jetBlue just screwed every one of us.

[email protected]

FOX News’ Bill O’Reilly and right-wing blogger Michelle Malkin complained that jetBlue was a corporate sponsor of the YearlyKos blogger conference and had offered a few free tickets for conference attendees (not exactly a huge commitment, and something companies do for conferences of all political stripes). O’Reilly and Malkin claimed that this was akin to jetBlue supporting people who endorse murder and assassination – he quite literally compared the top blogs to the KKK and the nazis.

jetBlue, mind you, advertises on FOX (according to Markos), shows FOX News on its flights, and its CEO has given $2100 to far-right GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney. But please just ignore all of that. Because jetBlue has now, finally, shown some attention to the left as well, O’Reilly and Malkin decided that jetBlue must be destroyed.

So what did jetBlue do in response? Did they say “hey, what do you mean we’re catering to the left, we’ve been showing FOX News on our flights forever?” Did they say “would you like our CEO to stop donating to right-wing politicians in order to show that he doesn’t take sides in politics?” Did they say “if we pull our sponsorship of YearlyKos should we then pull our sponsorship of FOX News shows too?

No, jetBlue responded by pulling their logo from the YearlyKos Web site sponsor list, sending the clear to signal to every company in America that you, we, are pariahs that no company should dare touch. That we are, in fact, just as O’Reilly and Malkin have claimed, akin to murderers and assassins.

Oh, but jetBlue would like you to know, sotto voce, that they still REALLY like you, they just have to pretend in public that you’re a diseased pariah while funding the presidential candidacy of a gay-bashing, far-right religious nutjob. As a gay man it reminds me of the way Republicans treat gays or Jews or Muslims or any other minority – bash us in public, but privately tell us they really like us, really they do. You see, some of jetBlue’s best friends are black… I mean bloggers.

jetBlue can go fuck itself.

And feel free to tell them that in those words: [email protected]



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