Sarah Palin hopes men like David Letterman 'evolve'

'Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is accepting comedian David Letterman's apology over the controversial joke directed at her daughter, but says she hopes "men who 'joke' about public displays of sexual exploitation of girls will soon evolve."

"Letterman certainly has the right to 'joke' about whatever he wants to, and thankfully we have the right to express our reaction," Palin said in a statement. "And this is all thanks to our U.S. Military women and men putting their lives on the line for us to secure America's Right to Free Speech – in this case, may that right be used to promote equality and respect."'

OK, here goes:

"...hopes men who 'joke' about public displays of sexual exploitation of girls will soon evolve" - Wow, talk about carefully-worded! Well it's much better than "hopes men will soon evolve". I think it's the word "evolve" that I think gives away her attitude. "Evolve" suggests that men telling such jokes are less-than-human. No, men telling such jokes are crude boors, perhaps, especially if they do it in front of millions of TV viewers, but crude boors nonetheless, in the same way that women who make jokes about boys and their teachers getting it on are likewise. But I wouldn't say such a woman needs to "evolve". After all, she is human.

Well, all right, a little semantic nit-picking there perhaps. Now on to the next line:

"...our U.S. Military women and men putting their lives on the line..."

If there are 5,000 blue bottles on the wall and 1,000 green bottles on the wall, would I be inclined to say that collection of bottles is "green and blue", or "blue and green"? The issue here is that men are vastly more "represented" in the armed forces than women and vastly more exposed to dangerous conditions overall as not just a percentage of the forces deployed but on a per-capita basis when delineated by the sexes. Yet Gov. Palin places the word "women" first when referring to the troops in a sex-designated fashion. [On that topic, notice we have gone from referring to our deployed forces as "men", as used to be done until the 1980s, since that was by and large the most accurate way to describe the composition of our armed forces (and still is). Since then, we have gone to utilizing more "gender neutral" terms such as "troops" and "forces", leading to semantically ridiculous sentences such as "We have deployed 15,000 forces in such-and-such a place". The blatancy of attempting to side-step the word "men" (you'd think it was a dirty word!) when describing people placed in harm's way is glaring yet goes un-discussed.

However when it seems to serve a politician's agenda (not just Gov. Palin, but others do this as well), the use of sex-identifying words is employed. In this particular case, you'd think based on the subconscious assumptions around her word ordering that the US armed forces is made up 80% of women and 20% of men, when in fact the opposite is true.

Letterman gave Palin a golden opportunity for her to attract the anti-Palin feminist crowd and like any decent politician she is taking the chance to try to draw in political support she otherwise would have had a much-harder time getting.

manonthestreet

It is just nonsense to say the military protect freedom of speech in the USA. That freedom is effectively removed by the many restrictions that are imposed by your own government and culture. But more importantly the USA military is an imperialist army just like the Roman Legions. Its function is to project American power which is why there are American basis in over half the countries of the world.

What the US army does is spread feminism worldwide.

The theory of evolution conflicts with her Christian beliefs? Shouldn't she have said "transform," instead of evolve?