While it’s slightly incredible, I guess, that Ann Coulter would flippantly claim in an e-mail to have sent fake anthrax to the New York Times, this story brings up a more interesting point:
[W]hat should be done with Ann Coulter, who has argued that The New York Times should have been blown up by Timothy McVeigh and that Times executive editor Bill Keller should be executed by firing squad?
This was the question one Times source asked on Friday after an employee at the paper of record received an envelope with an X scrawled through it and a suspicious powder inside. “This thing makes all of Ann Coulter’s comments a little less funny,” said the source. “I wonder if she considers herself at all responsible when lunatics read her columns and she says that we should be killed.”
What’s gotten me all thinky is not the “what should be done” part, but the the other part: “This thing makes all of Ann Coulter’s comments a little less funny.” I know her standard dodge is to chide the seriousness of her critics (“Hey, lighten up, Poindexter, I’m only kidding”), but I’ve read enough of her work to conclude that it’s not really intended to be funny. At least, not the parts that people discuss. Let’s take a look.
I have a screenshot of that Sadly, No! online store with the T-shirts advocating the murder of conservatives — the one Glenn Greenwald failed to condemn. But before we get to the screenshot, let’s recap, for humor purposes.
Remember your college roommate’s ‘famous spaghetti,’ where he’d dump a can of Pathmark tomato sauce into a pot and go crazy-bonkers by adding some oregano flakes and garlic salt? That’s ‘humor,’ Patterico-style.
But sure, let’s recap.
Patterico: “As a right-wing blowhard, I am convinced that other people are motivated similarly to myself. That is, other people also habitually lawyer the truth, using reason and argument as a wino uses a lamppost — for support, not illumination.”
Us: I saw a squirrel. Hey Brad, do you want this last piece of pizza? I like cartoons.
You can see the never-sold, voted-down parody (of this right-wing T-shirt) that used to be in our store which hasn’t even opened yet, here.
Of course, we could be dishonestly lying in an untruthful fashion, and our store could have been secretly open all this time in a clever plot to sell $0.00 worth of stuff.
Wingnuttery’s triple-A team, a.k.a. the Christian Worldview Network, has produced another high-caliber prospect. His name is Coach Dave Daubenmire, and he looks like this:
Astute observers will note the symbol on his hat. It signifies that the only team he’s really interested in playing for is JEEEEEEEEE-ZUS-AAAAAAAAAAH’S!
In the early 1990s the school where I was employed was looking for a new principal. As the football coach and a parent of three children in the district, I was very interested in the direction our school was going to take and I saw the selection of our new leader as a very important decision.
I’m glad Coach Dave recognizes the importance of selecting a competent person to run his school. Of course, Coach Dave probably defines “competence” as “forcing the kids to learn about dinosaurs boarding Noah’s ark,” but it’s nice to see he has standards of some sort.
The other day Senator Hillary Clinton joined others in supports of Israel who has been under attack by terrorists imbedded in Beiruit.
Nope, I got no idea what it means either. You could probably write a more coherent sentence by tossing a Scrabble box into a salad spinner.
However, that very same day another group, Jews for Peace, in San Francisco, blamed Israel for the war in the Middle East and protested against Jews living in Israel.
That sentence had four commas. And only one of them was used correctly.
More than 14,000 civilians have been killed in Iraq in the first half of this year, an ominous figure reflecting the fact that “killings, kidnappings and torture remain widespread” in the war-torn country, a United Nations report says.
Killings of civilians are on “an upward trend,” with more than 5,800 deaths and more than 5,700 injuries reported in May and June alone, it says.
The report lists examples of bloody suicide bombs aimed at mosques, attacks on laborers, the recovery of slain bodies, the assassinations of judges, the killings of prisoners, the targeting of clergy — all incidents dutifully reported by media over these three-plus years of chaos in the streets.
But hey, at least it hasn’t devolved into a theocratic militia state yet… right Hitch?
You don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it helps
Immediate opening for on-air talent willing to justify alleged rapes and murders by U.S. troops stationed in Iraq. Military background and/or Feminist credentials preferred, although candidates need not be female. Prefer experienced candidates, but will train fresh talent with unique perspectives. Credentials optional, scruples not required. Equal opportunity employer.
I Condemn It All
Filed under: General, Humor — Patterico @ 7:07 am
Many serious leftists have arrived at the Sadly, No! web site through favorable links supplied by a serious and well-respected Constitutional lawyer named Glenn Greenwald. Ace is going to kill me for this, but I’ll provide you the links. There’s this one, which provides a Sadly, No! link as documentation of the right’s “juvenile name-calling,� and this one, which provides two Sadly, No! links as evidence of the “vile, deranged and psychosexually disturbed commentary� of Jeff Goldstein.
If you go to the Sadly, No! main page, there are four buttons at the top. One says “Store.� If you click on it, you get to a Cafe Press store with some items for sale bearing the logo:
Rope.
Tree.
Conservative.
Some Assembly Required.
The words are printed over a noose. You can purchase the coffee mug, the teddy bear, or any of various items of clothing.
[Watching Patterico and Misha‘s readership streaming through the store…]
For opining that “Israel is making a strategic mistake by over-reacting to Hezbollah’s provocations,� and for noting that Israel’s interests are not identical to America’s, conservative Gregory Djerejian has been declared an “appeaser� and a member of The [center] Left by renowned political thinker Hugh Hewitt.
For noting that bombing his pro-Israeli Lebanese friend out of his house would appear to be an ineffective way of stopping terrorism, War on Whatever supporter Michael J. Totten is told to stop “bitching� and that he and his friend should “grow up�.
Apostate movement conservative Andrew Sullivan, for the crime of not hating liberals enough, is declared “a dishonest, hyperemotional, narcissistic, self-serving he-bitch.�
I shall now shed, almost but not quite Iron-Eyes Cody style, a single tear for conservatives Djerejian and Sullivan, and the neoconservative Totten.
[sniffle]
It is — how you say? — too sad! Tant pis.
But then when, in their big-tented carnival of jackbooted carnality, conservatives sleep with fascists — there, I’ve said the word — this sort of Valtrex moment is inevitable. When the three purged rightwingers above agreed to make kissy with their favorite Bush, they were basically agreeing to fuck a blow-up doll filled with every diseased, extremist mass-movement notion and belief of the last 40 years.
Which is why my single tear is actually more like one shed by Roald Dahl’s Enormous Crocodile than by the ’70s-era Ad Council’s sad Native American. Read the rest of this entry »
While this is unlikely to gain approval from the “Kill‘EmAll” crowd, it’s probably the best thing the international community can do:
British Prime Minister Tony Blair and United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan called today for an international “stabilization force’’ to quell the fighting between Israel and the Hezbollah militia, while President Bush pungently suggested that Mr. Annan should pay more attention to reining in Hezbollah.
Mr. Blair and Mr. Annan called for a deployment that would be far larger than the 2,000-member United Nations observer force currently stationed in southern Lebanon. Without such a force, “then I think it’s very difficult to see how we restore calm,’’ Mr. Blair said, according to Agence-France Presse.
American and Israeli officials gave a tepid response to the idea, with Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert, telling the Knesset that a ceasefire could only come after Hezbollah returns two captured soldiers and that Lebanese, not international soldiers should be deployed along the border, The Associated Press reported.
Uh. I think you’d be better off with international soldiers along the borders, Mr. Prime Minister. If our experience in Iraq has taught us anything, it’s that supposedly “national” security forces can be penetrated easily by terrorist groups.
