With pastor Terry Jones wavering on his plans to burn some Qur’ans this weekend—his fellow religious whack-a-doodle, Fred Phelps of the famed Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, has vowed to pick up the slack:

“WBC burned the Koran once—and if you sissy brats of Doomed america bully Terry Jones and the Dove World Outreach Center until they change their plans to burn that blasphemous tripe called the Koran, then WBC will burn it (again), to clearly show you some things,” the church announced in a news release this week.”

That’s what really sticks in Phelps’ craw—they’ve burned Qur’ans before and nobody paid any attention when they did it—but this cartoon-mustached preacher in Florida gets on the Today show and gets coverage in all the major media when simply threatens to do it.

Here’s a media lesson for Phelps: timing is everything, Freddie. If you had threatened to burn Qur’ans in the middle of the Park 51 saga, pumped by the media during the silly season before midterm elections, perhaps you would have finally had your 15 minutes or more to spew your hatred on the television machine like pastor Terry.

But Fred was too slow to capitalize on the media frenzy, and now all he can do is whine to anyone who will listen about how nobody paid attention to his bonfire.

The Traditional Values Coalition is also envious of Jones’ sudden fame, releasing a statement from Executive Director Andrea Lafferty calling the burning a “stunt.”

It is being done for one purpose—publicity.

Translation: “Damn, why didn’t we think of it first?”