What was that?  You think that the title trivializes sexual assault?  Folks, at this point the Left has already trivialized this offense down to the bedrock:

At the exact moment Jon Favreau is receiving high praise in pre-inaugural media puff pieces, the 27-year-old chief speechwriter for President-elect Barack Obama (not Jon Favreau, the Hollywood actor/ director) finds himself in a minor mess over a photo from a recent private party showing him groping the breast of a cardboard cutout of Hillary Rodham Clinton as an unnamed pal wearing an “Obama staff” T-shirt kisses and feeds her beer.

If you haven’t seen it, imagine the early stages of the barroom rape scene of “The Accused” with Jodie Foster. Or think prosecutor Mike Nifong’s graphic (though false) descriptions of the Duke lacrosse party. Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson danced to a similar tune at the 2004 Super Bowl.

[snip]

If the photo had exposed a Republican offender, there’d already be a full-bore media scandal and cascading resignations. MSNBC would be rearranging its schedules for a wall-to-wall 24/7 bonanza. Rachel Maddow would finally have her big story. Barbara Boxer, Patricia Schroeder and other righteous feminists would walk up the Capitol steps, reprising the time they tried to destroy Clarence Thomas - for nothing.

It’s ironic that the Democrats are tacitly abandoning their stance on subtle (or in this case, not-subtle) gender bias at precisely the time where the Republicans - fresh from a campaign where their Vice Presidential nominee was under a constant barrage of sexually-themed hate speech - have had to concede that feminists might possibly have had a point.  It’s not particularly ironic that said feminists are betraying their own stated ideals, but that’s only because it’s not the first time they’ve done it.  What’s slightly alarming here is that there’s no indication that this sort of behavior is going to get smacked down by the Left - at least, as long as it’s being done by the Left.  That’s really the major sticking point here.  If groping a cardboard cutout of a female politician is acceptable behavior - and there’s a pretty good case for saying that it is - then it’s acceptable no matter who’s doing it.  And Left-feminists need to explicitly say this.  Because as it stands the message that they’re putting forth is “We have a double standard.”

And here’s the thing about double standards: they tend to turn into single standards when you’re not looking.  If you tell somebody “It’s OK to objectify the inconvenient,” you risk creating a person who’ll be eventually defining ‘convenient’ in ways that you won’t like at all…