David Feherty Jokes About the Deaths of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi

David Feherty, a sports analyst for CBS, proved that he shouldn't give up his day job when he offered a little joke (a very little joke as it turned out) in a Dallas Magazine for which Dabid Feherty had to apologize.

"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."

Variants of that joke have been around since there have been obnoxious public figures. However it is not done to wish for or even fantasize that elected public officials in a democracy are killed. True, the Left used to do it all the time with President George W. Bush, even making a film fantasy about it, and recently Wanda Sykes imagined Rush Limbaugh dying of kidney failure.

Nevertheless, it is not done and David Feherty, now realizing that, has officially apologized to Speaker Pelosi and Senator Harry Reid. No apology was forthcoming to Osama bin Laden. It is fine to wish him dead. In fact, it is all but required.

It is true that the Second Coming will likely happen before Wanda Sykes apologizes to Rush Limbaugh, but that is the essential double standard that stems from a very sad fact. That fact is that the Left are very often rude, crude, and socially unacceptable and are unashamed about it. This is true even in personal, face to face, real time situations and not just on the Internet, which encourages rudeness in almost everyone for the anonymity and distance it provides.

The coarsening of public discourse has been a decades long process. It is practically required for certain people to be disagreeable while disagreeing. In that way the person disagreeing and being disagreeable validates their own commitment to their point of view. If one is willing to wish ones opponent to die or to use any other kind of insult, that must mean that one's passion for one's own opinion is unquestioned.

Of course it is also unattractive and not effective in trying to change hearts and minds. No one who voted for Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid is going to change their vote simply because David Feherty imagines them being killed in an elevator. Nor are any of Rush Limbaugh's myriads of admirers going to tune him out because Wanda Sykes called him a traitor and wished him to die of kidney failure.

It used to be that political discourse was designed to appeal to the conscience, to reveal the absurdity of an opposing view, to make plain that truth of the thing being said or the falseness of the thing being attacked. Now, for too many people, it seems to be just a way to vent.

Source: David Feherty shouldn't get pass for tasteless joke - but neither should Wanda Sykes, Mike Lupia, New York Daly News, May 11th, 2009