by Matt Barr

When people who think the Mohammad comics are a South Park bit get jobs with magazines

What's the term for when you accuse people you don't like of hypocrisy on the flimsy basis that... you don't like them, I guess? Hypocrimosity? A distemper tantrum? It's happening a lot. Nick Gillespie has a hard-hitting question for Bill Bennett, who co-wrote a Washington Post op-ed castigating the press' refusal to run the Danish MoToons:

I'm curious to know whether Bennett felt the same way about Andres Serrano much-declaimed, little-viewed "Piss Christ" or Chris Ofili's "Holy Virgin Mary", to mention two controversial works that offended the Bennetts of the world? Did he push to have those images disseminated so that people could fully understand what was at stake?

Hmm. That is curious! Because unless he did, he's wrong now! Meanwhile, corporate blogger Andrew Sullivan wants to know why Michelle Malkin is keen to run the MoToons but not Abu Ghraib photos on her blog.

These are just petty, hamfisted swipes at ideological opponents, but they're annoying, even for someone who rarely reads anything written by Malkin or Bennett. Ignore Sullivan's tacit assumption that bloggers have some responsibility to write about things they don't care about. Can't you see Abu Ghraib photos pretty much anywhere you want to? Is the point not that nobody is publishing the MoToons? I am almost sure the same is not true of Abu Ghraib pictures.

Gillespie, at least, thinks he didn't see enough of Piss Christ and Dung Mary in the media. He links to a Jonathan Gurwitz column in support of his argument, which argues against him, but we can't be expected to read things closely in the information age; there's just too much. But again, beyond how both the MoToons and Piss Christ stick it to the religious squares, daddy-o, are we talking about the same thing?

How many people have been killed over Piss Christ? Embassies burned? Beheadings threatened? Bounties placed? Is anyone arguing that the New York Times should have set aside space to run the cartoons when they were published, back in September?

Or is the argument rather that they're news now, and while the Times is reporting that Nigerian Christians are being slaughtered over them, editors are being jailed and cartoonists (cartoonists!) are fearing for their lives, it won't show its readers the drawings that are prompting all of it?

Gillespie didn't see a lot of Piss Christ or Dung Mary "back in the day," for which I'll take his word -- maybe there was more to the story than protests and calls for government funding to be withdrawn (probably from Reason). But as his Gurwitz link notes, he can see them now if he wants:

Even as America's newspaper of record, the New York Times, sensitively editorialized last week that "people are bound to be offended if their religion is publicly mocked," its Arts page ran a picture of Ofili's dung-covered Madonna.

As between the MoToons and dung-covered Madonna, of course, one was intended to make a point about violence in the name of Islam, and one intended to make a point that it's so cool that we have the freedom to desecrate religious icons in America. One is a political opinion, one is an episode of South Park. If the Times, and Reason, have decided that the latter is more immediately newsworthy than the former, and more deserving of protection and support, it's a wonder any serious person is reading them.

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