You’re severely drunk and conservative. You’re driving down the highway at 90 miles per hour in your Hummer, dangerously weaving in and out of lanes while popping Oxycontin into your mouth like Pez. Suddenly, you’re being pulled over by a police officer. As you drunkenly stumble out of your car, the first thing you say is, “Hey! You can’t pull me over! Look at that guy over there! He’s driving at least 70 miles per hour!”

This is essentially the strategy of conservatives defending Rush Limbaugh. After he made several untrue personal attacks against Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke when she spoke out on contraception healthcare coverage, Limbaugh was soon embroiled in controversy. The response by his defenders is mostly not to say his remarks were correct, but merely to redirect criticism onto popular liberal comedian Bill Maher, pointing out that he has called Sarah Palin a “twat”. Or, to use the original metaphor, they are defending a drunk driver weaving through lanes at 90 miles per hour by saying, “Look at this guy driving 70 miles per hour over there!”

To be fair, Maher and Limbaugh do have a lot in common. Both host popular political shows. Both are older, white men. Both like to make jokes (though Limbaugh’s are often unintentional). Both have hair and teeth. And both have said disparaging things about women. However, there are big differences between Limbaugh’s attacks against Sandra Fluke and Maher’s mockery of Sarah Palin.

The main criticism of Maher, in fact, hinges on the same mistake made in Limbaugh’s public apology to Fluke: emphasizing that the problem was the use of “bad words” over what was actually meant. Limbaugh’s apology, for example, makes it clear that he was only apologizing for using the two words “slut” and “prostitute”. Presumably, he meant to use more family-friendly words like “woman of the night” or perhaps “person who puts hee-hees in her hoo-ha in exchange for money”, but which nevertheless still mean that Sandra Fluke wants to be paid to have sex. Limbaugh seems to think his remarks were problematic not because he falsely accused Fluke of being a whore, but because he specifically used naughty words like “slut” and “prostitute”. This is confused for two reasons:

1. “Prostitute” is not a bad word, you fucking idiot.
2. The actual problem isn’t with your word choice, but with the fact that you falsely accused a woman of being a whore—based on ridiculous misunderstandings about birth control.

Rush could have called her any other synonym or synonymous phrase for “prostitute”, and there’d be just as much outrage, because no one cares that he used any particular language. His remarks were mostly made public because they were in the context of an idiotic blowhard who clearly didn’t understand how female birth control works. Essentially, he argued that Fluke wanted to be paid by the government to have sex, which made her a slut and a prostitute. That she was having so much sex that she couldn’t afford all the birth control. That this was a world-class floozy who couldn’t keep her legs shut because she kept taking all those birth controls to have all that sex!

The problem with these remarks is that they are completely false and his only evidence for Fluke being a “slut” is a ridiculous misunderstanding about how female birth control works. Most women do not use the female condom, and hence do not have to use more birth control the more they have sex. Limbaugh’s ridiculous naivety on this point only underscored the need for more women’s voices to be heard during the contraception hearings. In short, the problem wasn’t the specific language he used, but that the things he said were deliberate attempts to falsely malign Fluke’s character and do harm to women’s healthcare.

Is this at all comparable to Maher’s descriptions of Sarah Palin as a “twat”? Not really. Maher’s critics are going after him specifically because he used “bad words”. That is, in the context of Maher’s statement, if you removed the word “twat”, then there’s nothing that bad being said. Basically, Maher was making a joke about how Palin could confuse “tsunami” as the name of a country and want to invade it, and then said “Speaking of dumb twats…” as a transition. In this context, the function of “twat” is meant to convey dislike, disgust, and disapproval of her as a stupid person. If he had said, “Speaking of dumb people”, presumably there would be little offense, yet this is essentially what is meant by “dumb twat”—the word “twat” just emphasizes his dislike of Palin as a person. You could even argue that “twat” is meant to convey womanhood in some sense, so he essentially means “dumb woman that I dislike,” but that hardly means he thinks all women are as dumb as Palin.

Furthermore, Palin is a public figure, and well-known for gaffes that make her appear stupid or uneducated (for example, when asked in an interview what specific newspapers she read, a flustered Palin finally said she read them all). There is plenty of evidence to suggest she is a bit dim. Palin is also a well-known enemy of feminism, and hence of women’s rights in general. If anyone deserves to be called a twat or a cunt, it’s a public figure who constantly says stupid things and does not support women’s rights. In fact, Maher presumably calls her names like cunt and twat specifically because of her anti-woman positions when it comes to abortion and equality, so it is disingenuous to portray these remarks as attacks on all women. (Some feminists, I realize, may disagree that you can use these words in pro-women contexts, but I disagree with these criticisms that see words like “cunt” as unchanging platonic forms that cannot possibly be used in the ways we typically use other words—sarcastically, ironically, etc.—but let’s not get into that sinkhole of time and energy.)

So the problem with Maher is that he used naughty bad language against a well-known, demonstrably incompetent public figure because she stood against women’s rights and other reasonable causes. The problem with Limbaugh is different. He called a relatively unknown woman a whore without any good reason, in the context of an anti-women’s rights rant. He said she wants to be paid to have sex. When Maher called Palin a twat, he didn’t also describe her as a vagina, because he wasn’t trying to impugn her as a woman. Or in other words, Maher said a naughty word but didn’t mean anything offensive by it; Limbaugh didn’t say as naughty a word but meant something highly offensive by it.

And yes, Maher was not being anti-woman when he called Palin a twat. When I’m cut-off by someone while driving, I’ll frequently have an outburst like “Cocksucker!” This is not because I think sucking cocks is a terrible thing (in fact I think it is a wonderful gift). Nor is it meant to imply that only gay men or women who use their mouths for sexual pleasure are the types that would drive a car so badly. It’s simply an insult I blurt out at assholes who cut me off. It essentially means, “YOU ARE A HORRIBLE PERSON AND I HOPE CALAMITIES BEFALL YOU”, but is much easier to say than all that and has those nice, hard consonant sounds that make most insults sound so impressive and feel so good to say. This is the sense in which Maher is using a word like “twat”. This is NOT the sense in which Limbaugh was using the word “slut”, though, as he literally described Sandra Fluke as wanting to be paid to have sex, and he used other literal descriptors of her so-called sluttiness to malign this woman.

There’s nothing wrong with being a woman. In fact, there’s nothing wrong with being a slutty woman, or even with being a prostitute. However, Limbaugh’s remarks were meant to falsely tar a woman’s credibility by implying she had a lot of sex for money as she spoke out in favor of women’s rights. Maher was essentially just calling a politician with demonstrable ineptitude an idiot. Now, ask yourself, do you really want to say these are really examples of the same thing? Do you still want to point at the guy going 10 miles over the speed limit after you’ve been pulled over for drunk driving at 30 miles over the limit?