On a recent episode of “The Daily Show”, Jon Stewart “outed” Fox News blonde bimbo anchor Gretchen Carlson; no, she's not a lesbian, she isn't secretly a liberal sympathizer.

It's worse. Gretchen Carlson actually has a brain.

From the Huffington Post:

“Saying she plays the 'troubled mom, just trying to make sense of this modern country,' Stewart explained Carlson seems to be dumbing herself down in order to connect with an audience that sees intellect as an elitist flaw.

After showing clips of Carlson talking about Googling the words "ignoramus" and "czar," Stewart was flabbergasted:

How do you get a job on television if you appear to be one of those people who need to pin their address to their coat so a stranger can help them find their way home?
Determined to get to the bottom of it, Stewart conducted a Google search of his own. According to his findings, this 'troubled mom' is a graduate of Stanford and a classically trained violinist.”

My friend Hank—a male friend of mine and that's important here—sent me “The Daily Show” clip and while I watched it, he waited on the phone.

He waited, to hear my reaction: you know—as a woman.

The clip began with the Fox News “Fair and Balanced” coverage of Climategate, and satisfying as it always is to watch Jon Stewart rake that black-hearted bunch of so-and-sos over the coals, little did I know I was being lulled into a false sense of security; Stewart soon zeroed in on Gretchen Carlson, and instead of having my suspicion confirmed that Carlson would be intellectually challenged to write her own name in the dirt with a stick, it seems that in addition to attending Stanford she also studied abroad, at Oxford. “And not the Mississippi Oxford”, quipped Stewart.

Hank asked me what I thought and I tried to weigh my words; in his voice I heard a sort of shame that comes when lessons once thought learned must now be learned again.  

“I'm disgusted", I said. "But I'm not surprised.”

He was surprised and genuinely distressed to learn that this attractive, intelligent woman would “dumb herself down” for—what—money ? A career with Fox News ?  

It was so completely incomprehensible to him he was practically demanding an explanation.  And it almost seemed impossible to explain, until I remembered Willie Steen.

In the months leading up to the November 2000 presidential election, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, in coordination with Governor Jeb Bush, ordered local election supervisors to purge 57,700 voters from the registries, supposedly ex-cons not allowed to vote in Florida. According to Greg Palast, author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, “At least 90.2 percent of those on this "scrub" list, targeted to lose their civil rights, were innocent. Notably, more than half—about 54 percent—were black or Hispanic. You can argue all night about the number ultimately purged, but there's no argument that this electoral racial pogrom ordered by Jeb Bush's operatives gave the White House to his older brother.”

Palast puts a face to the numbers by interviewing one of the “disenfranchised”; like 94,000 others, Willie Steen had been tagged a criminal and was not allowed to vote in Florida because Jeb Bush's elections officials said he was a felon.

But Willie Steen has never been convicted of a crime in his life.

Steen was in the Persian Gulf War in '91; he spent four years in the military, and has worked in the medical field ever since, and as Steen points out, “You can’t even work for a hospital being a convicted felon.”

In other words, if Steen were a convicted felon, he wouldn't have been hired in the first place, and even more striking than Steen's situation is his stoicism; when Palast asks him how he feels being called a criminal, Steen answers: “What can we do sometimes, you know—that's how they did me, but what can I say.”

In my mother's “facts of life” talk I don't recall she ever said outright, there are times when wisdom lies in not appearing quite so smart. But to one degree or another, all my life I've seen women, including my mother, do either the same thing or some variation of what Gretchen Carlson did. I've seen my aunts and cousins do it, I've seen my best friends do it and I have done it too, and I imagine any woman who says she never hid her light under a bushel isn't exactly being forthright about the matter.

Certainly, given her circumstances, Gretchen Carlson had more choices than Willie Steen, but knowing nothing more about her than I do, one thing is safe to assume: a woman who did her post-graduate work at Oxford left the world of academia because she found there are more advantages, as Jon Stewart said, to playing “Chrissy” to her co-anchors "Janet" (Brian Kilmeade), and "Jack Tripper" (Steve Doocy).

Which either says a lot about Carlson, or a lot about how far we've really come, and Palast, in his interview with Steen, sounds much like my friend Hank; both white, both male, and both incredulous that in this day and age these prejudices and abuses are still with us.  

But well-intentioned as he may have been, Palast never lost what Willie Steen lost.  And always had what Willie Steen, didn't.

What can we do, sometimes, says Steen, and except for "I'm disgusted, but I'm not surprised"—what else was there for Willie Steen to say.