Pointing out the holes

In today's Boston Globe magazine, Charles Pierce--a regular correspondent on Eric Alterman's site--brings some much-needed sanity to the Dunkin Donuts Scarf of Terror kerfluffle. As far as I can tell the short piece isn't online, so this is me typing it in.

Dear Will Kussell:
I don't understand it. You folks beat Krispy Kreme, for pity's sake. They're the best donuts in the world, and oyou and the rest of the Dunkin' Donuts empire of which you are the president ran them out of Massachusetts like they wre Edgar Renteria. You produce sharp postmodern ads--"Freezing at Peewee Hockey" was the best--and you've become cool again even in the face of the Starbucks Borg. And with all those triumphs, you still go and surrender to the flying monkeys of the intertubes over a Rachael Ray ad? They yell, and you fold? This is what those people believe, OK? That a black-and-white checkered scarf worn by Ray in one of your Internet ads was an attempt by fashion designers to mainstream Yasser Arafat's old headgear into American society in preparation for our eventual absorption into a worldwide caliphate. (By this logic, the end of every NASCAR race is designated by the waving of a subliminal signal for worldwide jihad.) This is the "possibility of misperception" referred to in the statement through which your company pulled the ad. Be honest, Will. If I wandered into one of your hundreds of stores and started saying that stuff, you'd have me locked up. That this particular spasm of hysterical bedwetting was inspired by the likes of Michelle Malkin, who is to the political dialogue what E. coli is to a holiday barbecue, makes your capitulation all the more inexplicable. It is never a good thing to give the crazy people anything they might perceive as a victory. It never ends well. Give them a trophy, and they'll spike it onto their own heads.

Charles P. Pierce

Is it that bad? Worse. Besides Malkin--who seems to have married into every fucked-up delusion ever suffered by white people anywhere--the other forces putting pressure on Dunkin' D included Charles Johnson's Little Green Footballs and Pamela "Atlas Passed Out" Geller. LGF is the site of choice for people who want to see most of Western Asia vaporized. Geller seems to have destroyed most parts of her brain not used for Arab-hating.

In other words, this is the worst kind of political correctness: fanatical haters putting an end to tolerance that offends them. It's like the Klan demanding that the local easy listening station stop playing Teresa Brewer because she sounds too much like Ella Fitzgerald. The company waved the white flag when faced with the nastiest kind of ignorance, and may need some pressure from the other side.