From The New York Daily News…David Feherty shouldn’t get pass for tasteless joke — but neither should Wanda Sykes
By 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.
This isn’t about condoning what Feherty wrote. It sure isn’t about running interference for Limbaugh. He has become the clown at the right-wing circus and has had the bully pulpit for a long time, not just banging away at people who think like President Obama — or Wanda Sykes for that matter — for a long time.
Limbaugh is another gasbag in this country who has gotten rich on meanness, and so if he is getting a taste of his own medicine now, prescription or otherwise, that is probably just swell with the people he has trampled on the way to the buffet table. Then the bank.
But what if Limbaugh, white talk show host, goes on the air and says that Sykes, black comedian, is about half-a-terrorist and that, oh by the way, he hopes she dies? Is he allowed to say he’s just an entertainer, and tell everybody to lighten up?
Feherty? He has been condemned by representatives from Pelosi and Reid and even the PGA Tour. CBS issued a statement that said, “Feherty’s column for a Dallas magazine is an unacceptable attempt at humor and is not in any way condoned.”
It remains to be seen whether Feherty, whose work on television I usually like, and whose writing I like a lot, will be forced to issue an apology. Or if he might even lose his job over this. This is what Pelosi’s spokesperson, Nadeam Elshami, said about the things Feherty wrote in D magazine, in what was supposed to be a piece about George W. Bush moving back to Dallas:
“Such comments are beyond the pale and an insult to our patriotic men and women in uniform.”
Really? It sounds like they are a whole lot more insulting to Speaker Pelosi and Sen. Reid. But if context does matter here — which it only occasionally does when the thought police get righteously cranked up about something and turn into vigilantes — it is worth pointing out that Feherty has become a tireless, passionate advocate for injured soldiers. Pelosi went to Iraq this weekend? Feherty has been there, too.
It doesn’t get him over on what he said. We’ll probably find out soon enough exactly how much trouble he has gotten himself into. He thought Pelosi, liberal Democrat, was fair game. Limbaugh thinks everybody who disagrees with him is fair game.
Wanda Sykes thought Limbaugh, a loudmouth white conservative, was big game, thought she could say whatever she wanted because she had the bully pulpit for a night, and she didn’t have to take it from Limbaugh anymore, she could dish it out.
And if Nancy Pelosi had been in the room, she would have laughed along with everybody else, for the best reason in the world: It wasn’t about her.
