Smart Satire in a Blog

I just discovered "Jon Swift's" smart, satirical weblog. A la Stephen Colbert, "Jon Swift" assumes the identity of a rightwing nutjob blogger in order to skewer far right conservatives.

The first post I ran across uses the Ted Haggard incident to juxtapose conservative hypocrisy with liberal amoralism. The fundamental thesis is that

Conservatives set very high moral standards for others, which they are not always able to meet themselves. When they invariably fall short, liberals call them hypocrites. Liberals set very low moral standards and believe that when they uphold them, they should be congratulated for that.

The first thing that struck me about the post was that I was a few paragraphs into it before I found myself thinking "this guy can't be serious". It was only at that moment that I realized "oh, of course he's not serious".

As I read further, I realized that the satirical thesis does have a ring of truth. One can avoid hypocrisy by reverse logic — if hypocrisy can be described as not practicing what you preach, then if you don't preach anything, you don't have to worry about what you practice. Similarly, the existence of hypocrisy does not necessarily imply that the preaching was wrong. As an example, just because Rush Limbaugh abused drugs, does not mean he was wrong to preach against drug abuse.

Don't get me wrong, though. there are plenty of cases where liberals are right not to preach against something. Ted Haggard is a great example. Liberals are just as concerned about crystal meth abuse as conservatives are. But liberals do not preach against homosexuality, a position I happen to agree with. So in the case of Ted Haggard's homosexuality, I agree that the problem of his hypocrisy lies in what he preaches, not what he practices.

For those of you who may not be familiar with the source of this blog writer's pseudonym, Jonathan Swift was a famous eighteenth century satirist who wrote, among other works, Gulliver's Travels — a satirical look at government, religion, human corruption and the often ludicrous "Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns", a common point of discussion among literary circles of the day.

Although he might be a liberal sissy, I am hesitant to list "Jon Swift" as such in my blog roll. There are really two reasons for this. First, he comes across more "anti-conservative" than "pro-liberal". It is entirely possible he finds himself amongst us middle-grounders, but has chosen to target conservatives because they are the ones in power. Second, as illustrated in the posting I linked to above, he is not afraid of singeing liberals while he's incinerating conservatives. Therefore, I have decided to list him in my "In Locus Medius" section.

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