COMRADES! IS NOT MAKING FUNNINESS POLITBURO CAN ENJOY! PLEASE TO MAKE LAUGHS AT KERRY! You knew this was coming: the conservatives have turned on The Onion.

In a cloud of hot gas appearing at Oxblog, David Adesnik says,

I love The Onion. I read it every week. But I laugh a lot less at The Onion's political humor than I do at its brilliant send-ups of America's social habits and popular culture.

The reason I laugh a lot less is that...

...because they make fun of Republicans living and dead, and that is by definition not funny! Oh, shoot, that's the short version -- here's a few cubic inches of what's really coming out of Adesnik's pressurized tank:

...is that The Onion's political humor employs the same caricatures and stereotypes over and over again. Moreover, these satirical devices collectively form a coherent ideology that is both extremely elitist and extremely liberal.

To be frank, I have a lot more trouble with The Onion's elitism than I do with its liberalism. Liberalism is a good thing. Liberal ideals, both classical and modern, have contributed immeasurably to American political discourse. Yet The Onion's brand of elitism, when cloaked in humor, has the potential to breed a disturbing sort of cynicism...

You catching this, kids? Humor is bad for you when it breeds a "disturbing sort" of cynicism -- meaning, perhaps, that a sort of cynicism that would make you despair of ever dislodging greedhead, hegemonic Republicans from office -- or, for that matter, being anything other than a drone for the super-rich all your miserable life, diverted from suicide only by occasional tax cuts and lotto fantasies -- would be less disturbing, in fact something to be encouraged.

Thereafter follows "evidence for the points I am trying to make," which consists of Adesnik analyzing Onion columns' humorous/political content, which is what Dante called "the tenth circle of Hell." Later, perhaps, Adesnik will condemn Citizen Kane as an unflattering portrayal of American businessmen.

One expects this from the fever swamps, but here's tie-loosening right-wing party boy Professor Glenn Reynolds trying to get his crew to do the wave over Adesnik's foul tip. "I just wish," mourns Reynolds over The Onion, "they were funnier."

My momma done told me: never take humor advice from a guy who goes "Heh" and writes it out.

Soon word will spread throughout the land. Maybe even Sullivan will stop linking to The Onion, on grounds of Disturbing Cynicism ("Hello? Don't they know there's a war on? Disgraceful. And my lifesize Orwell skeleton agrees"). Tacitus will tell us in choked voice how a comrade-in-arms innocently betrayed their position on Heartbreak Ridge because he laughed too loudly at Jean Teasdale, and many good men were lost that day, my friends (or, rather, you baby-killers), because of their Disturbing Cynicism.

Truth Squads will emerge. "There never was a Reagan Pyramid," theonionlies.com will declare. "Sure, Donald Rumsfeld proposed one, and Bush said they could build it -- but then he explicitly declined to do so. This whole spurious idea has been traced to a 20-something 'artist' from New York -- a blue state -- who walks around with his shirt untucked and reads Langston Hughes."

Let's see: by their reckoning, we have the movies, theatre, literature, popular music, the visual and plastic arts, and now humor. And they have blogs and Bible camp.

Looks like we did good on that trade.