The Washington Post takes up anger-spewing leftist Sandra Bernhard Friday, and explains the sheer joy of watching her unload venom on Sarah Palin. Theatre reviewer Peter Marks began his review on the front page of the Style section: "No one does angry funnier than Sandra Bernhard. So when she turns her chainsaw wrath on the Republicans' new media magnet, Sarah Palin, the trash talk is so witheringly foul it feels as if it's been fired in a furnace of pure, unadulterated rage."

She also promised the Post she'd call Cindy McCain a "Barbie doll hooker." Is Bernhard truly the funniest with an "acid reflex," as the headline quipped? From the one example Marks provided, someone who doesn’t reflexively hate Gov. Palin might beg to differ:

After Bernhard declares in the D.C. Jewish Community Center that if Palin were to step onto her Manhattan turf, "I'll tear her apart like a Wise natural kosher chicken," the explosive laugh derives as much from the sneering vehemence of her delivery as the idea of the evangelical Christian candidate as kosher poultry. (Not to mix beefy metaphors, but judging from the raucous response in the Goldman Theater, a partisan audience seems primed right now for this kind of confrontational red meat.)

Declaring the Post’s liberal bona fides, Marks proclaims that Bernhard is hilarious, that he plays like a kid in a lawn sprinkler in her profane attacks on the GOP’s first female vice-presidential nominee, but he can’t reprint the vast majority of it:

The kosher crack might be the only one Bernhard makes at the expense of the vice presidential hopeful that is suitable for publication. (Talk about negative campaigning -- whoa, Nelly!) For though there are slightly less caustic moments of "Without You I'm Nothing," it is the interludes in which the comedian spews epithet-laden venom like a rotating sprinkler that a spectator washes in most happily.

Please remember episodes like this when the Left (and its subset, The Washington Post) stands up and says that "hate speech" from the right is a terrible problem. A bisexual comedian can stand up in a Jewish community center and mock a heterosexual conservative Christian woman in unprintable rage, and no one is summoning a "human rights commission." They're bathing in the rage.  

The Post left out that the Thursday "hate speech" party included discounted tickets that included a post-show Bernhard reception for the D.C. Jewish Community Center's Gay and Lesbian Outreach and Engagement program. It also left out that it was....(sigh)....government-subsidized:

This engagement of Sandra Bernhard is a DC Performing Arts Presenters Initiative project, which is made possible through funding by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts Regional Touring Program.

—Tim Graham is Director of Media Analysis at the Media Research Center.