February 10, 2012 7:10 AM

You know you're a Republican when...you take an article from the Onion as factual and true

THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD

(apologies to Keith Olbermann)

Congressman John Fleming (R-LA)

Congressman John Fleming (R-LA) is going to have a rough news cycle after his office posted a link to an outrageous story about Planned Parenthood’s intentions to build an $8 billion “abortionplex,” complete with shopping mall, movie theater and three-story night club. It’s a laughable commentary on the outrageous charges that anti-choice groups use to attack Planned Parenthood, from one of the finest purveyors of satire, but the joke appears to have been lost on Fleming.

A few years ago, Fox News Channel decided it wanted to do its own version of The Daily Show. Recruiting a few Conservative comedians (yes, that’s an oxymoron), FNC created something they called The Half-Hour News Hour. If you’ve never heard of it, don’t fret; no one watched it, and it didn’t last long enough to make much of an impression. The only reason I remember The Half-Hour News Hour is that it confirmed one very basic truth: Conservatives just aren’t funny. No matter what they tried, the show’s writers weren’t up to the task. Perhaps it that Liberals have a different appreciation for the humorous and Conservatives for the more serious. Perhaps humor isn’t the same for Liberals and Conservatives. Whatever the reason, The Half-Hour News Hour died a quiet, ignominious, well-deserved, and little-noticed death. Not that Lizz Winstead and Jon Stewart had been feeling particularly threatened.

What I personally find funny about Conservatives is that, not only are their funny bones out of whack, so many of them seem incapable of recognizing, never mind appreciating, satire.

The Onion as real news? Really? What planet do you have to spend most of your time on (apologies to Barney Frank) in order to think for even a nanosecond that The Onion is anything but pure satire? Say hello to Congressman John Fleming. Strictly speaking, he may not meet the defintion of “Worst Person in the World,” but he’ll never be accused of being the “Smartest Person in the World.”

Yeah, but Rep. Fleming’s been this way before….

Getting duped by false stories in The Onion is a common occurrence, as Literally Unbelievable demonstrates. But rarely does it happen to someone so public. And adding another layer of humor to the incident, the story Fleming posted is nine months old and was already a viral Internet phenomenon: several fake Yelp reviews of the abortionplex were published, and the story was the basis for Literally Unbelievable in the first place.

Fleming has been a punch line before. Think Progress reported in September that Fleming complained that he and his family struggled to live on an annual income of $400,000, more than enough to qualify Fleming as a member of the 1 percent.

Yes, this is Fleming’s THIRD go-round as “Worst Person in the World” (you can read about the other “honors” here and here). Multiple “honors” means that one is particularly “gifted”, in that one’s surpassingly ignorant, foolish, mean-spirited, or compassion-depraved…er, deprived. Two would be impressive; three is world-class. Fleming’s third is a classic case of a clueless Right-wing ideologue failing to do his homework and engaging his mouth before his brain’s in gear.

One more and he gets a free lifetime subscription to NewsMax.

Perhaps I should drop the “Worst Person in the World” title, and just start calling it the “John Fleming Award.”

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This page contains a single entry by Jack Cluth published on February 10, 2012 7:10 AM.

Everything you need to know about today's Conservatives was the previous entry in this blog.

I did my master's thesis on "anus-mounted fireworks"...and lived to tell about it is the next entry in this blog.

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