So you're never going to believe this, but Jason Biggs, the kid who made himself famous by pretending to fuck a pie, apparently has a really crude sense of humor and a filthy mouth to go with it. In case you haven't yet seen the mushroom cloud off in the distance to your right or felt the shockwave of indignation, let me help you out: The usual suspects among the conservative media are losing their minds over a couple of really crass comments Biggs made about Mitt Romney's wife, Ann, and Paul Ryan's wife, Janna, during last week's Republican National Convention. The offending cracks were offered via Twitter, as has become tradition in our culture, and were as follows:
I'd totes dip a pinky or two in Paul Ryan's wife's bleached asshole (she obvs bleaches her asshole). #RNC
"@godissanta420: @jasonbiggs How dare you ignore Ann Romney's asshole? ur un-American." Sorry ur right. I bet hers is un-bleached and hairy.
Tasteless? Extremely. Funny? Depends on your sense of humor, I guess. Over the line? Perhaps. Cause for the world to implode in on itself and a bunch of comically self-righteous members of the conservative media to suddenly, breathlessly clutch their pearls and turn into the Harper Valley PTA? No, not a chance. Stop me if you've heard this one before, but it's an offensive and vulgar joke made by a guy who makes his living in the entertainment industry, someone who has absolutely no influence on public policy or whose political opinions carry a single ounce of weight with anybody.
Biggs's Twitter feed is apparently a treasure trove of crudeness and it's entirely his own business if that's what he and those who follow him find funny. That particular form of media, which among all the rest has become the most conducive to verbal diarrhea, is like any other in at least one important respect: You don't like what you're seeing, you don't follow or you ignore. But as I've said before many times, that's not what we do these days. The opportunity to satisfy our perpetual need to feel personally victimized and to unleash a giant ration of turbulent outrage is just too great -- particularly when that highly selective outrage can be used to advance a specific political point of view, score a few pop culture PR points or collect an enemy scalp.
So you get what you're getting right now, which is Fox News trumpeting "Biggsgate" as its latest contrived controversy designed to rile up its audience, make it feel superior in both classiness and civility to the godless liberal menace it despises to the point of apoplexy, and divert its attention away from anything serious -- like the fact that Democrats are currently handing the GOP its ass through a startlingly impressive display of focus and backbone in Charlotte.
Yesterday, Megyn Kelly, who always comes off like an extravagantly groomed chihuahua who's very angry about being left in somebody's Louis Vuitton handbag for too long, curdled her face into that trademark sneer and lashed out at Biggs, calling him a "disgusting pig" and expressing well-rehearsed shock that Nickelodeon hasn't fired the actor from his voice-over job doing one of the characters in the upcoming Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboot. Michelle Malkin soon jumped on board the umbrage train, using her Twitter curating website "Twitchy" -- and never has there been a more apropos name for anything associated with Malkin -- to make Jason Biggs, misogynist pie-fucker, public enemy number one.
While neither Fox nor Malkin -- nor that dingbat John Nolte over at Breitbart nor Brent Bozell's Newsbusters -- are launching any sort of targeted campaign aimed at getting Biggs kicked out of the Nickelodeon family, they're doing the more jittery suits at the network the favor of tying Biggs to bad publicity that, in their view, will tarnish the good name of Nick. The conclusion to be drawn and the action that should be taken with that in mind, as far as they're concerned, is obvious.
Now make no mistake: Critics of Biggs's comments have a point when they say that Nickelodeon shouldn't have promoted the actor's Twitter feed without a full understanding of the kind of things he regularly says on it. And Biggs, knowing that his tweets were possibly being read by Nickelodeon viewers, should've kept a lid on his crass sense of humor. The network has publicly apologized for leading its audience right into Biggs's dirty mouth, although it still hasn't decided what, if anything, it's going to do with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles star; the show hasn't even debuted yet and already there's trouble, although it can easily be argued that, even on a kids network, bad publicity equals good publicity.
But the outrage coming from the right on this remains breathtakingly disingenuous, given that at the same time Malkin was filing internet stories about how unacceptable Biggs's comments were, Ann Coulter was tweeting that Bill Clinton had impregnated Sandra Fluke backstage at the Democratic National Convention and Erick Erickson was taking fire for calling the DNC "The Vagina Monologues." Add to that the fact that people like Malkin and Megyn Kelly were quick to rush to the defense of Rush Limbaugh, or at the very least make excuses for him, when he called Fluke a slut, and the sudden drawing of a line in the sand becomes an act of almost comical hypocrisy.
The same people who are now taking very public offense to a really vulgar joke made by an actor, calling him vile and a misogynist, didn't bat an eye when a self-appointed pundit who has a rapt audience of millions and a stranglehold on GOP politics berated and sexually demeaned an average citizen day after day on his national radio show. It's almost farcical to hear the conservative media go on the attack with smarmy cracks like, "Stay classy, liberals," when they were such willing participants in the organized covering of Limbaugh's prodigious ass.
Limbaugh's comments really did cross the line, simply by virtue of the authority the Republican party has inexplicably given him and the fact that his defamation was intended to silence a political non-combatant who was doing nothing more than expressing an opinion that Limbaugh thought didn't deserve to be heard. As for everyone else -- Coulter, Erickson, Biggs and many others armed with a Twitter feed and a snarky opinion -- leave them the hell alone. Sure, there's an argument to be made that there's a difference between a guy like Biggs, who's an entertainer, and Erickson, who's a CNN-employed political pundit, but in the end it hardly matters anymore.
Social media has made everybody pretty much the same -- the same kind of asshole. And politics these days is a shitty, terrible bloodsport where every asshole gets a seat at the table. Expecting civility from just about anyone, particularly people desperate to get noticed amid the constantly growing noise, is a foolish conceit. Taking offense to every little thing somebody says, particularly about politics, will keep you safely away from living your life almost every minute of every day. It's just not worth it. Unless you're one of those jerks who's part of the indignation industry, who profits off of other people's need to feel victimized and offended, best to just ignore it altogether.
By the way, Biggs's wife, actress Jenny Mollen, has also drawn the wrath of the perpetually aggrieved conservative watchdog media by tweeting a joke about, as a horrified Newsbusters puts it, "statutory rape." The tweet in question:
"My husband is up for a Teen Choice Award which means tons of 8th grader pussy! Please make sure your kids vote!"
Now that's funny.