I don't feel all that sorry for David "Pimping Out Chelsea" Shuster, but I do feel for him a little, for precisely the reasons that James Poulos outlines:
‘As a parent’ — in the parlance of our times — I’d be seeing Hillary’s progenitorial rage and raising it a few capfuls of testosterone. But there’s little or no escape from the problem that today’s parlance defaults to the mildly, ironically offensive, and that judging by the standards of our times Shuster’s ‘Pimped Out’ Comment is not ‘incredibly’ offensive but simply mildly and ironically offensive. The appropriation of Ghetto Talk by the whitebread infotainment industry mirrors a broader ease, especially among those under 45, with casually framing the events of everyday social life in bitch-pimp terms. In a world where pimping out your ride is a great honor, ‘sort of’ pimping out your daughter would appear to be less of an honor primarily on account of the ‘sort of’ qualifier. Of course, Shuster was trying to be less-than-honorable, obeying another cardinal rule of MSM Edginess: degrade obliquely. But he was under marching orders — probably not written in neat hand by an MSNBC intern, but certainly uploaded into his hard drive over many years spent in moving through a high-budget industry devoted largely to making itself comfortable with the great American lowbrow.
| 
Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream
Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class
It's hilarious how everyone goes out of their way to reassure us that Shuster's comment was offensive on the merits, blah blah blah, before they start equivocating. If that's the kind of comment that actually offends you, you've probably never had a normal conversation in your entire pathetic, jerkoff life.
Sometimes I hate this country, where if you use a casual expression like "pimp out" off the cuff, you hear a lot of self-righteous crap about how you just compared someone of dignity to an actual whore. the fact is, Hillary did not experience actual offense at Shuster's comment for even a nanosecond. She just calculated that this sort of thing ought to seem offensive, therefore I should exploit it -- as if anyone needed further proof that she has no interest in inhabiting a reality where people deal with one another on the level.
Posted by Bill | February 10, 2008 6:56 PM