The Smug Baldy Speaks

The Bush administration recently bent over and gave us all a peek at where they plan to dig up part of the $150 billion for the as yet unpaid-for emergency economic stimulus package: their ass. Actually, it’s more like they’re using the FCC to pull it out of ABC’s ass. With a charge of broadcasting “explicit and graphic depictions of sexual organs” that censors somehow found “titillating and shocking”, the FCC will fine 52 different ABC affiliate stations $27,000 each, for airing an episode of “NYPD Blue” that contained a short scene in which actress Charlotte Ross gets surprised by a young boy as she gets ready to get in the shower.

The episode was aired five years ago.

In a TV series that wrapped up two years ago.

Why the wait, you ask? Obviously, it takes five years to get over the trauma of seeing Charlotte Ross’s butt. This is especially true if you’re an FCC censor, who are a particularly timid sub-species, most famous for their snowflake-delicate sensibilities, intense priggishness, and inexplicable belief in a warped legal doctrine that mature content warnings and V-Chips are not enough cover when someone’s butt is on the tube.

In other words, the FCC really loves ass, and they want ABC to pay over $1.4 million in fines for having shown some butt on their long dead TV show. ABC, for its part argued against the fine, on established biological fact that buttocks are neither sexual nor excretory organs. The FCC rejected the claim, saying instead that:

“Although ABC argues, without citing any authority, that the buttocks are not a sexual organ, we reject this argument, which runs counter to both case law and common sense.”

In this, the FCC unzips its briefs and eposes the flaccid and shriveled meat of their claim - that the human buttocks, or rather each individual buttock working in concert with the other, must constitute a single sexual organ. Their basis is not logic or fact, but rather case law and the Bush Administration brand of common sense. Interestingly, the FCC stipulated that while ABC may have received little or no condemnation from its legion of NYPD viewers, the commission was forced to act on the behalf of the untroubled viewers:

As a matter of clarification, while ABC may not have received many complaints about the program, the Commission received numerous complaints, including thousands of letters from members of various citizen advocacy groups.

What advocacy groups? Busybodies and other nosy neighbors like the 40,661 supporters of the ultraconservative American Family Association who never watched NYPD Blue, but nonetheless found this episode offensive. Or titillating.

See - it’s the people who never read a biology book that get all jealous and worked up over the thought of other people seeing the bits and pieces of the human body that they themselves find both appealing and repulsive. To the AFA, Twyla above waves hello.

And finally, the note that must not be lost in this symphony of the idiotic is the fact that this $1.4 million, if paid, only accounts for less than one tenth of a percent of the $150 billion price tag of the stimulus package. Since nobody knows where the rest of that money is going to come from, you can be assured that somehow, somewhere, there are more loyal Bushie looking into other dark holes for a proverbial golden nugget.

Just don’t bend over.

HT Poynter Online