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Obama chides Bernie Mac.

Poor Barack Obama! It's another with-friends-like-that-who-needs-enemies-story:

[C]omedian Bernie Mac after an appearance at an Obama fundraiser last night. The comic performed a profanity-laced set at the function which ended with hecklers telling him to get off the stage after a joke that some deemed particularly offensive to women. Obama joked about the fundraiser being a ?family affair? when he followed Mac on stage, but the campaign got more serious about criticizing the comedian afterwards:

Toward the end of a 10-minute standup routine at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in downtown Chicago, the 50-year-old star of ?The Bernie Mac Show? joked about menopause, sexual infidelity and promiscuity, and used occasional crude language.

?My little nephew came to me and he said, ?Uncle, what?s the difference between a hypothetical question and a realistic question??? Mac said. ?I said, I don?t know, but I said, ?Go upstairs and ask your mother if she?d make love to the mailman for $50,000.??

As the joke continued, the punchline evoked an angry response from at least one person in the audience, who said it was offensive to women.

How did it get more offensive? The Chicago Tribune gives a little more detail:

He promised to help Obama and ended his irreverent riff with a joke involving the women in the families and living with two ?hoes.?

That summary comes from Ed Morrissey, who calls attention to the offense to women that Obama's "family affair" scolding misses. To say, this is a "family affair" implies that we could talk like this in an adults-only environment ? as if there's no difference between sex and sexism. Ed notes that it's particularly bad when Obama needs to win over Hillary-supporters.

Firedoglake attempts humor with heavy-handed sarcasm:

This is potentially game changing. Who would ever have expected such stuff from Bernie Mac? At any rate I don't see how Obama can possibly win in November in the aftermath of this catastrophe.

Oops. You stepped in it. If such talk from Mac was completely predictable, then the Obama campaign is responsible for it. Once again, I've got to say: With friends like this, who needs enemies?

UPDATE: What exactly was the "ho" joke? (Important, considering what happened to Imus.) Jack Tapper has it:

Mac's wife, in the joke, said she sleep "with anyone" for $50,000, and Mac's daughter said the same.

Explained Mac: "Hypothetically speaking, we should have $100,000. But realistically speaking we live with two hos."

So the same week that Obama agonized over letting his daughters do a cute little TV interview, Mac is calling his own daughter a "ho."

And according to my commenter EnigmatiCore, Andrew Dice Clay told the same joke in the 1980s.

Full post as published by Althouse on July 13, 2008 (boomark / email).