Our Posts Explained - A Public Service Brought To You By The Idiom

As the management says, our posts are for our amusement, and our amusement only. But sometimes we do forget that other people may not “get” our hilarity. Usually this comes up in the context of liberals who, as a rule, tend to take themselves and their causes very seriously and thus, are somewhat humour-challenged. So we will proceed slowly, very slowly.

Just for those who value the importance of being earnest, we wanted to make a few things perfectly clear about some of our recent posts. To begin, let's analyze the Supermodel Revolution post, which focuses on press coverage of the many attractive Lebanese women taking part in demonstations against Syria:

1) The post is humourous. By taking an issue of staggering importance such as, say, the possibility of an “Arab spring” and conflating it with the low and boorish tendency of men to look at women's breasts, one creates “comic tension.” It’s that comic tension that provides the ha-ha. (Cf. The Daily Show, The Onion.)

2) The post is a sly dig at the media’s tendency to play up the “hot chick” angle because they’re more photogenic. This has been widely commented on elsewhere. While the politically correct set may grumble at this depiction of Lebanese women, The Idiom didn’t take these pictures and put them on the cover of major news weeklies and all over the web. AP did. Maybe the liberal establishment should take issue with the photographers of their own propaganda machine. They are clearly practicing the heinous anti-liberal bias crime of “lookism.” Don't ugly chicks yearn to breathe free too? As our post SupermodelRevolution? Redux so ably points out, the less attractive protesters get less airplay. Peel away the layers of irony, savor them, they are exquisite.

3) There was a final dig at the Vietnam era generation (the gold medal winners of the Earnest Olympics) who credit themselves with promoting a mass movement based on ethical opposition to the war in Southeast Asia, when in fact, a lot of it was based on teenage boys looking to get laid. There is no doubt that by 1967, campus protests were a decidedly social phenomenon, and thus a little jab at those very serious people.

Well, if you have to have the joke explained to you, you’re probably not going to get it in any case.

Turning our attention to our post on the nomination of John Bolton to be ambassador to the United Nations, we at the Idiom can’t understand why some people don’t see the humour in his appointment. There’s just something funny about the nominating a guy to be ambassador to the U.N. who once said “there's no such thing as the United Nations." Insert your own joke about existentialism here.

What’s more perplexing though are the people who find it objectionable and counterproductive for the President to nominate someone with a contentious relationship with the U.N. to serve as ambassador to that organization. Maybe what these poor misguided folks don’t realise is that John Bolton is not being hired by the U.N.! He works for the U.S. government and his job is to advocate the United States’ interests in the “world body.” And frankly, we think U.S. interests would be well served by giving the U.N. a hard dose of reality.

Far from the romantic image of leftists, where the U.N. embodies the future of peaceful, enlightened one-world government, the United Nations, for the most part, is a cesspool of corruption where unaccountable and incompetent third world bureaucrats draw big salaries and other benefits to do things like: take refugee populations under their protection and then leave them to slaughter; administer programs that allow horrific dictators to grow rich off their people’s misery and deliver kick-backs to U.N. staff and their friends; traffic in women & children for purposes of forced prostitution; travel to disaster areas to “coordinate” the efforts of nations doing the heavy lifting from the comfort of the local Sheraton. And don’t forget those nifty diplomatic plates that, thanks to diplomatic immunity principles, lets them park anyplace they god damn well feel like it in New York City and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.

Hey, there’s a reason we hear the local joke in Baghdad is, “The U.N. is coming in? Oh great, they should have the child sex ring up and running in no time!”

The problem is that most of those enraptured by the myth of the U.N. really don’t have any contact with their victims, or the victims of the dictators that they coddle.

We at The Idiom personally know a man who can’t walk straight because when he was thrown in prison for indeterminate cause, Saddam’s thugs crushed his pelvis probably for nothing more than their own amusement.

We at The Idiom personally know an Iraqi woman whose sister, a doctor, was murdered when she criticised the health system of the former regime.

We at The Idiom personally know a man whose father was taken by the Baathist government in the middle of the night and never seen again.

We at The Idiom personally know a man who had escaped Saddam’s torture chambers after the Shi’a intifada, made his way to the West and dedicated his life to returning and helping his people.

And we at The Idiom are aware that a good number of Iraqi citizens show up to work at international organizations every day, at the risk of their lives, not just for a pay check, but for the opportunity to help build a better future for themselves and their countrymen. And we know that most of these people are god dammed grateful to the United States for helping them achieve that opportunity.

That is what 1,513 of our soldiers have died for. That’s what many more will die for before the war is finished. They are dying for those hot Lebanese women in Beirut, and for women all over the Arab world. And for the men too. And you can be dammed sure that it is worth it.

And The Idiom dares anyone to smugly mock that!

Any questions?

We know things are very difficult for you these days. Rudderless and intellectually bankrupt, your weltanschaung collapses and you continue your inexorable decline into a permanent minority party status quagmire here in the United States. So as the self-anointed paragons of open-minded tolerance that you are, why not open your minds to some of the new ideas that we present to you on a daily basis in a humorous fashion here at The Idiom? In the meantime, hate mail is always welcome.

Your Humble Editors:
Kid Various, Mr. Surly, & Mr. Scriblerus, Esquires