The Village Voice’s Roy Edroso routinely forays out into the wingnut blogosphere (calling them Rightbloggers in Voice-speak) to document the atrocities. Roy’s blog isn’t quite as much fun as Sadly, No! in the wingnut blogger critique, but he is reading these people so we don’t have to. And as befits the end of a year, he has compiled the Top 10 Rightblogger Stories of 2008. Read the whole thing for all of the links to the stories and blog posts, but here are some of my favorites from Edroso’s list:
#10: Fred Thompson, The Natural. Early in the year, some rightbloggers actually expected former TV star Fred Thompson to lumber into the Presidency. Though Thompson’s campaign was somnolent and inept, his choir fluffed him frenetically. National Review’s Jim Geraghty went further than most, writing after one GOP debate, “This performance was so commanding, I wanted [Thompson’s] last answer to echo back to the lights in the back of the auditorium, blow out all the lamps and spotlights, for the theme to ‘The Natural’ to play, and for him to trot around the stage in slow motion while sparks showered down in the background.” Thompson instead went directly to the showers and, after a ten-month nap, took a job as a radio talk-show host.
#7: And Robin is Tony Blair. “A beam of light flashed into the night sky, the dark symbol of a bat projected onto the surface of the racing clouds… Oh, wait a minute. That’s not a bat, actually. In fact, when you trace the outline with your finger, it looks kind of like . . . a ‘W.'” In the Wall Street Journal Andrew Klavan explained why The Dark Knight is “a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war… Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency.” Maybe that explains why the Joker was more popular. (The Journal unfortunately didn’t run Klavan’s other essay about the Hollywood film that celebrated an earlier phase of Bush’s career, Pineapple Express.)
#5: Rightwing Hillary Love. As her star started to fade, Hillary Clinton won the applause of rightbloggers theretofore committed to her destruction. “I am having a tiny little pang of missing Hillary,” admitted National Review’s Lisa Schiffren. “Not her, but hating her.” BuzzMachine’s Jeff Jarvis discovered a media conspiracy against Clinton. Commentary’s Jennifer Rubin insisted that at least Hillary would never condescend to simple country folk as “tony Hawaii prep school” graduate Obama had, and attempted to exploit her gender resemblance to Sarah Palin, proving once again that if there’s anything rightbloggers hate worse than Clintons, it’s defeat.
(Denizens of DelawarePolitics indulged in this Hilary love, apparently oblivious as to how much sillier it made them.)
#4: Michelle Obama: The Lost Sessions. First there was the alleged “Whitey” tape, in which the future First Lady used the epithet in a context that must forever remain a mystery, as no one has ever heard it. Then another alleged tape surfaced, in which Mrs. Obama was said to have railed against the media; transcriptions read like English as a Second Language (“All dirt has been thrown onto my husband’s face and yet he loves this country”). No one ever heard that one either. We hold out hope for the discovery in a Chicago garage of Michelle’s lost Millie Jackson collaborations.
Really, this one is one of my favorites, probably because of how the tape got found.
I don’t know how many of you read the wingnut blogs, but if you’ve any favorites crazy stories (especially from the Delaware faction) drop those links in the comments.
BTW, the DelwarePolitics crew is working on getting in their entry for 2009 early, with a particularly silly insistence on Obama taking power now — you know, before he actually takes the oath of office. The hypocrisy shows through when you know before you read them that if Obama was actually trying to be the President before noon on 1/20 they’d be going to town about coups, rule of law, constitutions, some bullshit about socialism and probably trying to tie in such behavior to sharia law. I guess their effort counts as pre-emptive wanking.