In Defense Of Bad Taste.(ISSUES & INSIGHTS)(EDITORIALS)(Editorial)

The Media: Before the left pushed "political correctness" there was "bad taste," invoked this week for similar reasons in Washington. At the same time Europe is hearing an echo from its darker past: "blasphemy."

Let's start in the nation's capital, where Tom Toles, cartoonist for The Washington Post, surprised no one by offending the Pentagon and lampooning Donald Rumsfeld's denial of claims that our troops have been stretched thin in Iraq.

Published last Sunday, Toles' cartoon depicted, in bandages, an armless, legless soldier. Dressed as a doctor, Rumsfeld advises the man: "I'm listing your condition as battle hardened." The cartoon stung, prompting the Joint Chiefs of Staff, no less, to pull long faces and fire off a protest letter.

We have no doubt, when this era's history is written honestly, that Rumsfeld's version will bear out far better than Toles'. The cartoonist has been a persistent anti-war doodler during a period of a real Islamo-fascist threat. But it's disingenuous to say his panel showed anything but solicitude for our wounded warriors.

We might disagree with his take, but we must admit it was tart in the way a good political cartoon should be. And we worry about our generals when a satirical scribble can give them the vapors. Would Patton have swooned over "bad taste"?

A half-century ago, Malcolm Muggeridge, the late, great editor of Britain's humor magazine Punch, argued that targeted institutions were made all the stronger when the satirists were given full reign. He worried about "retired generals and admirals and clergymen who ...