I have a feeling this is a parody. I had an entire entry typed up when I saw the last line.

I don't see a parody. I think it's a way of slamming liberals and Jimmy Carter in the complete absence of any genuine evidence or thought process whatsoever.

As one of Ann Coulter's interlocutors flat out asked her, "You just make shit up, don't you?"

Andrew,

When the last line says flat out "This story is fictional, but not false"... yeah, I think you can safely assume a parody.

Upon re-reading, it's not quite up to the level of Scrappleface... but then, very few parody creators are.

David Brin understands me.

Cruel, but fair.

Can we say "straw man"? cmon, say it with me, "straw man". As bad metaphors go, with no facts, no accompanying truth value, you can't take this seriously.

Still, as a satire piece, it works. Somewhat funny, in that disrespectful, freeperish way.

actually, there is a line in the LOTR when Gandalf says "As for me, I pity even his slaves." Plus there's the whole mercy for Gollum thing.

Jimmy would have negotiated a land for peace treaty between the Orcs and the humans. Negiotians over the possession of the One Ring would begin after the establishment of an Orcian state. The Orcs would say they agreed, in English, but in Orcian they would say the humans had to be killed.

The scary thing is that it could have been true. Imagine being a modern president who is ranked under Millard Fillmore and Chester Arthur.

Can I get my two minutes back please? (And please do provide warning messages when linking to clownhall!)

Thanks!

Joe, a parody is an imitation of something, like the Harvard Lampoon's Bored of the Rings. This isn't an imitation, it's appropriation of a genre in which the author can slam his target unconstrained by facts on the ground. William Safire writes like this, too, in his various imaginary letters written from (say) Hillary Clinton's point of view, writing first-person about how hard it will be to stay out of jail. (We're waiting, Bill.)

Back to composing my fictional, but not false, piece on the establishment of the Bush-Hitler Mutual Admiration Society, a parody of course.

As satire, it would have been better to write a straight out plea begging compassion for Mordor. Not in the voice of Carter. Kind of a cheap shot really - the man means well. So he was a lousy President. Let it go, it's been over a long time.

[to WK] I'll offer Jimmy Carter a deal. If he agrees that he's a complete disaster in the foreign policy sphere and promises not to comment on it any more in current publications etc., I promise to leave him completely alone.

[to Anne.elk] let me get this straight... you'll click on arn link that's implicitly about wizards, balrogs and elves, but object to Townhall.com articles because it's too far from your view of reality?

[to Andrew] this article is indeed an imitation of something. It's an imitation of a news report (Scrappleface has built a deservedly popular blog on that very format), and of Jimmy Carter. If Carter wasn't such a focus, I'd call it satire instead. TomAto, tomato, whatever.

Like all parodies, of course it's made up and unconstrained by fact. And Prager wasn't dishomnest - he flat out said it wasn't factual. If it's factual (like the guy in Ivory Coast who was killed when he decided to test the local witchdoctor's bulletproof spell), then by definition it can't be a parody. Are we going too fast for you?

Anyway, as Prager so aptly notes, the proper questions are first: "is it FALSE"? That is, is it in any way a reflection of positions taken by the target (Jimmy Carter and the frothing left) on other issues? From Carter's own record of not just coddling but publicly saying nice things about the world's worst dictators, to the Left's excuses for Palestinian behaviour that would make orcs blush, to zero tolerance policies in schools and the popularity of thereapeutic 're-education' techniques, most of us read that and hear a lot of echoes. Your mileage may vary.

The second question, and for most folks the more important one, is: is it GOOD (funny, amusing, insightful etc.)?

IMAO's wayyyy over the top parodies involving "The Rumsfeld Strangler" et. al. are not only un-factual, they're so very far from reality that they can't even be a reflection of real behaviour. But they are pretty funny at times, hence Frank's popularity.

Finally, there's also an art to it... there's a fine line between funny and stupid, or funny and just unrelievedly mean. Anyone unfortunate enough to have seen all or part of "The Jewish Hammer" knows what I mean.

No idea why I've written so much on this, except the topic was kind of interesting and I got on a roll. Ciao.

Actually, Carter comes off pretty badly in the Halberstram book as well...

A.L.

The problem with this satire is that it's point is to paint Jimmy Carter, and those like them, as people who equivocate to the point complete inversion of facts. Yet the last line "This story is fictional, but not false" pretty much undercuts the argument. Something that is 'not false' is generally speaking 'true'. The amount of semantic wrangling necessary to explain how this might not be the case, is:
1) Precisely what he is complaining about.
2) Not even bothered with.
Instead we have one of those pithy and obtuse one-liners intended to make us nod and smirk knowingly while dismissing everyone else with the old "Well if you don't understand, I can't explain."

Dennis Prager is dumbass, but not stupid.

Carter's "peace" keeping helped the Islamic revolution in Iran and basically failed badly to recognize who they were dealing with... I should also add that Reagan didn't do a better job of dealing with them later...

Carter's analogy is not new, there was an editorial in Haprer's a bout a year ago that said the very same thing. That one, I have to say, was very witty though.