50-year-old singer Madonna kicked off her latest tour last week in New Jersey, and made headlines for mentioning everybody’s second-favorite Vice Presidential candidate. I mean Palin. Madonna apparently shouted to the crowd that the Alaska governor “can’t come to my party! Sarah Palin can’t come to my show!” Later, Madge even performed what appeared to be an impromptu, albeit non-rhyming, rap of some sort (see video above) in which she threatened to “kick [Palin’s] ass.” Perhaps more troublingly, during the song “Get Stupid,” a video screen features a montage of bad guys like Hitler and Robert Mugabe, and Senator McCain pops up as well; Obama is included in the “good guys” section along with John Lennon and Gandhi. I’m not sure that’s the equivalent of a consistent pattern of whipping up xenophobic, racist hatred at your political rallies until the assembled wingnuts demand the beheading of your opponent, but it has ruffled a few feathers, and the singer was asked about the comments at the premier of, uh, a movie she directed. Madonna directed a movie? Wow. Anyway, she said the “trash talk” was just “a metaphor,” since Palin’s “in the Republican Party, I’m in the Democratic Party.” See a video of those comments (and more!) after the jump.
Again, I don’t mean to attempt to ward off accusations of left-wing media bias by proposing false equivalencies, but I can’t help but agree with the headline, “To All Celebrities Who Support Barack Obama: Please Shut Up!” Also, Madge’s description of a threat to kick someone’s ass as a “metaphor” makes me wonder if she wasn’t trying to reference an anglophile touchstone: Monty Python’s “dead parrot” sketch, in which the clerk insists referring to Bolton as Ipswitch was a “pun” and then a “palindrome.” Oh, dead parrot sketch, you’ll take our minds off politics for a moment, won’t you.
