NP: Dogs Die In Hot Cars, Please Explain Yourself

Not to belabor this point -- although it did give me an opportunity to shamelessly rip off a Duckman episode title -- but parts of the left wing blogosphere continue to try to make Laura Bush's standup into a big issue.

This led me to track down the actual text of Whoopi Goldberg's comments from last year. The bit in question:

"And that's why I'm here tonight. Because I love bush. But someone's giving bush a bad name. Someone has tarnished name of `bush.' Someone has waged war, someone has deliberately misled the country, someone has attempted to amend the constitution, all in the name of bush. The bush I know and cherish would never do such things. My bush is smarter than that. And if my bush is smarter than that, you can understand just how dumb I think that other bush is. And anyone who would wave to Stevie Wonder is not fully there. I will do whatever it takes to restore bush to its rightful place and that ain't in the White House. Vote your heart and mind and keep bush where it belongs."

This is compared to the "offending" Laura Bush joke:

I saw my in-laws down at the ranch over Easter. We like it down there. George didn't know much about ranches when we bought the place. Andover and Yale don't have a real strong ranching program. But I'm proud of George. He's learned a lot about ranching since that first year when he tried to milk the horse. What's worse, it was a male horse.

The first alternative here is that the likes of Atrios and Digby are so daft as to not to be able to tell the difference between a pretty decent joke (and yes, Hank, it's not exactly a new joke) that never explicitly mentions the horse's unmentionables and a tirade that uses the word 'bush' ten times in rapid succession as an insult. The second is that they know Whoopi was both insulting and not funny, but choose to unfairly equate the two purely to score political points.

Neither of these paints a terribly good picture of this alleged Democratic spine that's been growing lately.