Snopes is a valuable resource overall, especially since its writers lay out the evidence for the claims it examines and why it is or isn't credible.
Like any resource, however, Snopes isn't perfect. I've noticed before that the site seems to go easy on right-wingers in high places. That's okay, it's a reminder that you should be ready to be skeptical and critical of all media.
Today, while looking up some other topics, I found a recent post addressing a claim by Kristi Noem, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. After South Park's latest episode, which satirized Noem's history of cosmetic enhancement, Noem told right-wing podcaster Glenn Beck, "It's so lazy to just constantly make fun of women for how they look. It's only the liberals and the extremists who do that. If they wanted to criticize my job, go ahead and do that, but clearly they can't."
Snopes writer Joe Esposito declared the quotation a "Correct Attribution," which it evidently was -- she did utter those words -- and left it there. It would have been entirely proper, and I'd have thought an irresistible followup, to examine her claim itself. Is it only "the liberals and the extremists" who "constantly make fun of women for how they look"? (I think it's a safe bet that by "extremists" she meant only left-wing extremists, not right-wing extremists like her boss or herself. And I should add that the word "extremist," used as an epithet as she did there, is also lazy.) That claim is obviously false; the right has a long history of doing it. Just below the Noem post, Snopes provided a link to an earlier post about right-wing fantasies that Michelle Obama is too butch-looking to be a woman and must therefore be a man. Contrariwise, South Park's previous episode had mocked Donald Trump's appearance even more harshly. Noem was lying, and it wouldn't have been unfair for Esposito to mention that she was stretching the truth, or something comparably mild.
Noem was right, it's lazy to make fun of women's appearance, but South Park doesn't pretend to be sober, responsible discourse. It has always, for twenty-seven seasons, been juvenile satire. For awhile, a sect of right-wingers, known as "South Park Conservatives," managed to persuade themselves that Parker and Stone were their BFFs. Even then it took some disciplined memory management to ignore the show's mockery of the right, but of course they managed it. (I see from that article that the label "South Park Conservatives" was coined by Andrew Sullivan; it figures.) I have no such illusions myself. I figured out early on that I only agreed intermittently with their opinions. I still enjoyed a lot of their work, and tuned it out when I didn't. I haven't seen the Noem episode yet -- neither, she says, has Noem -- but from the summaries I've seen, it also attacked her for her policies and her actions - her job.
Trump's MAGA base, for all their religious posturing, has taken advantage of the breaking of taboos South Park spearheaded by becoming grosser than their predecessors could have been - openly, anyway. Hence the "Fuck Your Feelings" t-shirts, balanced by their indignation when someone stamps on their own feelings. Stone and Parker have had to become even more outrageous to keep ahead of them.
I don't judge Noem or the rest of the Trump gang by their appearance, I judge them by the content of their characters - just as I judged their predecessors of both parties. It's not out of line, I should think, to notice that Trump judges women by their appearance: his female appointees are nearly all from the same mold. That wouldn't matter if they were competent or honest, but of course they aren't. They're chosen for their looks and their loyalty, their willingness to do what he tells them to.
