Michelle Malkin is pitchfork crazy mad over Bill Maher's airing of a 1999 clip of Christine O'Donnell's witchcraft claims. I think Michelle just doesn't get humor. The right rarely does.
That the right wing has little or no sense of humour is obvious. To have a sense of humour you have to have at least a smidgen of self-deprecation. You have to see the world for its absurdity. You have to have an irreverence for the silly conventions that bind us to our everyday lives even though we don't exactly know why we do those things. Most of all, you have to not take life, and especially yourself, seriously. Conservatives can claim none of those things.
The lack of humour is probably the right's most prominent characteristic - that and a complete lack of self awareness. A movement that defines humour by Fox's cheap suit Glen Gutfield or the perpetually unfunny Dennis Miller, whose career has been on a downslide since his heady days as a liberal on SNL, is not one that has an even remote familiarity with satire, comedy, wit etc. There are no funny conservatives ... at least intentionally.
Perhaps it is this hapless ignorance of teh funny that angers right wingers so much when it comes to comedians. Because conservatives always fail to get the joke, they take comedians very seriously. In fact, they treat fake news jokesters like Jon Stewart with the utmost seriousness.
To them, Stewart is on par with the hated Walter Cronkite or a favourite target of the right, Dan Rather. To say conservatives don't get the joke is not the point. Conservatives don't think there is a joke. It's news to them.
Take Bill Maher. Please. (Badum!) On his show Friday night, he spoke fondly of new conservative superstar Christine O'Donnell, then played a 1999 segment from his former show, the aptly named 'Politically Incorrect', where she admitted to trying witchcraft. Maher used the tape to bait O'Donnell to come on the air with him.
Of course, he was being facetious. She would never come on his show now she is a right wing cause celebre. Maher was just having a little fun with an extremely loony individual. He likes her! But he knows she's comedy gold, a nutjob who says, in her clueless way, so much about the absurdity of the Tea Party. It's funny as hell because these people don't realize how crazy and out of touch with reality they actually are. We know. And we laugh. Can you blame us?
That really ticks off the conservative chattering classes. Today, the rightosphere is alight with outrage and indignation. That's not unusual, in fact it's par for the course, especially on a Sunday when their religious fervor is at its peak, pitching them into pulpit bashing rage. But O'Donnell has given them a little extra kindling for the bonfire.
Michelle Malkin is screaming. She calls Maher every name in the book. She's probably not wrong. But she is way off base whining about the missing context of O'Donnell's witchy comments. Michelle - there is no context. Christine is nuts. Lovably nuts, but nuts.
That hasn't stopped the army of rightbloggers from following Malkin's fevered lead. They are marching in unison today in absolute apoplectic furor over Maher's treatment of O'Donnell.
That they don't get the joke, or the context of the joke or that Maher actually really likes Christine. Maher is on TV and therefore to them he is a serious talking head, just like Stewart or Limbaugh or Beck. He is not making jokes or being funny. He is spreading as gospel irreverence towards one of their own that does not jibe with their view of a sacred world with its sacred leaders and pretty faces. And Christine O'Donnell is their latest sacred cow.
To them, it's blasphemy, pure and simple. And Bill Maher is fine with that.