You got to love when people out-speak themselves. Seems Arizona Congressman Jeff Flake, explaining why he spent a week on a deserted island, said, "I’ve felt like a pansy, I guess, and this made it feel like I was actually doing something again."<\/p>\n
When I fist read about his adventure, I thought, OK, not my cup of tea, but hey, whatever floats your boat. Besides, I admired him for going there with virtually no food, though he did bring salt and pepper, which I thought at least showed a little refinement. (If he brought thyme, basil, oregano and capers, I would have really been impressed.) He caught fish to survive.<\/p>\n
So then somebody raised an issue about his use of the word \u201cpansy.\u201d Was it Ben Smith of Politico<\/a>? He had a piece on this headlined \u201cFlake apologizes for ‘pansy’ remark.\u201d<\/p>\n Why apologize?<\/p>\n "Pansy" can be used as a (somewhat dated) slur on gay men, and the comment raised some eyebrows for that reason. [Editor\u2019s Note: Whose eyebrows? Smith\u2019s?] <\/p>\n Flake’s spokesman, Matt Specht, emails that he didn’t mean it that way.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Well, I\u2019m \u201coutdated\u201d enough to recall the use of the word to refer to gays. (Hell, I\u2019m old enough to remember when gay meant having a good time.) But really, apologize? Well, Specht doesn\u2019t just dig the hole deeper. He employs a backhoe.<\/p>\n "Congressman Flake didn\u2019t realize that that word can have a negative connotation<\/em><\/strong>. He simply meant ‘wimpy.’ He apologizes if anyone took offense to it," Specht writes.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Flake, who one might say lived up to his name by his week-long stunt, wasn\u2019t referring to gays when he employed the term. He was talking about himself not \u201cactually doing something.\u201d But he wasn\u2019t referring to himself as gay \u2013 because that would be \u201cnegative\u201d?!<\/em><\/p>\n Oy vey. (Oh, sorry, I apologize. I\u2019ll have my spokesman email a statement that I didn\u2019t mean to be anti-Semitic.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" You got to love when people out-speak themselves. Seems Arizona Congressman Jeff Flake, explaining why he spent a week on a deserted island, said, "I’ve felt like a pansy, I guess, and this made it feel like I was actually doing something again." When I fist read about his adventure, I thought, OK, not my… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[87,88,89,90],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=171"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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