May 29, 2012
S.E. Cupp
Why didn”t the left stick up for Coulter and Malkin in the past? Both women are more famous “media types” than Cupp.
While trying to suss out what brought on this outbreak of bipartisan outrage, my train of thought was derailed when Larry Flynt raised his gravelly, crippled-dude voice in his own defense. He told thedailycaller.com:
“I”m able to publish this because of the Supreme Court case I won in 1984, Flynt v. Falwell.“
Flynt got the year wrong, plus the case citation, and quite possibly the point of the decision itself. He called the Cupp image protected “satire,” but Hustler Magazine v. Falwell concerned “parody,” and the two are not synonymous.
But let’s cut Flynt some slack: Poor dude has to use a penis pump.
So let it be noted that in May, this Year of Our Lord 2012, left and right finally agreed on something: Larry Flynt is a jerk.
(I”m looking forward to the Franklin Mint’s commemorative coin.)
But before the ink on this hard-won cultural truce had time to dry, Dan Riehl up and smeared it.
Riehl blogs at breitbart.com. You remember Andrew Breitbart, the online impresario whose recent unexpected death prompted leftists across America to express their ghoulish delight at his passing?
I guess Riehl didn”t get the company memo about not stooping to the left’s level, and/or he had been in a coma for the previous two days, because on May 26, he mused on Twitter about salon.com editor-at-large Joan Walsh, “…If she’s going to open her mouth, wish she’d do something I might actually enjoy for once!”
Michelle Malkin’s twitchy.com promptly condemned him, but Riehl managed in a couple of witless, tone-deaf Tweets to surrender the right’s briefly held moral high ground and destroy a tenuous political coalition.
To Dan Riehl, I say:
Thank you.
Don”t misunderstand me:
Hustler‘s Photoshop of S. E. Cupp was gratuitous and unfunny.
But that’s what forced the punditocracy to wring their hands for 48 hours? That’s what briefly united the nation’s warring partisan factions?
A disgusting, tongue-in-cheek picture in a half-forgotten magazine?
I hate “civility.”
Conservatives aren”t supposed to buy into Marxist concepts such as “misogyny.”
Left and right shouldn”t “get along,” especially not based on anything this flimsy and asinine.
Pretty much every woman writer on the Web gets Photoshopped. Our Wikipedia entries are hijacked. We get sued and insulted. We get death threats and rape threats. I hate it. But crude, unhinged vitriol is the very connective tissue of the online environment in which we”ve chosen to work.
In other news, water is wet.
Fight back with all your strength and wit. But remember: To the average American, this “controversy” is just another Big Media circle jerk.
My only advice to S. E. Cupp: Next time you go on TV and the subject is blowjobs, leave the pearl necklace at home.
