Hysterical

Andrew Sullivan, Taylor Marsh, at least one television station have fallen for a hoax. And not just any hoax, this one is a doozy.

Our own crazy conservative uncle Andrew Sullivan got snookered by a fake web site that reported the “news” that Fox was spinning off their hit TV series 24 into a Saturday morning children’s cartoon that featured Jack Bauer as a young cub scout torturing other kids and “kicking Arab ass.”

Here’s Andrew’s post:

Ann Coulter: set your Tivo. Money quote: “We spent a lot time doing research on this game,” says Surnow. “Using a sponge, team members must take the water from a filled bucket and squeeze the water from the soaked sponge into an empty bucket. First team to fill the empty bucket wins.” Surnow said he chose the Sponge Bucket Game because it provides opportunities for little Jack to interrogate the little Arabs.

“There’s a great scene before the game starts where little Jack takes an Arab kid named Abdul and sticks his head in the water-filled bucket,” says Surnow. “Jack keeps his head under the water until he drowns. The kid did not give Jack the answers he needed, and for the greater good of the Cub Scouts of America, Jack had to send a strong and clear message.”

That’s a strong “enhanced” message. Just like Mr Tenet says.

The irony in this piece regarding Tenet’s “enhanced message” will probably save Mr. Sullivan total embarrassment as he will more than likely claim he knew it was a joke all along, that you can’t fool him, he’s Andrew Sullivan of The Atlantic!

But my friend Taylor Marsh has no such excuse:

What's really funny here is that the website Dateline Hollywood is so blatantly a humor site that their "About Us" page has the following history:

Dateline Hollywood was founded in 360 BC as “Gladiators Weekly” to cover the booming entertainment industry in the coliseums of ancient Rome. Its pioneering analysis of the statistics of lion mauls and emperor thumbs up/down made it the original publication to take the business of entertainment seriously. Its premiere edition included “The Ten Gladiators to Watch” and an analytic feature, “Deaths by Daggers Down LXVIII Percent.”

The publication now known as Dateline Hollywood covered a number of different amusing industries as the times changed, transforming from “Inside Slave Trade” to “Bubonic Plague Infestation Monthly” (later quarterly, yearly, and eventually publishing just once per century) to “What’s Hot in Renaissance Art,” “Miracle Play Today!” and, following a move to the young United States in the early 19th century, “Minstrel Show Monthly,” “The Ragtime Gazette,” and, following the editors’ realization in 1973 that ragtime’s popularity had faded, its current incarnation.

I got caught by an April Fool article myself. But I at least checked the dateline and it read April 3, so I got bitten. This is hysterical, though. Kudos to Dateline Hollywood for putting this one over.

Other Links to this Post

1. LeatherPenguin » St. Andrew of the Heartaching Gobsmack Gets P3wnd — Thursday, 3 May , 2007 @ 10:33 am