Here are four comments relating to Tony Snow’s death. Please tell me which is the least offensive:

There is special place in hell for Mr. Snow. As a co-conspirator of the Bush administration, I have no special sympathy for him. I only wish his suffering were more prolonged.

or

I hope he suffered at the end. Just a terrible person.

or

CANCER WAS TOO GOOD FOR HIM
HOPE IT WAS PAINFUL.
NOW FOR THE REST OF THIS SCUMMY ADMINISTRATION. COME ON CANCER, DO YOUR GOOD WORK..

or

Anyone who would say they hope Tony Snow suffered is a dick.

The first three were approved by L.A. Times comment moderators. The fourth was left by me, and was not published. Subsequent comments have been approved, making it clear that my comment was rejected.

I’ll admit that I deliberately included the profanity to see if it would get the comment rejected.

Now, I understand that it’s easy to monitor comments for language and tricky to moderate them for content. But in what world is my comment more offensive than the first three?

Of the above comments, which ones bothered you? Which ones would you be worried about your children reading?

Truly, which is more offensive?

UPDATE: Commenter Jim reminds me that an anti-Snow commenter used the word “dick” — and his comment was posted:

Yes Alessandro I agree. The one of him with the horns made him look like a total dick. [Alessandro had said: “You picked a nice picture for your tribute.” — Patterico]

Interesting. I think this is worth a new post.

An article says yes:

[R]esearchers are finding that same-sex couplings are surprisingly widespread in the animal kingdom. Roy and Silo [homosexual penguins at the Central Park Zoo] belong to one of as many as 1,500 species of wild and captive animals that have been observed engaging in homosexual activity. Researchers have seen such same-sex goings-on in both male and female, old and young, and social and solitary creatures and on branches of the evolutionary tree ranging from insects to mammals.

The article does say that “homosexuality among some species, including penguins, appears to be far more common in captivity than in the wild.” I’ve never been convinced by studies that look at the behavior of animals in zoos, any more than I would accept a study of sexual behavior in jails as representative of humans as a whole.

But behavior of animals in the wild seems much more relevant, and the article has examples of that as well.

(Via Hot Air headlines.)

Will Howard Kurtz slam the L.A. Times web site for approving comments that reveled in Tony Snow’s death? After all, he made a point of noting when a small percentage of Michelle Malkin’s commenters reveled in the news of Ted Kennedy’s brain tumor.

I explore this question at Hot Air, where I set forth the text of a question I submitted for Kurtz’s online chat tomorrow.

A L.A. Times blogger has responded to my post below about the L.A. Times‘s decision to green-light over 20 comments containing sentiments like this:

CANCER WAS TOO GOOD FOR HIM
HOPE IT WAS PAINFUL.
NOW FOR THE REST OF THIS SCUMMY ADMINISTRATION. COME ON CANCER, DO YOUR GOOD WORK………………..

Each of these comments had to be personally approved by someone at the L.A. Times. A note at the blog says: “Comments are moderated, and will not appear until they’ve been approved.” It’s true; I tried leaving a comment there myself, and it did not immediately appear.

In a comment to my post, blogger Andrew Malcolm decried these comments as “vile and despicable.” But he defended the decision to approve these hateful comments, saying: “we do moderate the Comments, most often for crude language. Never for whether we agree with them.”

Malcolm says the comments I quoted are “a very tiny minority of the some 52,000 comments left on The Ticket in recent months” — but does not mention that they are about 1/4 of the comments to the post about Snow’s death.

As Malcolm points out, there are also a good number of other comments that are kind to Snow, including several that remonstrate the ghouls for their ugly comments. I reproduced the ugly ones because those are the ones that I’m shocked were approved, without any disapproving commentary from the blog proprietors.

As I said below, if Malcolm thinks the comments were “vile and despicable,” why not say that in his own comments section?!?! Maybe that would have discouraged this slime.

Meanwhile, is it the case that profanity is considered offensive — but hoping that someone suffered when they died is not?

I updated the post below to note Malcolm’s comment and my reaction, but I thought it might be worth a new post, to make sure you saw it.

That’s how it appears:

A coalition of military groups is planning a nationally televised town-hall-style meeting with the presidential candidates near Fort Hood, Tex., the largest active-duty military installation in the country. But so far, only Senator John McCain of Arizona, the presumptive Republican nominee, has agreed to attend.

CBS has agreed to broadcast the meeting live from 9 to 11 p.m. Eastern time on Monday, Aug. 11. The candidates would face questions directly from an audience of 6,000 people, made up of veterans, service members and military families from the base.

Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, the presumptive Democratic nominee, has not agreed to participate.

Obama advisor Phil Carter says that Obama “unfortunately had a previously scheduled commitment on the date proposed.” That is unfortunate!! Except, the organizer of the event says she has always been flexible on dates: “We made it very clear to them that if they would commit to the event, we would work with them on dates.”

I guess he pledged to aggressively seek an agreement with the director on dates for the military event.

You thought you had seen all the ugliness on the L.A. Times relating to Tony Snow? Nah! In another post we examined the comments to a blog entry about his death. In this post, we’ll look at the comments to his obituary.

Here are some of the charming comments left by angry, unhinged leftists:

5. Repeating lies day in and day out is bad for your health.
Submitted by: Chris
7:08 PM PDT, July 12, 2008

6. I definitely feel sorry for his children and wife. But TOny Snow did while he was at FOX and Whitehouse can’t be forgiven. These Republicans are criminals and the democrats who voted for this war including. I don’t feel sorry him. I think it is time for redemption. Most of us deserve the worst possible punishment for our arrogance and the crimes we committed in the name of liberty,justice and other BS on the rest of the world. THis country runs based on Greed. America is committed to destroying other religions and cultures in the world and make world into an absolute trash.
Submitted by: naagam
7:07 PM PDT, July 12, 2008

7. Lying causes cancer? Now we know.
Submitted by: Jinny Campos
6:59 PM PDT, July 12, 2008

. . . .

9. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the first day of a Tony Snow-free world! Yay!!!!
Submitted by: Melanie S
6:19 PM PDT, July 12, 2008

. . . .

16. Because there obviously is no god, nor heaven and hell, I’ve always adhered to the idea that if you are saddned by the deaths of your friends and family, you should equally be gladdened by the deaths of people you hate. Tony Snow was a professional liar and willing member of the most notorious administration in this country’s history. I didn’t know him personally, but professionally he was a BS artist extraordinaire. This was the best cancer since Lee Atwater’s brain tumor.
Submitted by: Shaun Mason
4:02 PM PDT, July 12, 2008

. . . .

22. Just because your dead it doesn’t make you a good person.
Submitted by: Vrginia Hollender
12:55 PM PDT, July 12, 2008

Lovely. Well done, L.A. Times comment moderators! Well done indeed!

UPDATE: Thanks to Instapundit for the link. Thanks also to Charles Johnson for his link. I should tell their readers, though, that the worst stuff is actually here.