Coulter Says Something So the Establishment & Rubio Shills Have to Go Banana-Pants Over It

This to me is a joke of the "silly" kind. It signals itself as silly by Coulter's playing dumb -- that is, she knows Trump cannot deport the American Haley. She knows Haley is American. She knows it would be unamerican to do try such an impossible thing.

So she's playing dumb with the tweet. Then she says something silly.

When someone says something that is deliberately and knowingly silly, personally, I give that statement a lot of wiggle room because one looks like a prig and a dope to take it seriously and deconstruct it for its "real meaning.'

But the establishment people -- who incidentally have a bank-shot agenda here; when they attack Coulter, they attack Trump, and that in turn helps Rubio, which is what this is all really about -- are going nuts over this.

Eh. It's not just a joke. It's a silly joke.

Hunting down a bit of foolishness for What It Says About Everything makes you look a perfect fool.

Is It Offensive to Harp On Her Status as a Second-Generation American? Um, yeah I think it is, but here's the thing: it slightly is.

There needs to be some kind of de minimis safe harbor for jokes of such minor offensiveness or else we're just the Social Justice Warriors, Rightwing Auxiliaries.

The de minimis idea is important in law. Does a town putting up a Christmas tree sorta-kinda intertwine the state with religion? Um... yeah but barely. Call it "de minimis, say it's such a minor breach we can safely take no official concern over it, and move on to real shit.

This Coulter joke is that. It's de minimis. You need to have your Immigrant Bashing Sensitivity Dials tuned to super-duper sensitive to get upset about it.

I can't help but think of Howard Stern's old rant about the right wing's speech-policing, back when the right wing was perceived (wrongly, probably) to do more of it than the left.

He went off on this rant about people on the right's insistence that speech be so inoffensive that all we'd be able to talk about is Barney the Dinosaur all f***ing day long.

I'm so sick of this from the left, and I'm even more sick of it when people on the right see a cynical -- or, who knows, genuine but incredibly misguided -- opportunity to impose even greater speech restrictions on a people who are already overburdened by speech restrictions.

One More Thing: The Extreme-Silly Joke. I like a type of joke where I say something outrageous. If my soup is disappointing, I'll push it away and declare, in a low dark voice, "This soup is worse than the Holocaust."

Now, the thing is, I know the soup is not actually worse than the Holocaust. I'm playing dumb, playing silly, saying something so absurd you could not possibly believe I'm on the level.

Occasionally, in private life, I'll say about Obama, "Guess that sounded better in the original Kenyan."

I'm a dedicated anti-Birther. So why do I say it? Because people who know me know I don't believe he was born in Kenya, and the joke is just being so over-the-top extreme, to a silly degree, that maybe it's funny.

Or maybe it's not.

Anyway, I see Coulter's joke as this type. I think she's being over-the-top silly/extreme.

I think people who are taking a deliberately over-the-top silly/extreme joke and treating it as serious are either misinformed, or doing what the Social Justice Warriors do, which is reading nonsensical meanings into things because of a pre-existing political agenda.

posted by Ace at 01:56 PM

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