freedom, says no.
