Sexists should have no 'side' to defend them

It's hard to keep score in the war on women, especially when the two sides in the fight have different standards as to what's insulting -- depending on who's insulted.

The problem is that, somehow, a sexist rant is only a sexist rant when it's an attack on a woman in our own party. Otherwise, we call any comparison a "false equivalence" -- and dream up creative ways in which conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh calling Sandra Fluke a slut is not at all like liberal TV host Ed Schultz calling Laura Ingraham a slut.

Watch and learn, aspiring parsers, as Bill Burton, a former aide to President Obama and the founder of Priorities USA, the pro-Obama super PAC to which HBO's Bill Maher has donated $1 million, insists that Maher calling Sarah Palin what many women consider the most objectionable slur to women is nothing like Limbaugh's slurs against womankind.

As Burton told MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell: "The notion that there is an equivalence between what a comedian has said over the course of his career and what the de facto leader of the Republican Party said -- to sexually degrade a woman who led in a political debate of our time -- is crazy."

So Maher is a comedian, and Limbaugh isn't -- because Burton finds the one funny and the other a clown? I'm sure Limbaugh appreciates the promotion to king of all he surveys. And it is indeed shameful that not one of the Republican candidates was willing to challenge El Rushbo for calling Fluke a prostitute -- for disagreeing with him about whether contraception should be covered under health reform.

It's not too late for Obama to show that Burton no longer speaks for him. And that, unlike his rivals, the president applies a single standard, deploring sexism even at a cost. That call of support he made to Fluke was toll-free, but what a message it would send if Obama made the costlier call and returned Maher's money.

Why should he? Because hate speech doesn't tumble from the mouths of people who respect or are in any real way friends of women.

If we had, we'd know that the vile things comedian Louis C.K. has said about Palin and her family should have disqualified him from performing at this or any other year's Radio and TV Correspondents Association dinner. He did withdraw as host after Greta van Susteren of Fox News called for a boycott of the June event.

But has she also joined the boycott of Limbaugh, then? No.

Conservative commentator Michelle Malkin has gone a step further, announcing that her Twitter aggregation site, Twitchy.com, is rushing to Limbaugh's defense and becoming one of his advertisers. ("The ad revenue we generate may be small," she said in a news release, "but we are grateful for the opportunity to reach Rush's massive audience -- and to show our support for his work.")

Work that includes years of the kind of disrespectful comments that Malkin herself has endured.

Current TV's Keith Olbermann, who has verbally assaulted Malkin in the past, apologized and said he wanted to do better. But in the same segment, he explained why his attacks and Rush's are "apples to oranges."

Malkin does not accept what she not surprisingly sees as Olbermann's non-apology, pretty much as Fluke rejected Limbaugh's.

Palin, too, is selectively offended -- outraged by Maher's nastiness, but unperturbed by Limbaugh's.

Exactly like Democratic Reps. Sheila Jackson Lee (Texas) and Jan Schakowsky (Ill.), who've called for Rush's head but have nothing to say about Maher, whose show I was a guest on once -- and, in one of the most surreal moments of my life, found myself defending Jesus in front of a studio audience.

This determination to find our political adversaries guiltier of misogyny than anyone on the home team goes back at least as far as Bill Clinton, whose long history of treating women with the respect you'd show a Kleenex was and still is a topic off-limits in polite Democratic company.

I often wonder if there's any wrong action that wouldn't be defended by political teammates with cries of, "At least he didn't x, y, or z, like the other guys did."