Should we get outraged over a parody?

posted at 8:40 am on April 15, 2008 by Ed Morrissey
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Conservatives have a reputation for not having a sense of humor.  That’s mostly unfair; most conservatives (and liberals) I know have lives outside of politics and love to laugh as much as anyone else.  However, when it comes to laughing at ourselves, both liberals and conservatives have a bit of a blind spot — and a budding controversy over a parody version of the Wall Street Journal may prove it yet again:

When it comes to conservative women, liberals are a perverse and hypocritical bunch. As a general rule, they either insist that conservative women are hideously ugly or alternately get down in the gutter and aim everything from crude comments, to porn fantasies, to rape threats at the very same women.

Meanwhile, the very same libs who are the first ones to yell “sexist” at the top of their lungs when the mildest gibe is tossed at a woman on the Left, either keep their mouths shut or laugh along at the most grotesque, sexual insults aimed at conservative women.

For the latest example of this, you can head over to the Huffington Post, where they smirk along with this graphic (which I’ve blurred) that is featured in a piece of garbage called “My Wall Street Journal.”

I’ll skip the WSJ-style sketch of a topless Ann Coulter in a thong, to which John Hawkins so vehemently objects.  It’s tasteless and tacky, and John has a good point about the hypocrisy of liberals including it in the spoof.  It doesn’t even make much sense as a parody of the WSJ, one of the most sober of publications.  It might make a good satire of Britain’s The Sun, which regularly features such topless women, and certainly that’s the reference for the tabloidy reputation of new WSJ owner Rupert Murdoch, but most American readers will look at this and wonder what the satirists have in mind.

If Hawkins ran photoshopped pictures of Hillary Clinton topless to satirize her attempts to reach white male voters in the Rust Belt, can we suppose that the Huffington Post — which giggles with glee at the Coulter sketch — would react supportively?  I’m with John in guessing that the liberal writers at HuffPo would fall all over themselves to castigate John for demeaning Hillary as nothing more than a sex object.  I don’t exactly consider this a “sick porn fantasy”, though.

Compounding this is the report in the New York Times that a mysterious man with a corporate American Express card tried buying out all of the parody papers at Los Angeles newsstands yesterday.  Obviously someone wanted to get copies of it off the street, but that’s almost worthy of a parody in itself.  Doesn’t it make the parody more lucrative when it sells?  That strategy only encourages more reprints and funds future efforts.

Perhaps rather than working ourselves into a lather over this rather prepubescent example of political satire, we should be laughing — at its authors.  If drawing naked breasts is what they consider trenchant political commentary, then the creators of My Wall Street Journal have indicted themselves, not Ann Coulter or Rupert Murdoch — especially with their weirdly self-congratulatory YouTube hosted at HuffPo, with a fake Rupert Murdoch getting exercised over a fake WSJ.  Point out the hypocrisy and the locker-room mentality of the satire to be sure, but let’s not give it power it most definitely does not deserve.

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