So, in things popular-media oriented, I resort to the wife test. I gauge my wife's reactions to the story.
She wasn't happy at all. She despises Desperate Housewives and the role it plays in continuing to coarsen culture. She asked why the First Lady would give any attention to that show. And, IMO, she's right.
With each passing month, the popular media gets more and more deranged. 20/20 did a show on strippers a week ago, and Good Morning America spent a lot of time promoting that show - as if we need yet another breathless expose of the fact that a wide range of women become strippers because of the money. Knock me over with a friggin' feather.
And I think there is a relevant point here. What the First Lady said wasn't that risque by this month's standards - but we are never going to arrest this slide by moving into the salacious territory just abandonded by the liberals in their march to Gomorah -and then calling it virtuous because the liberals have already slithered past that point.
Sometime, someplace, leaders have to say, no mas. Even if it ain't hip. Even if MSM reporters won't laugh very hard at your jokes.
Yeah, David Korn is a flaming hypocrite. Yeah, Laura wasn't as bad as a lot of stuff that out there. And sure, Laura got raves and approval from the MSM for being semi-cool. But at what price? De facto validation of the other side's depravity in the cultural wars? She was on the bully pulpit - and used it as a platform for fanning the flames instead of trying to pour water on them.
Very good!
On this type of website, people should be examining her position on abortion instead of this type of stuff.
Well, I am a wife; and I didn't take it at all to mean anything other than a "city slicker" joke.
Absolutely excellent post.
Exactly. That's because this is a POLITCAL forum, not a Christian forum. While many of us are Christians, this is not where we come to be preached to, lectured to, or judged.
Laura was FUNNY!!
Bravo, encore! And I like your "wife's test."
I'm a wife to my beloved husband, and a mom of three sons and a daughter. Which brings me to another problem with the First Lady's act that I've tried to make on this topic --but which doesn't get as much attention as "Desperate Housewives," Chippendales, and milking male horses.
That problem is that Laura's shtick echoed the prevailing culture's ridicule of men, especially white straight Republican men (gay men, Dims, and men of color get a pass).
I'm sick, sick sick of all the commercials and so-called comedies on TV that make men out to be inadequate doofuses.
And it seemed to me that Laura Bush was jumping on that bandwagon by hinting at sexual inadequacy --the whole "Mr. Excitement" thing, in the context of the Desperate Housewife/Chippendale innuendo.
Now I don't need a lecture that "it's not real, it's just a joke" so "lighten up" (wish I had a nickel for every time I heard that chestnut); or condescending instruction that the president is manly enough that we all know he's not inadequate.
That's not the point. The point is that there is far too much of this ridicule going on in our popular culture --to the huge detriment of our social fabric (which is exactly what the anti-family Left is out to achieve).
And Laura Bush just put her imprimatur on it.
As I noted in #410, Laura made several great jokes that gently poked fun at her husband, without crossing the line. But the Mr. Excitement shtick did.
If my daughter or my future daughters-in-law ever ridicule their husbands that way in public, you can bet they'll get a little talking-to from this future mother-in-law !