Ah, Memorial Day in New York, when the long winter gives the city’s desperate denizens two days of spring before dumping a sweltering hot summer on them. It’s traditionally celebrated with beach parties, outdoor grilling, drinking too much, and long, long car rides in hours of traffic with everyone else trying to get out of the city. As Lena Dunham, the most dependable lightning rod for controversy ever, pointed out, this means a lot of urination trials and tribulations:
She later celebrated surviving the ordeal with a bit of humor:
While the second tweet is more Reader’s Digest joke page than Golden Globe-level comedy writing, I’m sure we can all relate to her situation. Except, apparently, the right-wing outrage machine, which was astonished and appalled to learn that a young woman dared to urinate on this holiest of holy days, which was originally meant to celebrate that 19th-century war in which what we now call the blue states prevailed over today’s red states. According to Michelle Malkin’s Twitchy website, it’s a grave offense to engage in this body function on Memorial Day:
So many questions arise. When was this new rule about not urinating on Memorial Day written? Is that for everyone, or just women? Does it apply to all women, or just women who vote for and/or create ads for Democrats? Or is this an age thing, where the urination activities of premenopausal women are as closely monitored as their sexual and reproductive activities? Is this Memorial Day ban on urination for the entire 24-hour period, or is it more like a Ramadan fast, where instead of eating after sundown, you instead finally get to go to the bathroom? The offense surely couldn’t be just that she made an innocuous joke about the indignities of holiday travel, right? Because that would be even stupider than stopping women from peeing on Memorial Day.
Sadly, the right-wing outrage machine did not explain the rules but simply squeed in outrage at the apparent violation of them. Michelle Malkin particularly singled out Oberlin as the party at fault, possibly for not having a course in the evils of urinating on federal holidays.
Daily Caller outrage-tweeter Jim Treacher took a small bit of pity on Dunham, perhaps because he realized that it’s a little weird being mad at someone for breaking a no-urination rule that you appear to have just made up:
Stay tuned for future developments, which will likely include the right accusing Starbucks of performing abortions in their bathrooms and congressional Republicans drafting a bill called Patriotic Bodily Functions, requiring coffeehouse bathrooms to be locked to the public on federal holidays.
