Guides to pocket squares and evangelicorials about plucked man-brows have not improved Gentlemen’s Quarterly’s limp digital sales, which dipped from 12,173 to 11,361 in the first half of last year. The numbers plunged even lower last week when the desperate style rag delivered a load of cobblers to its readers — thick with profane gripes and lousy grammar — in a “F— Ben Carson” article that committed journalism’s cardinal sin of underestimating the reader.
Liberal cosmopolitans, in a refreshing break with castrating convention, went ballistic and cancelled their subscriptions over the tantrum about how the Republican presidential candidate would have handled the Oregon shooter.
“I would not just stand there and let him shoot me,” said Carson, answering a question on the campaign trail with an opinion that is his birthright. “I would say, ‘Hey guys, everybody attack him. He may shoot me, but he can’t get us all.’ ”
The lexically challenged author burned the brain surgeon like a heretic at the stake for talking “dumber s—” than his rivals, despite the law of the land allowing Americans to make a citizen’s arrest to prevent a crime spree, and Carson’s tactic passing the test more than once:
• In August three Americans stopped a bloodbath in its tracks when they overpowered an armed terrorist on a train in Belgium.
• In September 2014 a company executive shot and wounded an Islamo-nut, who beheaded a woman in an Oklahoma food processing plant, preventing more mayhem.
• In January 2011 a plucky septuagenarian tackled a crazed gunman who shot a congresswoman and killed six people outside a grocery store in Arizona, averting further violence.
Readers delightfully thrashed the tweet out of GQ:
• “Canceling hubby’s subscription.”
• “You seriously crossed the line here. Not even an apology will suffice.”
• “Wow, why do you hate black people? Or more correctly, black people who aren’t liberal?”
Goon’s Quackerly would be an apter name for the zonked zine, whose attempt to humiliate a black conservative — for speaking his mind in an Orwellian age — fizzled like a fart, and spread the word that gits, not gents, are running GQ’s funny farm.
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