Fair’s Fair and Random Comments

I have absolutely no problem with Obama taking his licks over his very un-P.C. joke about the Special Olympics on the Jay Leno show the other night. It was thoughtless and crass and it's absolutely something my side would have eviscerated George W. Bush over. Any Obama supporter or liberal who is defending or minimizing the joke is a bloody hypocrite. For punishment, find a blackboard, whiteboard, or loose leaf sheet of paper and write 150 times "Obama's joke was insensitive and stupid and he needs to watch his mouth and I'm being a hypocrite by defending him."

On a somewhat related note, I got an anonymous comment on my last blog post. It was in reference to this phrase: "Make this Joe the Plumber 'tard GO AWAY!!!!" and the comment, titled 'tard, was: "It would be great if this word or its full form (retard) could be dropped from the vernacular … Thanks for thinking about this."

What precisely is wrong with the word retarded? I would understand if the commenter had objected to my slang use of 'tard in not referring to someone who is by definition retarded, but I saw another argument against the word retarded in a different post. Where the poster specifically meant to use the term in reference to a mentally/developmentally disabled individual. But of all the words that have fallen to the PC police (and in many cases thank gods for the PC police), why is retarded one of them when it is used in a dictionary sense (from Merriam-Webster: slow or limited in intellectual or emotional development or academic progress). So my use of it was improper and insensitive, but this person wants to not use the word at all and that I don't understand.

That doesn't mean Obama wasn't insensitive by his joke. Bad bad Obama! It's just a semantic argument that's always kind of bothered me. Though I certainly think that Joe the Plumber announcing to the conservative glitterati that they make him horny will certainly retard his upward mobility in the movement. Oh and apparently I also misspelled turgidity. I'm leaving the misspelling in there, along with my un-P.C. use of the word 'tard because that's what I wrote and I'll take my licks.