Faux Outrage: Wanda Sykes and David Feherty

Photo from source, New York Daily News

Oh, for pete's sake. We as a nation are a bunch of wimpy candy-asses sometimes. A famous person says something off-color, and everybody goes batshit about it. And this time, it is happening on both sides.

Sports announcer David Feherty made an admittedly tastless and not very funny (to me anyway) joke about Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, the military and assassination. I'm not sure under what circumstances the joke would be funny, so who knows what he was thinking.

And Wanda Sykes was hired to be funny at the White House Correspondents' dinner, and said some unkind things about Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Sarah Palin. This time, I thought they were funny. But I can see that not everybody would.

I would argue, however, that nobody is genuinely offended by either. Not really. It's manufactured outrage. Something to squawk about. Nobody thinks that Mr. Feherty wants Pelosi and Reid to die. And nobody thinks that Sykes really wants Limbaugh's kidneys to fail (she did not wish him death by the way). In Skykes' case, at least she was actually hired for her comedy, and delivered a routine several notches above her usual stuff on the taste scale.

But here's a different take:

[Excerpt]

David Feherty shouldn't get pass for tasteless joke - but neither should Wanda

Here is what David Feherty, a golf guy who poses no threat to the memory of Lenny Bruce, wrote in a Dallas magazine recently:

"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. . ."

Read more at: New York Daily News