RE: The controversial comments of "Randi Rhodes Crucifies Clinton for the Republican Party"

Humor is going out of style in this country.  Many of us have gotten past the boring Johnny Carson humor and moved to more in your face offensive comedy.  Many of us have a sense of humor as well, and that's why we can deal with someone like Don Imus making a joke.  But recently the Messiah, Barack Obama, was attacked with a racial slur in another post on this forum and that has led us to again ask the question, what is acceptable humor?

What is the line that no man should cross when it comes to sex, gender, race, retardation, or physical disability?  Obviously, many people here agree that legislation isn't the answer because we remember the Republican Congress' efforts to legislate its own idea of morality by rushing to save Terri Shiavo from her husband or proposing constitutional amendments to both condemn and prohibit abortion and gay marriage on a federal level.

What is the answer?  To declare war on controversial humor?  We will first need to define what is controversial and that is a matter of debate because everyone's idea of taste is subjective.  But if we declare war on controversial humor, should we also start refraining from using negative puns and insults, especially the vicious words that have been attached to Bush and his followers, the tards?

Declaring war on controversial humor might not be the answer because, like the war on drugs and the war on terra', we have learned that the only way to defeat a faceless enemy is to kill the source.  The source is the human mind and that in turn is molded or in some way affected by the surrounding environment and any number of events.  From my perspective, drug abuse is a social behavior disorder.  Terrorism on the other hand is a matter of indoctrination.

We can look at the war on terra' and trace Muslim fundamentalist hatred for our country back to the Crusades if we isolated the struggle as being between Islam and Christianity.  We can trace it back to the end of WW1 when the Western Powers carved up the Middle East and unsettled the factions within the Ottoman Empire.  We can even trace it back to our country's, or our CIA's, meddlesome tactics implemented against Middle Eastern governments during the last century.

The point is that our beliefs including our prejudices are encoded by our environment, who raised us, and our firsthand everyday experiences.  Everyone is prejudiced to an extent and to end prejudice is to end civilization as we know it.

Hopefully the radical left doesn't get its hands on the technology to decipher what all of us really think deep down inside, even those of us who are better than others at keeping it bottled in.  While you're thinking about that, imagine how many good jokes or observations fail to make the translation from idea to actual speech due to an overly censored and politically correct environment.

Are we adults or are we children?  One thing's clear, we're all still primates with easily destabilized emotions.  We feel what we feel, we think what we think, and all of the political correctness and condemnation in the universe will never change that.  But thanks to the Internet, people can now start saying what they really think without P.C. leftists or moral rightists apprehending them and making them apologize for their views.  It's looking like a new world for truth and honesty to reveal themselves.... for now.

So understanding that we all have different ideas of what is acceptable speech and what is good humor, where do we draw the line and how do we draw it?