Year: 2009

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.)