Friday March 28, 2003

FEW LAUGHS GOOD, FEWER LAUGHS BETTER! For a satire site, the Onion is pretty even-handed about its political targets -- why, Andrew Sullivan cherry-picks gags from it for his winger readership all the time. But the war seems to have challenged them in this regard, as one can only make so many jokes about stupid protestors and remain hilarious. So the Onion's recent Iraq-related spread, "Operation Piss Off the Planet," has a lot of items that would seem to mock the Bush agenda.

Your basic Onion fan (like this pro-war but reasonable fellow) says that's life and enjoys the jokes. But someone apparently felt the need to redress the balance, and created his own, more conservatively-correct version called The Lemon -- at least, that's the only excuse I can see for aping the format but, instead of parodying the site (as Mad did), just making sure that most of the jokes were about stupid protestors. (Sample headlines: "FOX news condemned for 'Flagrant centrist bias'" and "Saddam praises news coverage of war"). The obligatory Glenn Reynolds shout-out has followed.

As I've written elsewhere, the Right wants American culture and it wants it bad. I would suggest that doing conservative versions of pre-existing cultural artifacts is not the way to go about it -- just as the efforts of some well-meaning folks to find the "liberal Rush Limbaugh" are equally doomed. Culture is made by artists, not rip-off artists.

I expect we'll see an uptick in stridency all across the board as things get uglier here in Nuthouse America. Say, that was pretty strident in itself. See?