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Kathleen Parker, an obscure Washington Post syndicated columnist who made herself famous by attacking Republican Vice Presidential nominee Alaska Governor Sarah Palin last fall, said that Palin 'invited' vicious sex jokes made this week by CBS Television Late Night host David Letterman. Parker also made degrading, sexist comments of her own about Palin.Parker made the comment in an online chat this afternoon at WashingtonPost.com:Re: Letterman: Listen, Letterman is a comedian. Comedians that don't go over the line are not funny. If you said she looks slutty, that's over the line. If I say it, it's over the line. Why wouldn't...

Listening to President Obama and former Vice President Cheney give their respective national security speeches Thursday put me in mind of John Gray, author of "Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus." Different men, different planets. Or are they?

Racial and ethnic diversity is the key to happiness, success in the global marketplace and, not least, an interesting life. So we are told in a batch of new "fair housing" radio ads that are the sort of treacly propaganda that cause sober drivers to run off the road. Presented as a celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Fair Housing Act, the ads were produced by the National Fair Housing Alliance, a private, nonprofit group whose stated purpose is to make sure the act is properly implemented. The act bans housing discrimination and imposes stiff penalties for those who...

The GOP's identity crisis just got more interesting with the recent media splash of Meghan McCain, eldest daughter of the senator who did not become president. Young McCain, who began blogging during her father's presidential campaign, recently made waves at The Daily Beast when she picked a fight with conservative media mavens Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham. This is enough sport to make the little dog laugh, to say nothing of the dish and the spoon. McCain, just 24, is one smart cookie. In a matter of weeks, she has created a brand, presenting herself as a fresh face of...

Kathleen Parker, a "conservative" columnist who has discovered that slamming real conservatives was an easy way to lift herself from her earlier state of relative anonymity, has now turned herself into an inadvertent comedienne. I mean, how can you beat this comedy line on the title of her latest column appearing in the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel: "Is Meghan McCain the GOP's answer to Rush Limbaugh?" Yes, Parker is seriously proposing that "Valley Girl McCain" can save the Republicans from that "nasty" Rush Limbaugh: The GOP's identity crisis just got more interesting with the recent media splash of Meghan McCain, eldest...

The GOP's identity crisis just got more interesting with the recent media splash of Meghan McCain. Young McCain, who began blogging during her father's presidential campaign, recently made waves at The Daily Beast when she picked a fight with conservative media mavens Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham. McCain, just 24, is one smart cookie. In a matter of weeks, she has created a brand, presenting herself as a fresh face of her daddy's party and a voice for young conservatives. Strategically speaking, what better way to launch herself than to challenge the reigning diva herself, Miz Coulter? McCain jammed traffic...

The GOP's identity crisis just got more interesting with the media splash of Meghan McCain, daughter of the senator who did not become president. Young McCain, who began blogging during her father's presidential campaign, recently made waves at the Daily Beast when she picked a fight with conservative media mavens Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham. This is enough sport to make the little dog laugh, to say nothing of the dish and the spoon. McCain, just 24, is one smart cookie. In a matter of weeks, she has created a brand, presenting herself as a fresh face of her daddy's...

Pseudo-conservative Kathleen Parker’s ongoing method of getting her columns published in the Washington Post – bashing conservatives – took another sleazy turn on Sunday, with Parker asserting in the Post that conservatives who accuse the media of a liberal bias are "non-journalists" who stoking "ignorance," like Rush Limbaugh (not to mention groups like the Media Research Center.) The biggest challenge facing America's struggling newspaper industry may not be the high cost of newsprint or lost ad revenue, but ignorance stoked by drive-by punditry. Yes, Dittoheads, you heard it right. Drive-by pundits, to spin off of Rush Limbaugh's "drive-by media," are...

As he lifted the ban on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research Monday, President Obama proclaimed that scientific decisions now will be made "on facts, not ideology." This sounds good, but what if there were other non-ideological facts that Obama seems to be ignoring? One fact is that since Obama began running for president, researchers have made some rather amazing strides in alternative stem cell research. Science and ethics finally fell in love, in other words, and Obama seems to have fallen asleep during the kiss. Either that, or he decided that keeping an old political promise was more...

Geez, with this kind of fawning, Michelle O better watch her back: Eh? The president was asking us how we wanted to proceed. For the record, this is very un-Bush. At several meetings with the former president, including a one-on-one interview aboard Air Force One, there was never any question about how we would proceed. Bush ran all shows. Either Obama hasn’t figured out yet that he’s the boss or, quite possibly, he doesn’t care. As a veteran White House correspondent suggested to me later, “Maybe he knows he can handle whatever we toss his way.” I’ve written about the...

The only thing scarier than the Christian Right are pundits who believe that they cost the GOP the election. Without anything constructive to do, Republicans have apparently decided that being destructive might not be the wisest course of action but is a far sight better than sitting around and twiddling their thumbs. And that brings us to Kathleen Parker, conservative columnist with the Washington Post Writer’s Group and, lately, the bane of the GOP base. Parker, who became the model for thousands of conservative voodoo dolls when she wrote a few weeks ago that Sarah Palin should resign from the...

It may be time to take a closer look at karmic justice — that mysterious quid pro quo by which good and bad acts are rewarded in kind. One needn't believe in past lives and reincarnation to note that there's a whole lotta shakin' goin' on. Put another way: What goes around comes around. The most obvious manifestation is the 44th president of the United States, Barack Hussein Obama. I mention his middle name only because Chief Justice John Roberts did during the swearing-in ceremony, a proper time for proper names. It was wholly karmic that those who have been...

NEW YORK -- At Sarabeth's restaurant on Central Park South, two young old friends are catching up and comparing notes over breakfast. Anyone seated nearby quickly learns the story. They met in graduate school; both hold MBAs. Both recently have joined the swelling ranks of America's unemployed. Their shared tales, if once unthinkable, are becoming increasingly familiar. First, blue-collar jobs disappeared. Now white collars are fading. The young and briefly affluent, accustomed to earning more than $75,000, suddenly have time on their hands, the latest victims of the current economic crunch. Now what? The young woman has some consulting work...

Okay, maybe — maybe — someone could have given Kathleen Parker the benefit of the doubt as a voice of “loyal opposition” when she recommended that Sarah Palin drop out of the race after her interview with Katie Couric. That is a big maybe. The maybe comes from the fact that Couric — no intellectual giant herself, given that she offered no comment on Joe Biden’s claim that “when the stock market crashed Franklin Roosevelt got on television” — did make Palin look awkward with “gotcha” questions probably scripted for her and that she would never have asked any Democrat....

Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- Nationally syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker made herself the scourge of the pro-life community when she blamed emphasis of pro-life issues for allowing Barack Obama to win the presidential election. In a new article, Parker is backing down slightly from those arguments, but still bungles the facts. Parker drew guffaws originally for blaming the presidential election loss on "oogedy-boogedy" pro-life advocates. In her new column she urges the evangelical and conservative Catholic pro-life advocates to give up their religious-based pro-life arguments and tells them to "take a cue from Nat Hentoff, a self-described Jewish atheist, who has...

December 05, 2008, 1:40 p.m. Enough with the Oogedy-BoogedyReligion, politics, and us. By Shannen W. Coffin Kathleen Parker’s war on religion in the Re-public-an square entered a new phase today. In her syndicated column, she nobly attempted to explain her use of the term “oogedy-boogedy” to describe religious conservatives. It’s not that she is “anti-God.” It’s just that God really shouldn’t be mentioned in polite company. Religion can inform our values (gee, thanks). But reason, not religion, should inform our public debates. I hadn’t realized religion and reason were mutually exclusive. It seems Pope Benedict hasn’t gotten the memo,...

Washington Post columnist says the Republican Party must ditch God in order to survive. So, Kathleen Parker has determined that getting rid of social conservatives and shelving the values they fight for is the solution to what ails the Republican Party (“Giving Up on God,” Nov. 19). Isn’t that a little like Benedict Arnold handing George Washington a battle plan to win the Revolution? Whatever she once was, Ms. Parker is certainly not a conservative anymore, having apparently realized it’s a lot easier to be popular among your journalistic peers when your keyboard tilts to the left. She writes that...

In this, the interregnum between the end of one administration and the beginning of another, there’s not much for Republicans to do except look for ways to entertain themselves while Democrats are occupied with the serious business of creating a government. The problem — and the GOP is just waking up to this — is that there is absolutely nothing for them to do but wait. No one cares what they think of President-elect Obama’s choice for attorney general or any other cabinet post. The Clinton drama has always been a Democratic farce and only involved the Republicans as onlookers,...

Every time the GOP takes a beating at the ballot box there are calls to get rid of those doggone social conservatives -- or as Kathleen Parker refers to them, the "oogedy-boogedy branch of the GOP." This is a fascinating argument -- well, fascinating if you like watching people who don't even realize that they're doing little more than projecting their own personal biases onto the Republican Party and calling it political strategy. Atheists, agnostics, Elvis worshippers, Jedis, Satanists -- it doesn't matter; they're all welcome in the Republican Party (Ok, not the Satanists so much. They're creepy losers). However,...

As Republicans sort out the reasons for their defeat, they likely will overlook or dismiss the gorilla in the pulpit. Three little letters, great big problem: G-O-D. I'm bathing in holy water as I type. To be more specific, the evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy branch of the GOP is what ails the erstwhile conservative party and will continue to afflict and marginalize its constituents if reckoning doesn't soon cometh.