Making a reference to Palin and taking a shot at Palin are not the same thing. It's as simple as that. They are two different things.
Are you claiming that it is impossible to talk about Sarah Palin without making fun of her?

Again, I'll simply ask anyone who thinks this episode was mocking Trig Palin to explain to me how that is so.

That's exactly what it means when a reference is indirect. It means that YOU, THE VIEWER, have to make the connection. Are you at all familiar with the expression "double entendre"?

Ok, I'm not going to go back and forth with you over this. It was meant as a shot at Palin/Palin's familly. Period. Was it funny in a hardcore way? Yes. Is Sarah Palin making a big deal about this for attention? Yes.

PEACE

There hasn't been any back and forth.

I challenged anyone to explain how this was a shot at Trig Palin, and you haven't even tried to do so.

When my competitor walks off the court after I ace them on the first serve, I count that as a win.

Yeah you got me Count Dooku. I was wrong. You "Aced" me. I'm walking off the court defeated and sad.

I just wish people would stop paying attention to this media whore. All she wants is to be famous and she's getting just that. We need to treat her like Freddy Krueger. Keep telling ourselves she's not real and hopefully she'll just disappear.

Since Sarah Palin is the only female former governor of Alaska, it's a given that's who Ellen was referring to. Now, ask yourself, is it more likely that Ellen was another child of Sarah Palin's that no one knows about, or could it be Ellen is lying about her parents, demonstrating the show's message that the mentally handicapped can be abusive, manipulative and disingenuous as anyone else.
Or maybe the joke is, we should regard Sarah Palin as the mother of all retards. And the way Palin is acting, maybe she believes that too.

Indeed it is...

Okay, let's try a different tack. Set aside for the moment (if you can) anything to do with Sarah Palin or her family. Is the "joke" itself inherently offensive to anyone? Perhaps to those particularly sensitive to Down's Syndrome, but likely not to any of Family Guy's general viewership (who are long since de-sensitized to such things). The only criticisms I've heard of have come from Palin and her supporters. Ergo, it is unlikely that the offense has anything to do with anything other than Sarah Palin.

I've probably typed and deleted four different paragraphs, because they all diverge entirely too far from the TV series and stray into Otter territory. I think we've had enough of those kinds of threads, so I'll leave it at this: Who thinks Palin herself actually watches Family Guy, anyway? I suspect someone who works for her brought it to her attention (very possibly someone at Fox, who had advanced knowledge of what was in the script). If she is a viewer, then I suspect she's been oblivious to the nature of their comedy for all these years.

I link trig to math but I wouldn't be surprised if it were short for trigger.

Making fun of people with disabilities isn't funny unless it pisses off Sarah Palin. Then it is justified. Hell drowing puppies is justified as long as Sarah Palin is against it.

If only she were.

I love how these screaming self-righteous conservatives always rant and rave and froth at the mouth over the fact there's "TOO MUCH POLITICAL CORRECTNESS" and the "THOUGHT POLICE ARE TRYING TO CONTROL WHAT YOU SAY AND THINK" and "EVERYONE GETS OFFENDED AT ANYTHING PERCEIVED AS INSENSITIVE", etc. and what not...

Yet Sarah Palin gets indignant over "retards". Get over yourself, ****y.

I don't have a problem with people making fun of Sarah Palin. Making fun of her kids is crossing the line, IMO. Sarah can defend herself, her kids cannot. I will say that I don't have a problem with people making fun of retarded and/or down syndrome people in general. But in this case they clearly singled out a specific person instead of the group as a whole.

Her daughter's baby daddy hasn't had any problems defending himself. Surely the inability to speak for oneself isn't confined to the infant in the family? And, as has already been noted in this thread, the attack was made on Sarah Palin herself by way of the child. If a Paris Hilton parody included a chihuahua in a purse, you wouldn't consider the parody an attack on chihuahuas, would you?

This I find interesting, and it ties into an observation I made earlier, which is that the only people who have protested this episode have been Palin and her supporters. Perhaps the fact that you aren't offended by generic jokes made at the expense of mentally handicapped people, but are bothered by this singular joke and its specific target, says something not just about you, but us as a society. What it says, I can't say, but I think that there's a paper in this for you sociology majors out there.

What I find interesting is the same people who are getting upset by this are the same ones who were standing up and cheering when Rush Limbaugh made fun of Michael J. Fox's Parkinson's symptoms.

Was the insensitive comment made by someone on your "side" and/or made about someone on the other "side"?
- If yes, the correct response is "come on people, lighten up."
- If no, the correct response is "how DARE you?!?!?!?"

That's exactly the type of thing I'd expect a liberal pinko or right wing Nazi like you to say.

That was obvious satire.

Now having read an article about this on CNN, I still have the same opinion I did when this aired:

NO.

It was not a specific joke directed at her or her kids, but in a way I felt it was poking at her media whore personality. And given the response...I think I made my point.*

I would have also voted for her being hot too, but I can only vote once.

*I would like to point out that I am not a fan of Palin by any stretch, but I did poke fun at Obama earlier today in The Simpsons thread. I am an equal opportunity hater of politicians.

I still don't quite see how that made fun of Trig Palin.

This is the most retarded thread I've read in a long while.

Of course it was targeted at Palin's family. Duh. That being said, so what, that's what they do. It's a cartoon from an liberal creator, taking cheap shots at a prominent conservative...where's the surprise? Now you could argue about the hypocrisy inherent in that had it instead been some conservative network TV show mining humor from a birth defect in an Obama child there would be widespread outrage at the hate-mongering racist producers of the show requiring a national dialog and immediate show cancellation.

ETA: Sarah Palin is hot.

Family Guy always goes too far. So what.