JAMES TARANTO'S INADEQUATE SEARCH SKILLS

Offended by Wanda Sykes's Limbaugh jokes, The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto invokes a recent joke by CBS golf analyst David Feherty --

Despite how the conflict has been portrayed by our glorious media, if you gave any U.S. soldier a gun with two bullets in it, and he found himself in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Osama bin Laden, there's a good chance that Nancy Pelosi would get shot twice, and Harry Reid and bin Laden would be strangled to death.

-- and piously asserts:

Our sense ... is that conservatives do not much care for Fehrety's joke either. The closest thing we could find to a defense was an item by blogger Jules Crittenden titled "Sounds Like His Heart Was in the Right Place." Yet Crittenden concedes Fehrety's "rhetorical excess" and devotes most of his post to arguing that many liberals have said things about U.S. soldiers that were worse and not in jest.

Apparently Taranto didn't look very hard -- he missed, for instance, Six Meat Buffet's "David Feherty For RNC Chair" and Political Inaction's "David Feherty = Awesome" and Estel Powell's "Feherty Speaks the Truth, but Why Apologize?!" and Never Yet Melted's "Too Bad He Apologized." He missed what Doug Powers wrote:

Have we just found a host for next year's White House Correspondents Dinner? ...

Whatever your political affiliation, you have to admit this is still a lot funnier than anything Wanda Sykes said Saturday night.

In any case, it's an absolutely ridiculous joke and Feherty was right to apologize for the outlandish and insulting premise. Everybody knows that Pelosi and Reid would never get in an elevator with a lowly U.S. soldier.

And he missed some even more elaborate refinements of the joke by Feherty admirers. Here's one from That's What It Does:

The whole concept is ludicrous, as everyone knows you would pistol whip Pelosi and Reid unconscious, waste a round and then shoot Bin Laden in a matter that makes it appear he took his own life. You must knock out the bureaucrats so that you lack witnesses in your inevitable war crimes trial.

And from Kickin' and Screamin':

Guy's got balls! And I can honestly say I find little wrong with his sentiments. Although I do not think our troops would stoop so low as to waste bullets shooting Nancy Pelosi. Bin Laden? Yeah! Now as for strangling her………………..

And from Dutchman6 of the Sipsey Street Irregulars:

Let us assume the following:

a. The soldier is armed with a standard issue M4 with green tips in the mag.

b. There is no camera in the elevator.

c. In addition to the war the islamofascists are waging on us, two politicians in the elevator who bear a striking resemblance to Reid and Pelosi, but in fact are NOT Reid and Pelosi have recently voted for a gun confiscation bill. Our own civil war is, or is about to be, breaking wide open.

Therefore, when the door to the elevator opens at the ground floor:

Osama lies dead from a broken neck, the soldier lies wounded from a gunshot and the two electronic politician facsimiles lie dead, each with a single gunshot wound to the head.

The story the soldier tells is: "Osama jumped me and in the struggle for the weapon the two politicians were shot and killed by the same round. I was then shot in the shoulder. With the weapon empty, I turned on him and in close combat, broke his neck despite my wound. I'm sorry I didn't protect the Senator and the Congresswoman. I stand ready to be tried for dereliction of duty."

What actually happened was....

Um, that one goes on and on for a bit.

James, listen to me. There are two kinds of right-wingers -- the ones who'll admit they thought Feherty's joke was hilarious and the ones who are lying to win moral-superiority points.