Well, at least Dale Courtney announced his disgust before posting a video clip of Saturday Night Live’s skit about Todd Palin and the parentage of his daughter’s child.
I suppose that’s an improvement, but Dale does feel it necessary to make the point that progressives must think it’s funny to joke about incest, pedophilia, and the like. That’s absurd, of course, just as it’s absurd to suggest that all conservatives trade in racist jokes. But Dale’s world seems to have been shaken just a bit, so I’ll join him in denouncing as vile, tasteless, and utterly inappropriate this or any joke about who fathered Bristol Palin’s baby — or who gave birth to Todd Palin’s youngest child. In fact, and I’ve said this before, candidates’ kids should be kept out of the spotlight and the ugliness inside it, and I hate jokes about incest as much as I hate jokes about race.
Now, in the sentences above, I’ve probably given enough context that any of my readers, even without morning caffeine, can guess what the SNL joke was — and this is to give understanding to what I’m condemning. But I don’t feel the need to lift ugliness from one spot in the blogosphere to infect mine. Dale not only has the video clip, but much of the text of the joke. Wouldn’t it be better to spend more time commenting (negatively, I hope) on trash than in providing it a bigger audience?
And no, I didn’t see the SNL piece. Don’t intend to. That’s my point. Tell me that a joke depends on the horror of incest for a laugh, and I’ll join you in condemning it. It’s an SNL skit, for heaven’s sake; it doesn’t require much more digging for context, as I would if someone told me a local pastor’s book had a racist bit of commentary in it, or accused a Maya Angelou book of being too sexually explicit for a teenager. I’d read it, fully, and provide citations for my critique — but a nasty TV skit probably needs only a brief description, not the full audio-visual with accompanying text. Nonetheless, I’m sure it’ll make Dale’s day that I join him in thinking that the skit was disgusting. That’s certainly not a “progresive” or “conservative” thing.