Jim Goad writes:
I’ve scanned my moldy memory banks trying to determine what was the first highly publicized scandal wherein someone lost their job for saying something offensive to leftist dogma, and the earliest one I can recall was the public resignation of the wonderfully named US Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz in 1976.
Two years earlier, Butz had faced a minor backlash with a comment he uttered in his best Chico Marx accent about how the Pope should have no say in population control because “He no play-a the game, he no make-a the rules.” At the time, people took offense not so much at the fake Italian accent as at the disrespect for the Pontiff.
But that wasn’t the comment that cost him his job. Butz fell flat on his butt after serial Republican snitch John Dean published a 1976 article in Rolling Stone about a flight he’d taken with Butz, Pat Boone, and Sonny Bono…
