Tragedy is when you see pronouns in an email signature, comedy is when we bomb your schools for no reason

As I’ve mentioned before, when Rob and I did our History of the Blogosphere interview with Mickey Kaus, he strongly recommended Nellie Bowles’s weekly column. Res ipsa loquitur:

It is not difficult to find praise for Nellie Bowles, who writes a weekly column for The Free Press, a website owned by her wife, Bari Weiss. “If you don’t read ⁦Nellie Bowles every Friday, you are leading a sad, barren, and empty existence,” says Free Press columnist Niall Ferguson. Conservative writer Caitlin Flanagan says that Bowles’s columns “have the exact spirit of the 70’s writers whom I adored and who were so damn funny—and also deeply in the know.” Free Press columnist Joe Nocera wrote that “everything she does is funny and wise,” in response to a tweet from John Podhoretz about how Bowles has “the soul of Borscht Belt comic deep within her.” Bowles has recently been described by Weiss as “the lovechild of Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion” and “the funniest writer in America.”

From here, Ley leads us to the blog that she wrote about the unprovoked war on Iran, which…”cringe” is just grossly inadequate:

We’re officially bombing Iran. And Iran is bombing, well, everyone they can. They’ve reportedly lobbed missiles, drones, and deck chairs at the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq, Azerbaijan, and Turkey as well as Israel, its number-one bombing love. But it’s been a pretty dismal showing. We’re very much and clearly winning. Like, really, really easily. Here’s Trump on the war timeline: “We also projected four weeks to terminate the military leadership, and as you know, that was done in about an hour so we’re ahead of schedule there.” And here’s Trump on who should become Iran’s new leader: “Well, most of the people we had in mind are dead. . . we had some in mind from that group that is dead. And now we have another group. They may be dead also, based on reports.” And they should stop picking one among themselves: “They are wasting their time. Khamenei’s son is a lightweight. I have to be involved in the appointment, like with Delcy [Rodríguez] in Venezuela.” It will be done in ancestral Trump fashion, via swimsuit competition in an indoor/outdoor pavilion at a resort. In other war news, a U.S. submarine sank an enemy ship by torpedo for the first time since World War II. Welcome back to water warfare, baby!

This tryhard witless smarm would be the definition of Not Funny even if it were a roundup of ordinary news events (in an alternate universe where such a thing was still possible.) In the context of a bombing and assassination campaign expressing an unfounded confidence that would embarrass Donald Rumsfeld himself…just dead inside.

And I tastefully omitted the punchline:

There’s unbelievable footage of a fighter pilot shot down over Kuwait, in a bright and cheery mood as locals approach her there in that dust bowl. They thank her for what she’s doing, and offer her help (thank goodness she didn’t land in Minneapolis).

See, it’s “funny” because Minnesotans for some reason are not greeting the people kidnapping their hard-working neighbors and murdering their unthreatening citizens as liberators! Are you laughing yet?

Revisiting Becca Rothfeld’s review of Bowles’s entry in the “the capacity for basic human decency left me” sweepstakes makes me furious again about Bezos killing the Washington Post book section. Can’t tell the truth about made people, you know.