Why is the MSM giving Wanda Sykes a pass? Mike Lupica:
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.”
Not funny. An old joke, tastelessly retold. Feherty of CBS – who once wrote a book called “Somewhere in Ireland a Village is Missing an Idiot” – is drawing fire because of it. But you have to wonder how a similar joke might have played at the White House Correspondents’ dinner on Saturday night, as long as it was about a Republican.
Because here are a couple of jokes Wanda Sykes wrote and then delivered to that crowd:
“You know, you might want to look into this, [President Obama], because I think maybe Rush Limbaugh was the 20th hijacker, but he was just so strung out on OxyContin he missed his flight. …
“Rush Limbaugh hopes the country fails? I hope his kidneys fail, how ’bout that?”
Somehow Ms. Sykes got laughs with this material, and draws no fire. It is all supposed to be about the setting, or so we are told. President Obama was there, the dinner is always the Washington version of a Friars Club Roast, just without the Sopranos language.
So Sykes, a comedian, gets a pass because of where she was, and whom she was talking about. And maybe who she is. David Feherty, who fancies himself a bit of a comic himself, doesn’t, at least not so far. As always, the rules on all this change from day to day like baseball’s strike zone.