Hooray for McCarthyism!

Ford Yanks Super Bowl Ad

Sensitive to the outcry over the Janet Jackson breast-baring incident during the halftime show at last year's Super Bowl, Ford's Lincoln Mercury division said Wednesday that it had yanked a Super Bowl commercial in which a clergyman lusts after a new Lincoln truck. In the ad, a clergyman finds a set of car keys in the collection plate, then discovers they belong to a truck in the parking lot. As he begins to caress the vehicle, a parishioner arrives with his young daughter to explain that she had dropped the keys into the plate by mistake. Finally, the cleric posts the title of his next sermon: "Lust." Lincoln Mercury said that it was surprised by the negative reaction the spot had received by such groups as the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests. In a column due to appear in Sunday's New York Times, media critic Frank Rich writes that the "indecency crusade" that followed last year's Super Bowl incident "has unleashed a wave of self-censorship on American television unrivaled since the McCarthy era, with everyone from the dying D-Day heroes in Saving Private Ryan to cuddly animated animals on daytime television [Postcards From Buster] getting the ax."

There's honeslty a group that calls themselves "Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests?"

There has GOT to be something more important going on in the world than a Ford commercial. And how are these "groups" viewing the commercial? Is Ford running this past them before it decides to go to air with it? I'm going to have to pick up the NYT this Sunday.