CSotD: Satire, lies and misstatements

Lalo Alcaraz

Tommy Siegel

Clay Jones

And so on and so forth. The Internet is full of jokes about JD Vance masturbating with a sofa, and the cartoons are nearly as plentiful.

It’s a lie. Or, as the Fact Check sites say, it “Originated as Satire.”

We see stories from time to time about foreign governments picking up Onion satires and publishing them as real, and we laugh at their credulity, but maybe they know it’s bogus and they just want to make us look bad.

That appears to be what’s going on with JD and his couch, but the question is, at what level do satire and fraud crossover?

If something is on the Onion or is from Andy Borowitz, we’re supposed to know it’s satire, a joke not to be taken seriously, because we’re expected to know that those are sources of satire.

I’m not sure how many readers were supposed to know that Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal was satire, but many people did not, and were outraged by his straight-faced proposal to cook and eat the children of the poor, which not only added to the fun, but magnified the reach of his intended message about heartlessness.

But what if the response from those who didn’t get the joke had been “What a good idea!”

As Swift wrote in a serious vein:

Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: like a man, who hath thought of a good repartee when the discourse is changed, or the company parted; or like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead.

The sofa story began as a joke, but, because the jester was not a known satirist, it was taken seriously, despite the fact that anyone with access to a copy of the book could readily prove the passage wasn’t in it.

Then, once the fake citation was revealed, someone else forged a page containing the alleged passage, claiming it appeared in the first edition of the book but was edited out of subsequent printings. This “joke,” too, was accepted as truth.

And accepted not just by the gullible, but by those who didn’t care about truth. Jones created the above couch cartoon knowing the story wasn’t true, and justifies his promoting the false story:

Sure, but people are also asking “Is Kamala Harris an unqualified DEI hire?”

Lisa Benson (Counterpoint) passes on the false claim that Harris was the “Border Czar” appointed to shut down illegal entry. It’s not satire and it’s not true: There is no such title and she was, rather, tasked with examining why so many people were fleeing their own countries.

Trump loyalists might prefer not to examine that issue.

Meanwhile, Steve Kelley (Creators) declares it a lie to say that inflation and crime are down and that there are fewer border crossings.

Despite the fact that inflation is down, and that crime is down, and that there are currently fewer illegal border crossings, though the latter stat depends on whether you’re counting those who were caught (higher) or those who got through (lower).

Perhaps this is just satire. Maybe Benson and Kelley are joking.

Those who promote the couch story say conservative falsehoods justify their own falsehoods. Which means “When they go low, we go lower,” and answers your mother’s question: If your friends all jumped off a cliff, you would jump off the cliff, too.

Is it humorless or impractical to object to further undermining the public’s faith?

I’m not against dark humor. I got a laugh from this NYTimes article about Linda Vaccarino, furiously bailing water out of the Twitter boat while her boss continues to drill holes in its hull, and I found this ghastly quote grimly amusing:

Like many of his fans, I was heartbroken by the effect of the Champ having taken too many punches. I don’t know if Yaccarino is a sell-out or has always been an amoral profiteer, but I wouldn’t wish anybody that same tragic outcome, except maybe metaphorically.

And I got a grim chuckle out of Marian Kamensky’s response to Facebook reversing its ban on Donald Trump, that superb satirist who made over 30,000 jokes as president and continues to regale his followers with many a clever jest.

Dear Leader’s biggest triumph as a satirist being when he told an audience “I love you Christians. I’m a Christian. I love you, get out, you gotta get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again, we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.”

Like Swift, people didn’t know if he was joking or serious, but his supporters explain that he meant that, once in office, he’ll make everything perfect and nobody will ever need to vote.

Just like living in North Korea!

Opposing Trump and Vance doesn’t require lying, as Jack Ohman (Tribune) indicates with this commentary on their racist attacks on Kamala Harris.

Ohman even slides in some gibes over Vance’s Mountain Dew fixation and the way he seems interchangeable with his predecessor, his job being to fill the ticket without overshadowing the Star.

David Horsey doesn’t try for humor, choosing rather to lay out the truth and let the readers see the reality behind what Ohman and others refer to as a “dog whistle” that only bigots can hear.

Anyone can hear it. The task is to get them to listen.

There’s no need for satire — much less lies — to make JD Vance look absurd. Jeffery Koterba points out that you don’t have to invent phony passages in his memoir to make him look bad.

Old journalist’s trick: Just quote him accurately.

As Ann Telnaes demonstrates, you can get a laugh out of his self-destructive statements without even twisting them, much less making them up.

Why lie about a man who offers an unending stream of jaw-dropping gaffes, like when he defended his Indian-descended wife against his white supremacist followers by essentially saying she was one of the good ones? If nothing else, she and Melania are gonna get along together just fine.

Never mind the Hillbillies. Call his next book “Country Slicker Eulogy.”