Welcome to America, the land of unrelenting irony and never-ending contests. Today we combine those two national habits by holding a contest to determine which of two weekend events wins the Head-Shaking Irony Award for last weekend. Let us know your pick, either by posting in the comments section or emailing me at john.grooms@cln.com.
First up, the Head-Shaking Irony event of the weekend for Charlotte: Two Islamic imams, dressed in traditional imam garb, were forced to leave a flight from Tennessee to Charlotte when the pilot refused to take off with the two men on board. The pilot said passengers were “uncomfortable” about the imams, even though the clergymen had been through two security checks. After they left the plane, TSA officials re-screened the men and found, again, that they were not a threat, but the pilot still refused to let them back onto the plane. The two imams, as you’ve no doubt heard, were on their way to a convention in Charlotte on Islamophobia, or anti-Muslim prejudice. How do you say “friggin’ dripping with irony”? Defenders of the pilot’s decision (yes, there are some — plenty, in fact) blame the imams for wearing their imam duds, which is apparently too out of the ordinary for 24-addicted doofuses to understand, much less tolerate. As one commenter after the CNN story linked above wrote, “I wonder if they would have kicked off a group of Irish priests for fear that they were related in some way to the IRA?”
Second contender: Remember Dick Cheney? Vice president, heart attacks, big torture fan, shot a friend in the face? You know, the guy who was wrong on just about every issue he ever dealt with while in office? (Remember “We’ll be greeted as liberators,” dropping the ball in Afghanistan, letting his Big Oil and Gas buddies write Bush energy policy, “The insurgency is in its last throes,” “waterboarding is not torture,” etc., etc., ad infinitum?) Yeah, that Dick Cheney.
The Dickster was on Fox News yesterday, one week after Pres. Obama ordered decisive action to kill the most wanted terrorist on earth. As tone-deaf to irony as ever, Cheney spoke about Libya where, he said, “it’s not clear to me that this administration is up to the task” of taking out Gadaffi. Not up to the task. Really? Cheney did not wink and say, “Just like we weren’t up to the task of following through in Afghanistan, or picking the right war to fight, or you know, pretty much anything at all.”
This article appears in May 3-9, 2011.
Dick Cheney is a moron. Who cares what he says. You notice it was the propaganda arm of the right wing, Fox, that gave him a microphone to spew his garbage.
So I vote for the paranoid pilot. He, and his airline, should be required to reimburse everyone on the flight for messing up their travel plans.
Our irrational fear is going to destroy us from within.
Hold on a second, I think I have another entry for your irony contest:
Democratic Senator Barack Obama on Osama bin Laden: “as president, [I would] order a trial that observed international standards of due process.”
Or wait, is this an example of hypocrisy? I always get the two messed up.