How To Spot Satire

Via a post over at Rob's site, I found a really ridiculous right-wing blog by someone styling themself as "Shelley the Republican". I'm somewhat of a connoisseur of satire blogs (like BlameBush!), and it looked right away to me like this was a very well done satire of extreme conservative thought. Here's some of my evidence:

1) The first entry says the author, supposedly a 28-year-old housewife from Iowa City, "support(s) the Project for a new American century 100%". PNAC is a big-time liberal bugaboo, but you almost never see conservatives talking about how they "support PNAC".

2) The atrocious spelling throughout. It's not as bad as Howie's satire blog, but it still isn't pretty.

3) The author is supposedly Shelly Goodman from Iowa City, but the masthead links to a My GOP site of Shelly Goodman from Little Rock.

4) Her profile lists one of the supposedly fundamentalist Christian's favorite movies as "Jesus Christ Superstar". Enough said.

5) This completely over-the-top "guest post" comes from a blogger whose own site is a Dobsonite fan-fiction blog -- clearly an absurdity. Still, it's impressive to have "guest bloggers" with their own blogs, no matter how infrequently updated. However, the author gives away the game when you notice that the guest blogger can post their own posts, under their own name, when the blog isn't listed as one of their blogs on their profile.

6) Last but not least, she sells her merchandise through the same outlet as Liberal Larry does... not exactly a smoking gun, I realize, but still highly suspicious.

The amazing thing is, unless they're clearing out the comments, very few of the commenters I read over there has picked up on the satire aspect of the blog. Of course, most of them seem to be Europeans, who seem somewhat satire impaired (except for the Brits, of course).

Update 2158 01 May: It turns out they moderate comments; I left a comment congratulating them on an excellent satire, and it never made it into the comment section.