Another nail in the coffin of nuance

A few months ago, I mentioned my admiration for Leonard Pitts Jr. while lamenting the lack of decent columnists around anymore (one less, in fact, with the recent death of Molly Ivins). Unfortunately not only are writing skills no longer a requirement to be a published columnist, apparently neither is understanding of basic facts.

Let's take today's column by Larry Elder, entitled "Global Warming Turns People 'Gay'" -- got to love how World Net Daily always has to put the word gay in quotation marks, by the way. It begins as such:

Global warming alarmists – despite their best efforts – seem incapable of convincing the Bush administration. So here's my suggestion. Make the scientists tell the president that global warming turns people gay.

The idea came to me after seeing a Super Bowl Snickers commercial and learning of the "controversy" that followed it. In the ad, two guys chewing on either end of the candy bar inadvertently touch lips. Shocked, they decide to do something "manly" and demonstrate their heterosexuality. How? They pull down their shirts and rip off their chest hairs. A pro-gay-rights group called the ad homophobic and demanded the Snickers people stop showing it. Clearly, America runs rampant with gay-haters.

So, imagine if scientists simply told Bush that global warming made people gay.

On the surface, it's a surrealist premise that doesn't even work, an attempt to tie together two news stories that have nothing to do with one another without providing sufficient reason why. It's kind of like my beginning directing project in college, in which I spliced together footage of Dali paintings and scenes from "Carrie" to a Natalie Merchant song. I scored well on it at the time, but looking back now, I wonder, "Why in the hell did I ever do that?"

More problematic, however, is the fact that the opening assertion is absolutely wrong.

The furor over the Snickers campaign was never about that one individual commercial. If Elder had bothered to pay attention to the story, he would have realized that most had no problem with the commercial until seeing the additional material Mars put around the promotion on its Web site. In addition to showing footage of football players acting repulsed when seeing the original commercial, it also provided an alternate ending in which the men reacted to the accidental kiss by drinking motor oil and one beating the other senseless with a wrench.

Alas, however, we now must be able to boil everything down to one sentence. Gay groups thought a Snickers ad was homophobic. Al Gore said he invented the Internet. Record cold temperatures on one day in Michigan prove that global warming is a hoax.

None of those sentences accurately describes its respective situation, but I guess they all make great thesis statements, eh, Larry?