Satire is a Scalpel. Not a Meat Cleaver
The Conservatives don't understand satire. They don't have the capacity for it.
To a Conservative, "satire" means "making fun" of someone. Whether or not there is a grain of truth in the alleged satire is not the question. The object of "sport" must simply be mocked. The intended reader will hear all the dog whistles, realize that the "funny funny cartoon" meets with the lies they're told by Limbaugh and the other right wing professional liars, and they'll "get" the "Joke"
Let me explain... when I say that Rep. Michele Bachmann has said some really stupid things, like...
"I find it interesting that it was back in the 1970s that the swine flu broke out under another, then under another Democrat president, Jimmy Carter. I'm not blaming this on President Obama, I just think it's an interesting coincidence." -Rep. Michele Bachmann, on the 1976 Swine Flu outbreak that happened when Gerald Ford, a Republican, was president, April 28, 2009
...and the new Republican majority puts her on the INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE? My friends, THAT'S SATIRE!
Mere mockery? That's not satire.
Let's examine these series of cartoons by James Hudnall and Batton Lash on the Biggovernment.com website (run by Andrew Breitbart, the admitted serial liar who is being sued for editing a video to make a USDA worker look racist when what she said was the opposite of racism, remember him?)
See, the intended joke here is that the First Lady is ordering parents to control what their children eat, taking control of a child's diet away from the parent and investing it in government. Nothing the First Lady has done even comes CLOSE to that, any more than Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No to Drugs" was any more enforceable than the current drug laws. It is a typical job of a First Lady to be kind of a national "Mom" and say things and work on projects to improve the health and education of children. But Brietbart's hack comic drawers don't understand satire. Instead, they show the First Lady as fat and scarfing down cheeseburgers, which she doesn't do, they show Obama's ears as impossibly large, the cartoon isn't funny in the first place, and there's no grain of truth on which to hang the satire.
And since when was Michele Obama "fat"?
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