Several emails on my International Freedom Center column begging to know whether it’s a joke or not. Well:

*** IT’S A JOKE ***

The NRO editor, on her own initiative but with my approval, inserted the word “fictional” in that introductory paragraph in the hope of making this clear. I originally submitted the piece “straight.” I guess the satirical nature of the piece is still not clear, though.

*** IT’S A JOKE ***

I really should know better. If you look at the parody pieces at the back of The Weekly Standard, they are over-stamped with “PARODY” in big letters. When TWS first started running those parodies, too many readers took them as factual.

This (in my opinion) does not so much reflect badly on the acumen of conservative readers, as on the dire state of our culture, where horrible phenomena like Political Correctness and artistic degradation have no gone so far that it is, indeed, often difficult to tell parody from reality — where today’s parody is all too likely to become tomorrow’s reality.

I should not be very surprised to learn that memos quite similar to those I

** MADE UP ** for today’s ** SPOOF ** column have indeed been circulating in the offices of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. Satire, in this age, is very tricky. Who could have invented Ward Churchill? But so far as today’s column is concerned:

** IT’S A JOKE. I MADE IT UP ***