Fox & Friends Really Hurt You Thought They Were Joking About Wifebeating When They Joked About Wifebeating

Women, huh? You can't live with 'em, you can't punch 'em unconscious in an elevator, know what I mean, fellas? And now it seems that a lot of sniveling liberals just can't take a joke, as seen in the internet's complete overreaction to some innocent banter on Fox & Friends yesterday, when Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade shared a harmless chuckle over the video of Ray Rice coldcocking Janay Palmer.

In case you missed it, Doocy said there's a simple lesson to be learned from the video: “The message is, take the stairs.” And then Kilmeade jumped in to clarify: “The message is, when you’re in an elevator, there’s a camera,” which is really the sort of advice that any abusive partner should keep in mind -- after all, if Ray Rice had kept that in mind and just beat the living shit out of Janay Palmer when there were no cameras around, he'd still have his NFL career, and we'd be talking about something important, like Benghazi.

WELL! Fox News wants you to know that it is Very Concerned about the reaction to Doocy and Kilmeade's innocent joshing, and Brian Kilmeade took to the cablecast this morning to clear this matter up. Not to apologize, not even a "sorry if anyone was offended" apology. Instead, we got this very definitive statement:

Comments we made during this story yesterday made some feel like we were taking the situation too lightly. We are not. We were not. Domestic abuse is a very serious issue to us, I can assure you.

Look, maybe they were joking and giggling, but they were NOT taking the situation "lightly." Instead, their jokes were totally fraught with gravitas. If it looked like they were joking about a woman being knocked unconscious, they most definitely were not, and you need to understand that the real problem is you and your faulty perceptions. You know, just like in M*A*S*H -- if they were joking (and they are not saying they were), it was simply their way of staying sane in an insane situation.

Hope that clarifies things for you.

Yr Wonkette would also like to take this opportunity to congratulate Steve Doocy for the superhuman act of will that kept him from following Kilmeade's remarks with "Oh, yeah, and did you hear about the new support group called 'Tempura'? It's for lightly battered women."

When Yr Wonkette first heard of Fox's plan to address this Obviously Not A Joke, we tried to crystal ball all possible outcomes:

• “Sorry if anyone was offended”: Even odds

• A huffy invocation of the right to free speech and an attack on politically correct critics: Even odds

• “Can’t you take a joke?”: Even odds.

• Straightforward but obviously grudging apology: 2-1

• Firing/resignation of either or both asshats: Who are you fucking kidding?

However, we didn't quite see this "Joking Never Happened, You Are Wrong About That" approach. Chalk one up forFox & Friends-- they can still surprise us.

[ TPM ]