Richard Cohen’s Latest Column Vs. Frank J.’s Satire

Some people claim that conservatives just aren’t funny — which isn’t true, especially in the political arena. There are actually a lot more funny conservative blogs than liberal blogs out there. Just name to few, there’s Ace of Spades HQ, Tim Blair, BlameBush!, IMAO, Iowahawk, The Nose On Your Face, Potfry, Scrappleface, and Wuzzadem among others.

However, there is one problem: it’s always extremely difficult to do good satire about liberals because they’ve gotten so outrageously silly, pacifistic, and consumed by moral equivalence that it can be hard to come up with realistic sounding things that some lefties wouldn’t do if they had a chance.

Here’s a perfect example of it. Frank J., over at IMAO, wrote a piece of satire called, “We Could Have Peace in the Middle East If Only a Few More People Would Condemn Israel.” Here’s an excerpt from the post:

“Israel has had a long history of responding to attacks on its people, and what do they have to show for it? More attacks! Israel seems to have missed an essential fact about the area in which they live: It’s full of Muslims. Grass is green, the sky is blue, and Muslims live in corrupt dictatorships and murder people. That’s just how things are. Does Israel really think they can solve that with violent attacks against the violent? That’s madness. Israel should have known that, by their location, they were essentially agreeing to get murdered every so often; anything else is cultural ignorance. But, by joining our voices in a cry of condemnation, maybe we can wake Israel up to the fact. We’ll have to shout loud for them to hear us over Hezbollah’s bombs, but they have to hear us now.

…Israel is at war and surrounded by millions of people who want them dead, so what they need most right now is our criticism. Let’s remind them who were the ones who decided to be Jews where they are not wanted so maybe they’ll realize their folly and stop the aggression. Then we will finally have peace in the Middle East (as long as you don’t count Muslim violence – but who does?).”

Now, here’s liberal columnist Richard Cohen in the Washington Post today:

“The greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now. Israel fights Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south, but its most formidable enemy is history itself.

This is why the Israeli-Arab war, now transformed into the Israeli-Muslim war (Iran is not an Arab state), persists and widens. It is why the conflict mutates and festers. It is why Israel is now fighting an organization, Hezbollah, that did not exist 30 years ago and why Hezbollah is being supported by a nation, Iran, that was once a tacit ally of Israel’s. The underlying, subterranean hatred of the Jewish state in the Islamic world just keeps bubbling to the surface. The leaders of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and some other Arab countries may condemn Hezbollah, but I doubt the proverbial man in their street shares that view.

…Another gifted British historian, Tony Judt, wraps up his recent book “Postwar” with an epilogue on how the sine qua non of the modern civilized state is recognition of the Holocaust. Much of the Islamic world, notably Iran under its Holocaust-denying president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, stands outside that circle, refusing to make even a little space for the Jews of Europe and, later, those from the Islamic world. They see Israel not as a mistake but as a crime. Until they change their view, the longest war of the 20th century will persist deep into the 21st. It is best for Israel to hunker down.”

They could have mixed and matched things from these two columns and no one would have noticed.

“Israel should have known that, by their location, they were essentially agreeing to get murdered every so often,” and so, “(i)t is best for Israel to hunker down.”

Maybe they can just replace Cohen with Frank J., Liberal Larry, Scott Ott, or Iowahawk. The conservatives would think it was funny, the liberals would have trouble telling the difference, and the bloggers would probably work much cheaper than columnists like Cohen.

Share this!

Enjoy reading? Share it with your friends!