Lighten Up, This Is No Big Deal

Internet age makes it impossible to have fun.
By Kevin Spak,  Newser Staff
Posted Dec 12, 2008 12:08 PM CST
Lighten Up, This Is No Big Deal
Oops. Found on Facebook, this image shows top Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau, left, and a friend posing with a cardboard cutout of Hillary Clinton.

All it took was one drunken night and an errant Facebook photo to turn 27-year-old Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau into the scandal du jour. Feminists are outraged, calling him “offensively sexist” for daring to touch that cardboard breast. Hillary tried to laugh the incident off, only to be lambasted on CNN for selling out feminism. It’s proof, Kathleen Parker writes in the Washington Post, that “nonsense is the new standard for controversy.”

“Puritans and prohibitionists would adore our brave new world of shutterbug infamy,” she writes, where having fun is strictly forbidden, lest there be a cell-phone camera nearby. Once, when the world moved slower, three-martini lunches were a Washington staple and indiscretions could be forgotten. “Now young men goofing around are immortalized as misogynist maulers, portentous reminders … that the gender wars won’t end until irreverence and humor are dead.” (More political scandal stories.)

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