300 WORDS OR LESS: 06.03.09

Fire Them All, Mr. Flanders
Obscene insults and raw hatred are not new in the online world. What made Guy Cimbalo's article about "hate-f***" fantasies so shocking was that it was published by Playboy. Did no one in the editorial process at Playboy.com think twice before hitting the "publish" button on an article that said of Rep. Michelle Bachmann, "Chemical castration has begun to look appealing"?

Cimbalo's article required someone to build multiple Web pages, someone to find, crop and embed photos, someone to write headlines and captions -- hours of paid labor during which various editors had the chance to say, "Hey, wait a minute. Maybe this isn't a good idea."

Cimbalo wasn't a blogger having a bad day who posted an ill-tempered rant. (It happens.) A major corporate enterprise helped produce this insult to the 10 women on Cimbalo's list, a list that included Michelle Malkin, Pamela Geller, Mary Katharine Ham and Amanda Carpenter. Furthermore, John Hawkins points out, Playboy actually issued a press release to promote the article.

Playboy CEO Scott Flanders was not previously known as a porn blogger, but as CEO of the company that publishes the Orange County Register. That a man with his good reputation would permit employees to perpetrate this atrocity is perhaps even more shocking than Cimbalo's perverse sadism (which is nothing new for liberals, as Malkin chronicled in Unhinged.)

Suggestion, Mr. Flanders: Once you learn who helped edit, publish and promote Cimbalo's article, fire them -- and issue a press release naming those you've fired. Replacements? Internet editors are a dime a dozen. (For the right price, you might even be able to hire Ace of Spades or Jeff Goldstein.)

First, however, Playboy must fire the employees who worked on Cimbalo’s article.

Fire them all, Mr. Flanders.

-- RSM