Kathy Shaidle on that Mao ornament on the White House tree

You don't want to mess with the Shaidle. She'll make verbal mincemeat out of you and bake you in a pie, with a joker face cut in the crust. Defending the Mao ornament by invoking Andy Warhol (my ethnic group btw) attracted her ire.

Here's an excerpt:

Fourth — forget Warhol: aren’t the lefties at Media Matters the ones “advertising their ignorance” about who Mao was (i.e. a mass murder millions of times over?)

Apparently not. The irony deficient Eric approvingly quotes a writer for the Los Angeles Times, who patiently explains to us plebes that:

Warhol’s parody transformed the leader of the world’s most populous nation into a vapid superstar — the most famous of the famous. The portrait photo from Mao’s Little Red Book is tarted up with lipstick, eye-shadow and other Marilyn Monroe-style flourishes.

You see, it’s all so po-mo, you idiots don’t get it.

However, I can think of a few other equally iconic illustrations, created specifically to “play with” and “explore” and “parody” received wisdom, in a “shock the bourgeousie” manner. How about the infamous cover of Hustler, created to mock feminist critiques that pornographer Larry Fynt was treating women as “pieces of meat”? The cover in question features a drawing of a woman being fed head first into a meat grinder. Get it?

Is Media Matters implying it would be ok for a White House ornament to feature that Hustler cover?

Just because something is hip and ironic, doesn’t make it an acceptable adornment for the White House Christmas tree. In fact, I’d argue that that very fact should rule out such an ornament. Shouldn’t Christmas ornaments in “the people’s house” have something to do with — call me crazy — Christmas, rather than serve as a chance to display its inhabitant’s elitist hipster cred?

Especially in a White House that up until recently employed an admitted admirer of mass murderer Mao?

The phrase “tone deaf” doesn’t begin to describe it.

Finally: isn’t this the same Media Matters that devoted considerable time to denouncing some conservatives’ embrace of that satirical, and uncomplimentary, “Obama Joker” poster?