Mark Steyn Insults Piers Morgan By Complimenting Him

This is one of my few areas of expertise-- insulting people.

If you're going to insult someone, you have to tell that person he's lacking in the things he prizes. You have to think about what's important to him, the target, not what's important to you, the person casting the insult. And you have to attack the target on his own grounds, according to his own standards.

Conservatives often knock liberals for being "hoity-toity," as Steyn knocks Morgan here. But "hoity-toity" to them is a compliment because they take that to mean "elevated, educated, elitist, snobbish but rightfully so." All the things, in short, that they prize as virtues to be cultivated.

“It’s not very difficult, this,” Steyn continued. “How much longer are Americans going to have to put up with some snooty, hoity-toity foreigner coming on the airwaves and telling them everything that’s wrong with their country? Why should Americans have to put up with that? It’s completely ridiculous. President [George W.] Bush used to talk about the jobs Americans can’t do, why do we need to bring in some snooty foreigner with some annoying accent to just go on and tell Americans everything. Can’t Americans point out what’s wrong with their country on their own? Has it come to this — that we’ve got to import a special worker class to tell you Americans everything that sucks about America? That’s now a job for foreigners? This is ridiculous.”

I agree with that last bit. I just think to get under Piers Morgan's skin you don't tell him he's "snooty" -- he aspires to be snooty. You tell him he's a shallow-thinking tabloid clown who's mistaken himself for an intellectual, and someone that CNN only hired due to its own deep intellectual and cultural insecurity. He's Jerry Springer with upper-middle-class English accent, but not particularly articulate.

This guy's a tabloid wanker, but seems to think that by moving his stale act from The Mirror to CNN he's become a sharpie like Chris Hitchens.

Nope. Still just the headline-chasing parvenu who wiretapped phones and faked pictures of war crimes.

On the first page of the article, he notes that the left has gone so bananas that they've now made an upper-middle-class English fop a protected minority.

posted by Ace at 05:41 PM

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