Home > posts > White House Mea Culpas, Part II
February 3rd, 2010 12:51 pm
White House Mea Culpas, Part II

Who knew White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel has a foul mouth and a penchant for insulting people?  Apparently, after hearing that liberal activists were planning to shame moderate Democrats critical of ObamaCare with television ads, “Rahm-bo” told them they were “f—ing retarded.”  This all came to light because thereafter he called to apologize.  To the activists?  No; the head of the Special Olympics.

The reasoning makes a lot of sense if you subscribe to this tenet of political correctness: If an insult is uttered yet the group most likely to be offended isn’t around to hear it, an apology is warranted because eventually they will.  Unfortunately for Emanuel, the Special Olympics is on a campaign to end the practice of using the word “retarded” as an insult.  Thus, the need to apologize to an organization that he was not even thinking about when he said the word.  Curiously, it’s unclear if the Special Olympics is equally as interested in promoting more civil discourse by ending all insults, whether or not the offending words specifically relate to the group’s core constituency.

All of this A insults B, so A apologizes to C silliness makes one wonder what public figures would do if they had no readily identifiable group to turn to and say I’m sorry.  Perhaps then they’d be forced to mend fences with the people they actually offended, instead of getting a get-out-of-jail free card from a group claiming to represent the emotions of all those conceivably covered by its mission statement.

Comments are closed.