The difference between sensitive and over-sensitive

Michelle Malkin (and others) are up in arms over the performance of Laura Bush the other night at the White House Correspondents dinner. I don't have any problem whatsoever with people being concerned about the "coarsening of the culture". I'm as sensitive to complaints about the "coarsening of the culture" as anyone, more so than most. I'm easily shocked and appalled by much of what passes for music (I stopped listening to FM radio in 1988). Every day I hear a half dozen things on the radio that I don't think I should be hearing. And I'll concede that I can see some validity to concerns about the stripper joke, though I don't think it was over the edge. It was right up against it.

But the comment from Michelle that "resorting to horse masturbation jokes is not much better than Whoopi Goldberg trafficking in dumb puns on the Bush family name" says far more about Michelle than Laura Bush. In the absence of any actual "horse masturbation jokes", one can only assume that she's talking about this:

I saw my in-laws down at the ranch over Easter. We like it down there. George didn't know much about ranches when we bought the place. Andover and Yale don't have a real strong ranching program. But I'm proud of George. He's learned a lot about ranching since that first year when he tried to milk the horse. What's worse, it was a male horse.

I don't know where Michelle's from, but that's not a horse masturbation joke - it's a clueless city boy joke. And if it is off-color, it's only slightly off-color. I'm from a culturally red state area, and I've heard variations on that in mixed company since childhood. To take offense at that means that you're looking to take offense. It's ridiculous. And to compare it to what Whoopi Goldberg did is beyond exaggeration and into hyperbole.