This is the headline of the summer:
And this is the line of the summer, from Pareene at Gawker, about the “tasteless and offensive” cartoon (or possible “anti-Obama propaganda”) that is making a fool of nearly*** everyone on cable “news” tonight:
This obvious and heavy-handed satire has enraged Democrats and liberal media critics because now they are pretty sure this nation of child-like imbeciles will believe it to be an un-retouched photograph from the FUTURE.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the FUTURE:
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*** Everyone except Jesse Ventura, bless him, who just told Larry King (I’m paraphrasing) that we live in the era of free speech, and everyone remembers Larry Flynt took his case to the Supreme Court and won for his magazine’s satires of Jerry Falwell, and the First Amendment is there to protect offensive speech because inoffensive speech doesn’t need protecting.
Go, Jesse, go!
You can’t make this stuff up. Really:
Possible Nazi Theme of Grand Prix Boss’s Orgy Draws Calls to Quit
Few scandals in recent years have provoked as much anger and dismay across Europe as the saga of Max Mosley, the overseer of grand prix motor racing who made tabloid news last weekend in a front-page exposé and accompanying Web video showing him in a sadomasochistic orgy with five supposed prostitutes in a London sex “dungeon.”
But beyond the licentiousness of the episode, it was the suggestion of Nazi undertones in the role-playing during the session in a basement in London’s fashionable Chelsea district that led to demands for Mr. Mosley’s resignation as president of the Paris-based Federation Internationale de l’Automobile.
The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, they say, and they would be right [e.a.]:
Family history has added to the notoriety: Mr. Mosley, 67, is the younger son of Britain’s 1930s fascist leader, Sir Oswald Mosley, and the society beauty Diana Mitford, whose secret wedding in Berlin in October 1936 was held at the home of the Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels and included Hitler as a guest of honor.
Naturally, automakers are distancing themselves from this nasty episode and this nasty man. But he isn’t having any of it [e.a.]:
Mr. Mosley, undaunted, tried to turn the tables on BMW and Daimler Benz, which manufactures Mercedes-Benz cars, with a statement that raised the specter of the two companies’ own role during the Nazi era. … His statement held to his insistence that fault lay with the way in which his actions had been reported by The News of The World, and not with the actions themselves.
And the NYT’s John F. Burns ends with the kicker:
If he recognized the irony in the son of the man who led Britain’s “blackshirts” in reproving German companies for their wartime past, Mr. Mosley did not show it.
Perhaps those commentators were right after all when they said that 9/11 signaled the end of irony.
Or perhaps 9/11 will prove to be the beginning of an era when people will once again understand irony, and satire, the weapon of resistance par excellence. One can always hope.
Heh:
It was only a matter of time before the so-called “Iranian President” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would be unmasked as the biggest hoax in the history of television, perpetrated by Brooklyn comic Misha Braslavsky, a cable TV buffoon exploiting Western stereotypes of “evil Islamic radicalism.”
Looking back, we can only laugh at our unblinking acceptance of Ahmadinejad, an “Islamist hard-liner” dressed like a Turkish used car salesman, who called to wipe Israel off the map or move it to Alaska, demanded a manual recount of Holocaust victims, and banned all Western music. His retractions were even more bizarre: “CNN make lie! I send squeegees to help Israel, not ‘Wipe off Israel!’ Who translated, I kill him!” Or “I not ban all Western music, I ban only Country-Western music, spawn of Satan! Eminem and Barbra Streisand still welcome!” - a statement that sparked violent protests in Nashville.
