There is a brilliant post by The Desperate Blogger over on Salon.
The post is full of brilliant quotes, supposedly from Pat Robertson talking about the earthquake in Chile, who says:
God is even angrier with them than he is with the people of Haiti.
If I had to guess, I’d say it must have to do with Chile’s persecution and attempted prosecution of their great former leader, and a personal hero of mine, Augusto Pinochet – who, it should be noted, had never been convicted of a crime when the Lord called him home three years ago.
But my favorite quote is:
General Pinochet not only assisted the CIA in the overthrow of Chile’s Marxist government, but is widely credited with personally arranging the meetings of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of his countrymen with Jesus.
The post concludes by saying that Robertson is:
praying that the people of Chile will heed this warning, and never again blaspheme against God and international free-market commerce by nationalizing their most precious natural resources.
The post is obviously satire, even if you don’t notice the tag “satire” or the blog’s recommendation that you “Don’t take the world too seriously”.
But what’s really delicious is that lots of people, including people on the left, are taking the post as the truth. It just has so much truthiness that people want to believe it. Even Fark posted it as if it were true, and they pride themselves on being ironic.
One Comment
There was a time when statements about “what Pat Robertson said” seemed so incredulous that I had to go verify them, and was stunned that they were actually true… I have since become accustomed to this (as well as probably many other people), that we now often assume the worse…
I guess that is the downside of irony: to be effective, it needs to be plausible, and I’m afraid those statements are plausible. Well, maybe not the last one.