MSNBC's Slate of Hate touts the intellectual stench of Ted Rall mocking Pat Tillman and other Americans serving their country in the military in Iraq and Afghanistan.

May 3, 2004: #01 Political Satire/Commentary where satire is always commentary but commentary isn't always satire™
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MSNBC's Slate of Hate touts the intellectual stench of Ted Rall mocking Pat Tillman and other Americans serving their country in the military in Iraq and Afghanistan.·

MSNBC crawled lower than pond-scum to publish a "cartoon" from the Slate of Hate (a.k.a. Slate, the on-line magazine) by Ted Rall on May 3, 2004, mocking the willingness of Pat Tillman and other Americans to serve in Iraq (and Afghanistan). Will MSNBC "News" loudly, unequivocally and repeatedly condemn this offensive material and urge it's removal from the MSNBC website or will they pretend the First Amendment obligates them to remain silent in the face of such calumny?

This cartoon (see Editor's note below) is the intellectual equivalent of prisoner abuse committed by a tiny percentage of American military police in Iraq. Just as common decency motivates the American military to unequivocally condemn such abuse and take effective steps to terminate it, common decency ought to motivate Slate, MSNBC and especially MSNBC News to unequivocally condemn this cartoon and take steps to remove it from the MSNBC website. Slate may not mind (and in fact may well prefer) being associated with such intellectual stench, but MSNBC and especially MSNBC News ought to want to disassociate themselves from it as unequivocally and quickly as possible.

The Pall of Rall on the Slate of Hate.

MSNBC, we await
your stern condemnation of Slate
to show you're appalled
by satire of Rall
for Slate on its website of hate.

By silence you'll tacitly say
his mocking of Tillman's okay
and thereby become
accessory to scum
employed by the website of Slate.

One can safely assume Joe Scarborough will express suitable outrage tonight on Scarborough Country. One can also safely assume that tonight on CNBC Dennis Miller will find suitable words to condemn such intellectual stench. Will Chris Matthews do the same? Will NBC News broadcast a segment focusing on Rall's cartoon as an example of hate? Will MSNBC News? Will the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times publish investigative reports on the anti-patriotism bigotry of the Left? (Of course not!) Will NPR dare do anything other than coo approvingly at the cartoon as a manifestation of what's really great about free speech? (Of course not!) Will the PBS News Hour devote a segment to such intellectual bigotry? (Do they even think such thing exists?)

One can recognize that a main purpose of satire, like cartoons, is to offend people comfortable with offensive ideas. Another purpose of satire is to mock the mockers. Those who mock beyond the bounds of decency deserve to be mocked most severely of all. Unfortunately for me, and fortunately for Rall, it's not possible to satirize him in a way as offensive as the manner in which attempts to satirize Tillman and other American military personnel placing their lives at risk because they lack the intellectual myopia and narcissistic self-importance of people such as Rall, for whom pond scum is too kind an epithet.

Editor's Note: I created a graphics image to "memorialize" this example of intellectual stench, but I refuse to provide a link to it because I don't want my site to contribute to traffic to the url for MSNBC's Slate of Hate featuring the Pall of Rall. What's so offensive about the cartoon? It mocks Pat Tillman as fool who gave up his career to serve in Iraq (and then Afghanistan) because, in the "mind" of Rall, Tillman could not have been "reading the papers" or else he would have known that toppling Saddam Hussein was simply a scheme by George Bush to enable his friends to get rich from "oil."

--Jim Wrenn, Editor@PoliSat.Com.

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