Scarfed a donut lately?

I have a confession to make. I love Dunkin’ Donuts, as those who know me could probably guess by my waistline. There is nothing more fundamentally American than taking a lump of sugary dough, deep frying it, stuffing it with cream, glazing the top of it with a thick coating of chocolate and then washing it down with an iced coffee into which you’ve just poured three packets of Splenda because you’re watching your weight. That’s the American dream right there, Jack. I mean, heck, Dunkin’ Donuts even uses the phrase “America Runs on Dunkin'” as its slogan.

So it was with some sense of bewilderment that I read earlier this week about the uproar surrounding a Dunkin’ Donuts ad featuring another quintessentially American product, effervescent chef and TV hostess Rachel Ray.

For those who might have been lucky enough to miss this controversy, let me fill you in on the details: Miss Ray, in an online commercial, stands in front of some flowering pink trees with a cup of Dunkin’ Donuts iced coffee in her hand, a smile on her face and a black-and-white scarf around her neck. Simple enough, right?

Ah, but these are stupid times here in the land of the free and the home of the brainless.

While you and I, and probably 99.9 percent of the rest of America, would view the ad and think nothing of it beyond perhaps, “Mmm, iced coffee looks good,” there is a small, imbecilic segment of the population that has nothing better to do than worry about what sort of message Dunkin’ Donuts is sending out via the clothing that its pitchwoman wears.

These self-proclaimed “watchdogs” saw the ad and decided that the scarf around Miss Ray’s neck looked like a keffiyeh, a type of headdress worn by Arab men, most notably the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Seething with anger that Dunkin’ Donuts might be showing sympathy to Islamic terrorists, the watchdogs took to the blogosphere and voiced their outrage, demanding that the ad be canceled.

Naturally, this whole affair did not go unnoticed by ultra-conservative Fox News commentator and hate-monger Michelle Malkin, one of the absolute worst by-products of post-9/11 America.

Ms. Malkin, in a pathetic (or, as she would call it, “patriotic”) attempt to make herself seem relevant in a society that’s sick and tired of ultra-conservatism, wrote, in her syndicated column, “The keffiyeh, for the clueless, is the traditional scarf of Arab men that has come to symbolize murderous Palestinian jihad. … Popularized by Yasser Arafat and a regular adornment of Muslim terrorists appearing in beheading and hostage-taking videos, the apparel has been mainstreamed by both ignorant and not-so-ignorant fashion designers, celebrities and left-wing icons.”

Now, I’ve never worn a scarf in my life, and I very much doubt I ever will, so I’m not exactly an authority on the subject, but I’ve never for a second equated black-and-white scarves with terrorism. I’ll wager that most of you haven’t either, because I like to think of myself and my reader(s) as rational, sane human beings. Happily, we understand that a scarf is just a scarf, no matter what pattern adorns it. It’s not some kind of mysterious communique between Dunkin’ Donuts and the jihadists they secretly support.

Michelle Malkin and her fellow neo-McCarthyists are apparently neither rational nor sane. In fact, let’s face it, nobody who sees support for terrorists in a scarf in a commercial for iced coffee qualifies as even remotely rational.

It’s sad to think that we’ve sunk so far in America that commentators like Malkin are taken seriously when they spew this sort of ridiculous tripe. It’s just a freakin’ scarf, Michelle, no matter how much you might want to believe Rachel Ray is a terrorist.

Ideally, Dunkin’ Donuts would have told Malkin where she could stick her opinion and banned her from ever having so much as a Munchkin for the rest of her life.

Unfortunately, though, they figured it was easier to simply quell the controversy, and so they pulled the ad, saying, “Absolutely no symbolism was intended. However, given the possibility of misperception, we are no longer using the commercial.”

Shame on you for capitulating, Dunkin’ Donuts. To give a loudmouthed racist such as Malkin a victory like that, over something so resoundingly stupid, is almost enough to make me switch to Krispy Kreme. And it sets a very bad precedent, too.

You watch: It’s only a matter of time before Malkin and Co. demand that Dunkin’ Donuts stop making French crullers.