I can’t think of any situation in which Riordan’s comments might be found amusing:
No one ever accused Richard Riordan of being a prisoner to political correctness, but the feisty former mayor of Los Angeles and now the state’s education secretary may have outdone himself last week when he called a youngster at a book event a “stupid, dirty girl.”
The incident took place Thursday at the Santa Barbara Central Library, where Riordan stopped in to promote a summer reading program. After reading a picture book to preschoolers and young elementary school pupils, he chatted with some of them.
One girl asked whether he was aware that her name was that of an Egyptian goddess.
While her full name was not released, event participants said her first name is Isis, the archetypal Egyptian goddess who represents everything from motherhood to magic to the dead and is considered by some historians to have influenced Christian interpretation of the Virgin Mary.
Riordan apparently thought the girl was asking whether he knew what her name meant and, with a camera rolling from a local news station, made an inexplicable quip he would immediately regret.
“It means stupid, dirty girl,” he said.
The story was carried by the Associated Press and circulated statewide over the Fourth of July holiday weekend.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who named the 74-year-old Riordan to his Cabinet, issued a stern statement calling his appointee’s remark “unacceptable in any context.” But Schwarzenegger went on to say that Riordan “would never knowingly or intentionally upset a child. … I know he deeply regrets having made these unfortunate remarks.”
Riordan apologized to the girl on the spot, said Carol Keator, director of the Santa Barbara public library system.
Has he lost his mind? Is there really any situation where insulting a 6 year-old is considered funny? Jeebus.
HH
Really stupid, but genius compared to the race baiting jackals at the NAACP and others who immediately branded Riordan a racist before discovering the girl was white.
Andrew J. Lazarus
Give Riordan a break, he’s losing it upstairs.
Jon Henke
In fairness, it didn’t seem like a genuinely ill-intentioned joke….he was, apparently, trying to be funny, and he said something stupid.
Apparently, he’s just not good at being funny. It’s happened to all of us, I think.
His apology, though, certainly left something to be desired.
HH
Next to get the treatment apparently is Dennis Miller for saying Ken Lay should be gang-raped… Actually I think the left hates Lay more, so perhaps he will mostly get a pass, but it’s a slow day at Brock’s place.
M. Scott Eiland
Why should Dennis Miller be excoriated for what he said? He’s just echoing the “enlightened” words of Democratic California Attorney General Bill Lockyer. Of course, Dennis Miller is a comedian with precisely zero power to affect such situations, while Lockyer is most certainly a player in determining the treatment of those accused of crimes–yet, somehow, I suspect that Miller will eat more abuse over this lapse in humor-related judgement. Could that be, perhaps, because Miller is perceived as conservative these days and Lockyer is most definitely *not*?
God forbid–that would imply that the media has a liberal bias, and we all know how absurd *that* is. . .right?
[closed captioned for the sarcasm-impaired]
old maltese
Have you never, in a one-on-one session with a child, engaged in back-and-forth teasing?
(I’m assuming that ‘teasing rapport’ already had been established. Otherwise, who knows?)
Kimmitt
As an education secretary with a girl I hardly know? No, not so much.
Now, if he’d issued some kind of apology like “I have no idea why I said what I said; it was totally unacceptable and I sincerely beg for Isis and her parents’ forgiveness,” then I’d figure he’d skipped his coffee and done something boneheaded. Lord knows we’ve all done similarly stupid things once in a while. The trick is to own up to them immediately and apologize profusely.
dave
Have you guys watched the video? It sounds a lot worse in print than it did on video. Granted, it was a stupid thing to say, but he said it with what was obviously intended to be a playful tone without any intentional hurtfulness.