Jonathan Swift was the most brilliant satirist of the 18th century. From the outrageous “A Modest Proposal” to the subtle delights of “Gulliver’s Travels”, he demonstrated that the stiletto of satire could be more effective than the bludgeon of outrage. And now the blogosphere has its own Jonathan Swift. Here’s a sample of his work, from Ann Coulter Tackles the Menace of Widows and Grieving Mothers:
Coulter is understandably frustrated at how the liberal media fawns over these women and hangs on their every word, while she has struggled to get her message out through the occasional television appearance, talk radio, college campus tours, her syndicated column, her website and her bestselling books. The media seems to believe that these women deserve some sort of special status just because they happen to have lost a loved one, even though they lack Coulter’s long list of credentials. These narcissistic women persist in believing that their loss was somehow greater than that of the rest of the country who watched it all happen on television.
Brilliant. And then there’s the case of the suicides at Guantanamo:
Admiral Harris contends ominously that the suicides are in fact an act of war against the United States. “I believe this was not an act of desperation, but rather an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us,” Harris said. Asymmetrical warfare is a tactic used by a weaker enemy to surprise and disorient his opponent. In order to restore symmetry to the battle, our side will have to engage in increasingly self-destructive tactics of our own and abandon certain principles and ethical values that hold us back and hand our opponents weak points they can exploit to strike back at us, a strategy we are already using with some success in Iraq.