bapifar01: The Onion awakens a sleeping giant

Well, it's about time. Yesterday the traditional media was finally outraged over House Republicans' repeated use of the hostage-taking strategy to pander to their tea party base. So, what happened? After watching the GOP shut down the FAA, threaten to shut down the entire government over birth control, and bring us to the very brink of economic disaster, was their refusal to fund FEMA in the face of flooding, tornadoes and wildfires finally a (washed-out) bridge too far? Not even close.

From ABC News:

Did The Onion Go Too Far?

The New York Times:

The Onion's twitter posts draw scrutiny

Time:

Is The Onion Going Too Far With Its #CongressHostage Twitter Satire?

That's right. This is the hostage situation that made the media sit up and take notice:

Brandishing shotguns and semiautomatic pistols, members of the 112th U.S. Congress took a class of visiting schoolchildren hostage today, barricading themselves inside the Capitol rotunda and demanding $12 trillion dollars in cash.

Now granted, it isn't as far-fetched as it would have been before the GOP had its group HPV vaccine?at approximately noon ET on January 20, 2009?but come on! It's The Onion.

A satiric site?one that currently features the headline: Pediatricians Announce 2011 Newborns Are Ugliest Babies in 30 Years?starts tweeting its brand of humor and we get this?

A few weeks after the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and one day after a man was arrested and charged in connection with a plot to attack the Capitol ...

Which only seems to raise the question of what the point-of-no-return is for citing proximity to 9/11 to make an idiotic point.

And the most ridiculous part of this story?

The United States Capitol Police on Thursday said they were investigating The Onion, a satiric media organization, for making false reports on Twitter claiming that there was a hostage situation ...

A satiric media organization is being investigated for engaging in satire? It's straight out of The Onion.

But really, you can't blame the media for getting so worked up about this. After all, it's not everyday they get to cover a breaking hostage situation ... because when it happens in Washington, it's called Democrats and Republicans are unable to reach an agreement.