Three things I think are true about Rush calling some Georgetown law student a “slut”:
1) It was ungentlemanly, and conservatives should be Ladies and Gentleman, ladies and gentlemen.
2) The outrage against Rush is highly selective. He considers himself an entertainer, and routinely says outrageous and/or un-PC things in the service of being provocative (in both the good and bad senses of that word). By rights, anything he says should be judged against the standard of liberal political entertainers like Bill Maher, Janine Garafalo, or if you like, Keith Olbermann. Yes, Rush’s audience is orders of magnitude larger, and his influence on the conservative movement equally outsized. But that doesn’t make him John Boehner. So why is Nancy Pelosi acting like the whole of the congressional conservative opposition to the mandate just accused an arbitrary 20-something woman of sexual promiscuity?
3) The irony is that a federal mandate for contraception coverage renders women’s personal sexual choices a matter for public debate. The folks plucking sex out of the private sphere in this situation are the mandate supporters, not its opponents.