Crowdsource Duncan Black!

Could there be one of those Time Man of the Year that’s not a person-type entrants, like “The Meme” or something?

Bill Kristol. Dear Cthulhu, that smug condescending grin all by itself makes it into the top ten.

Also, if this list does not include Victor “SPARTANS! TONIGHT WE DINE IN KENNEBUNKPORT!” Hanson, or Steven “and now I’m going to re-enact the closing speech from ‘Atlas Shrugged’ only with more references to anime” it is automatically invalid.

Four more wankers to go (three runners-up, and the winner), not three.

Friedman is a shoo-in for the top spot, and the three runners up will be 1) Glenn Reynolds, 2) Andrew Sullivan, and…hmmmm. Krauthammer? Fred Hiatt? Bill Kristol? Judith Miller? Mauren Dowd? It’s wide open.

I’d say Hitchens but that’s beating a dead horse.

Glenn Greenwald. Why? Because he’s wrong about nearly everything he says about the laws of war, as scores of actual lawyers have pointed out, yet manages to influence discourse about the wars even among people who should know better. here is an example. He does this by making factual assertions about the law that he knows many people disagree with and that are by no means settled. (His post below that ignores that translation is material support. Pick one at random, and odds are it is egregiously inaccurate.)

Anyone and everyone at Fox News. Collectively.

Friedman, yes, but not your run of the mill rightwingman. To wank you need to seriously pretend to be seriously pondering. Which is why I am going for dark horse Joe Klein. Or maybe a collective Swampland award. Krauthammer and the Fox Gallery of Horror is not wanking so much as something else -ramming hot needles in the public eye? There is also Bill Keller, of course. And what about, oh what about Ignatieff? A… and George Packer. Oh so many come to mind!

Why is Diane Sawyer on the list (or don’t I want to know)?

You’ve forgotten already? You should be ashamed.

And so I am ashamed, UK. But while that’s certainly wankeriffic and puts her in the running for wanker of the year in 2003 (and in a very competitive field that year) it doesn’t for me rise to the level of wanker of the decade.

And shed a tear for poor Mickey Kaus, if only he had stayed at Slate he could have been a contender.

I’d nominate Watson Ladd for being essentially Tom Friedman and Alan Dershovitz rolled into one all while presumably claiming to be a Marxist.

Otherwise I’d surely take Hiatt over any of his minions.

I feel like it’d be good to give a nod to an old-school wanker like Kim du Toit or Stephen Den Beste, but I’m really too lazy to hunt examples. (And I’d have to concede that they’d be better in a second-tier list.)

Bobo I assume is going to be there, and surely is at least a dark horse candidate for #1 (though the Mustache would be my guy as well.).

Since it’s the twilight of his career and the decade that stupidity eventually overcame faux sophistication, George Will should get it.

I’ll second George Will. True, he’s irrelevant to the modern Republican Party, which no longer even pretends to any sort of intellectual coherency, but his pomposity and stick-up-his-ass killjoy disapproval of almost everything qualifies him. Or a least some sort of career award for longevity as Serious Person (insert Edmund Burke quote here).

@32: Sorry – that should have been “blazing beacon.” Beacons aren’t really bounteous, are they?

George Will […] stick-up-his-ass killjoy disapproval of almost everything qualifies him.

Well, he approves heartily of baseball — and he manages to make a game I find excruciatingly boring to begin with even more so. No mean feat.

I’m pretty sure Tommy Friedman, aged six is taking the grand prize. But in the spirit of the post request, I’m going to suggest Fred Hiatt, and throw in Joe “neither the time nor the legal background” Klein as a longshot dark horse.

Marty Peretz.

Greenwald should be thrown in there just for giving Ron Paul a hint of legitimacy.

Oh, and how perfect is that? I see what he did there.

The hyperlink is http://www.denbeste.nu/archives.shtml, but you can’t get there from here; you’ll have to go back to the beginning of the Internet and start over.

There’s gotta be somebody from TNR on that list. Can’t be Marty, he’s such a bad and boring writer people wrote him off years ago. I can see sprezzatura on the list but it’d have to be at the bottom. James Kirchick had a hot streak but that was years ago. Maybe just Peter Beinart then.

It’s a shame he ruled out posthumous awards … one could at least envisage an Oscar-style montage of wankers deceased during the award period, with audience applause saying more about who they recognize than actual quality, so Tim Russert gets deafening applause while it’s more muted for Andrew Breitbart and even Michael Kelly (who was a forerunner of the 2000s media culture). But surely Roger Ailes has to be up there, lifetime achievement if not in the main group of 10.

Hi,

There are at least a THOUSAND top ten wankers in the U.S alone! So many wankers, so little time. We can’t possibly have enough time to hand out all the medals. And I agree with JS. @ 26, if David Brooks is not high on the list, there is no justice in the universe, and I’ve never wanked.

Have a nice day,
Antti

geo, I also disapprove of several people whom you probably don’t want to approve of. The fundamental difference between you and me is I change my mind when I hear the evidence: I disapprove of Glen Greenwald because he is misleading, a charge I’ve shown here and which no one disputes. I also disapprove of him because he’s an apologist for the Taliban victory that will happen in 2014, and ensuing genocide. But being wrong shouldn’t get you on the hack list. Lying to your readers should.

As for a more acceptable nominee, how about our old Bell Curve friend, Charles Murray? After trying to make racism acceptable, he’s finally discovered poverty, but only for white people. I’ll put in David Brooks for helping him in this effort.

Okay maybe Im missing out on something here but it seems like ye are ignoring the really top drawer wankers-Jean Claude Trichet, Merkozy and the dark lord himself- Dick Cheney. Their work shouldn’t go unnoticed .

My nominees for effective and subtle (or not-so-subtle) destructiveness…

Jim Cramer
Jacob Weisberg
Adam Nagourney
and I’m surprised that nobody has mentioned Gregory Mankiw.

The big difficulty is that most of really responsible people did their deeds from about ’98 to ’03, so it’s hard for me to remember.

Watson: a charge I’ve shown here and which no one disputes

That’s some first class trolling right there. You might throw in a “look Ma what I can do!” while you’re at it.

All that said Glenn is not always right (although he is in the case Watson links to), and like many smart people has a tendency to present his interpretation as incontrovertible fact. (In fact we can see Watson do exactly that several times in this very thread!) Glenn is also “shrill”, meaning he says things that sound outrageous since they contradict the carefully constructed common sense instead of merely saying things that actually are outrageous but don’t create any controversy since they stay within said common sense.

ciaran, I think the idea is no actual criminals or perpetrators of dastardly deeds but rather sycophants, boot-lickers and other media enablers.

Some truly winning entries here, with so many world class wankers I feel like I’ve stumbled onto the circle jerk of the century.

If Airmiles does not win, the prize has no credibility.

I forgot about James Glassman, and hey, how about an honorable contempt for Alan Greenspan, specifically as an advocate, like the whole surplus is evil, adjustable mortgage rates heavenly routine he did in the beginning of the 2k’s?

If Maureen Dowd’s obsession with promoting every wingnut claim about Al Gore, wasn’t wankery of the highest order, I don’t know what is.

The top spots ought to be confined to *unmitigated* wankers which I think rules out Sullivan, Klein and a couple of others mentioned above.

Coming to mechanics, I guess that the wankery has to have been noticed at the time by Atrios, so some worthy candidates have already missed out.

Atrios likes to aim most of his fire at the “respectable” pundits who dominate the establishment and attempt to speak like they’re above the ideological fray, or the even-the-liberals who go out of their way to sell out liberalism at every key moment.

I think Hiatt is a very good nomination (per DKW). Also any of the Sunday hosts, Duncan hates them with special fierceness – probably David Gregory if I had to pick which one he’ll single out. Tim Russert would have a lock if not for the prohibition on posthumous winners.

I’d be deeply disappointed in Duncan Black if he were to put David Gregory above McMegan in the wankery ranking.

I was wondering about the “mechanics” too. Most on the list appear to be very minor functionaries of the equestrian order (if that) as compared to strong praetorians like Kristol, Cheney, Friedman et al. I hadn’t heard of either Saletan or Halperin & know of McCardle only coz of the very mean things people say about her on this blog. And who the f**k is Richard Cohen ? Disappointing list thus far.

@Nine I think your complaints are a little unfair. We’re all counting on seeing Friedman in the top 3. Actual princes of evil like Cheney aren’t eligible. Kristol senior is dead and therefore ineligible, while Kristol junior is (IMHO) not a big enough wanker to make the list. I tend to agree about Richard Cohen (FYI, a longstanding “liberal” columnist for the Post), but it would be ludicrous to have a list like this without the WankPost being represented, and the archetypal candidate, Broder is ineligible.

Really, the only way to deal with Hiatt’s crew would be to single out the non-wankers – I can only think of Meyerson on the actual op-ed page, and Greg Sargent and Ezra Klein among the bloggers, though I’ve doubtless missed some.

But any pundit who can take time out from instructing the world on weighty matters, be it the economy, military tactics or foreign policy, to write against the wearing of blue jeans deserves special recognition.

Yeah, but I kinda sorta loved his blue jeans column though. It was sort of strangely sweet, in a doddering kind of way (speaking as someone who wears blue jeans every day of his life).

More seriously, IIRC, GW was one of the first Republican columnists to predict a landslide for Obama in 2008. He’s god-awful in lots of ways, but he’s just not idiotic in the way that Halperin or McArdle is.

(Wait, did I just really defend George Will?)

I’d be happy enough with an award to Hiatt, taken as a representative of the WaPo in general, similar to Saletan for Slate.

It’s kind of sad that there’s no room in the top 10 for Glenn Reynolds (at least I assume not). Back in the day, he seemed destined for greatness in this field. Now he just looks like another Mickey Kaus, notable only as an early adopter of blog technology.

And – I feel rather sad,too, that we are forgetting the Ulysses, the Moby Dick, the Magic Mountain of wankery in the 2000s. I’m talking of course about Fred Barnes Rebel-in-Chief! Wankery is, for a good part, sycophancy, and Rebel-in-Chief, from its phalloshot of Bush the GI Joe on the cover to the licking conferred by every sentence, rates high on overall sycophancy. And I’m throwing in poems to Louis XIV and speeches in praise of Stalin! Barnes has rather disappeared, though. Maybe, like any great artist, the masterpiece has exhausted him.

Considering that Black is a credentialed economist, it’s not altogether unlikely that the culprit he’s fingering is “Irrational exuberance” Greenspan or “Helicopter Ben” Bernanke.

Don’t know if Mr. Black would concur, but I think the term should be restricted to High-Broderite Faux-Equivilance trimmers.”Out” conservatives like Krauthammer and Kristol can aspire no higher than mere Hackery, impressive levels of achievement in mendacity and shamelessness notwithstanding. Fred Hiatt would certainly be a contender if the general public knew who he is, which, happily for them they mostly do not.

Like the Toffee Crisp ad, but with more waterboarding.

Roger 80 – I think Jonah Goldberg writes for the LA Times, although he made his name at NR so maybe that doesnt answer your question

Talking of Goldberg, Jeffrey is as bad as any of them and has spent a decade enabling war crimes and excusing war criminals. McArdle’s Edward Murrow in comparison. Douthat’s just nasty, but he probably came to late in the game to make the final ten. Theres always 2022.

Peggy Noonan deserves at least a dishonourable mention for her long and deleterious impact in mainstreaming lunacy from her permanent sunday show sinecure.

Oh, and who wrote that “he trashed the place, and it’s not his place” line about Clinton?

Imma say Michael Gerson just for funzies.

The top spots ought to be confined to unmitigated wankers which I think rules out Sullivan

Fair enough. And yet I can’t help thinking that Brave Sir Andrew — what with the preening narcissism and delusions of grandeur (“You’re welcome”), the weird pet obsessions (Baby Trig), and the compulsive need to tart up even the most banal nuggets of conventional wisdom in the finery of faux-erudite GayCatholicTory contrarianism — really does represent the very definition of wankery.

michael ledeen

Judith won the Pulitzer for her wankery (not to mention a First Amendment Award) and she knows about the Aspens.

Remember Michael “even the liberal” Kinsley? It’s just sad that he would be struggling to make the top 100 let alone the top 10.

As for CA: well, we’re too far from the two places that count as actual places (as opposed to mythical “real America” places) for the wanker corps, DC and NYC. Good for us, I’d say.

No worries rf, I was thinking that about him myself. Give him another eight-ten years and I fully expect him to be in the running.

roger #15 and DKW #37 got their wish- Joke Line is the 3rd runner up.

Is douchery wankery? Nastiness? What seems to distinguish our presumptive winner and several of the above listed is the gap between their massive self-regard and the tininess of their thinking. Formulaic repetition, cliche as first resort, a resounding hollowness. OTOH trying to distill wankery might be wankery too.

I had to scroll all the way down to vacuumslayer to see Michael Gerson mentioned? The very personification of sanctimony? Though anyone can see, there’s a lot of competition for those few remaining slots.

If Airmiles does not win, the prize has no credibility.

That’s a given, since Atrios seems somewhat proud of his role in ensuring that “suck on this” was not lost to history.

I’d hope that Reynolds will make it into the top three, given that he is a terrible person who continues to say awful things while moonlighting from his well-compensated public-sector job as a tenured tosspot, and that his prominence neatly spans the ESCHATON DECADE and encompasses such a wide range of wankery. Which leaves a spot for Bobo Brooks, who is pernicious because he is now the designated NPR/PBS “reasonable conservative”.

@novakant An Obama detention/drone apologist would be good, but who is a good example? Greenwald links to some occasionally, but they all seem fairly obscure to me. This is an issue that seems to promote more resignation (Repubs are even worse, no popular outrage except over trivia like TSA screening, no real scope for international presssure) and appeals to party loyalty than high grade wankery.

I get Limbaugh as center.

bad jim @78

I’m glad to learn I’m not alone in thinking David Broder the very model of the modern centrist idiot, and since Atrios has a long history of decrying his malign influence on public discourse I’m not going to abandon any hope of his posthumous recognition.

I remember when David Broder, before he became solely an op-ed columnist, was a superb political reporter. As a reporter he wrote very well, he captured the feel and atmosphere of a campaign in a way that few others did. I wasn’t old enough to vote in 1972 (’76 was the first election in which I voted), but I followed the ’72 presidential campaign very closely and Broder’s reporting (and his analytical columns) were excellent and quite indispensable. That should not be forgotten, IMHO, notwithstanding his later decline into punditry.

What really singles out the Moustache as the clear winner is his incredible skill at constantly contradicting himself (practically everything he’s ever written can be argued against in his own words), and of course the fact that he’s still widely respected despite this. I honestly don’t believe anyone else even comes close.

christian_h (118):

And the metaphors. Let’s not forget the mind-blowing metaphors. (Link to old but still-great Taibbi piece.)

roger, the banner of the West in this contest is carried by the Herodotus of Fresno, Victor Davis Hanson, now ensconced in Kerensky’s Tower at Stanford University. Although, despite his recent success with illegal aliens targeting his grapevines for kamikaze attacks, I fear he is no competition for the Cabdriver’s Friend.

Yes, Airmiles and Brooks look very, very strong for the top spots. Either one would be a deserving winner.

Only one wanker could possibly contend with them. Someone said above that nominating Chris Hitchens would be beating a dead horse, but surely the Hitch of all people wouldn’t want death getting in the way of good old-fashioned snark. And let’s be honest, his achievements in wankery were truly breathtaking: from the oily urbanity in which he cloaked often retrograde and xenophobic views, to the aplomb with which he could sprinkle a sweet sauce of superficial erudition over multiple reeking turds of warmongering nonsense, the Hitch was in a class of his own. The latter leg of his career, wherein he deftly reinvented himself as one of the “Four Horsemen” of lumpen atheism as his embarrassing Iraq columns swirled down the toilet bowl behind him, was the ultimate culmination of this path: a smooth continuation of profoundly ignorant and often-racist wankery that nevertheless successfully passed itself off as Sweet Reason and won him back a sprinkling of the following he’d lost.

For all these reasons, I’d cast a vote for Hitch.

Well at least the next decade cant be any worse

http://www.amazon.com/The-Tyranny-Cliches-Liberals-Cheat/dp/1595230866/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1334346543&sr=8-1

I guess the NR cruise is never gonna hit that f$$king iceberg

One more vote for David Brooks.-I think he’s earned it.

127

Argh. And they got him blurbs from David Mamet and Vince Vaughn.

Considering Ferguson, Mankiw and Summers, I think that perhaps Harvard should be listed as wanker of the year.

Of course, that opens up the competition to U Chic, which would be fun. I have in mind some sort of reality show like ‘The Hunger Games’, but with one less winner :)

I take exception to VDH being called the Herodotus of Fresno. As a native Fresnan, that’s an insult to me and my hometown.

Just to be clear, he’s from Fowler.

Oh yes, it’s time to put up a poll on who will be wanker of the decade. Can CT handle this Henry? Will there be a prize drawing?

Having bet on the dark horse, Joe Klein, I’m going for broke with… Chris Matthews! He’s strong. He’s underestimated. Look at this guy, just look at him – comes from the cable wankeria, which hasn’t gotten the shout out yet. Has certain of those Klein characteristics – seventies liberal who becomes strong on defense and all the rest of the horseshit. Then: stunning moments of wankery! The mancrush on Bush in full mission accomplished regalia! And who can forget (or wants to remember) his creepy stalking of Hilary in 2008! Negatives are his rather subdued media position in the Obama years, and having to actually go back and look at his oeuvres collecto-craptacious. Postives: easy linkage. So, in comparison to some other really strong contenders, he might not look that great, but you have to remember that the Washpost is pretty much done, and the print press is pretty much fully represented. I’m putting the odds at 20 to 1 (for no good reason – it is just a Mattewsy thing to say), but I’m betting – well, not the house. The living room, maybe.

Chrisitan_h, Glenn Greenwald is ignoring lots of Supreme Court precedent and quite a bit of legal reasoning that goes against him. The understanding of the Obama administration is that there is a war against al-Queda, so all al-Queda members are targets, and can be killed at will. In that article he doesn’t mention this salient and important fact.

Watson Ladd 04.14.12 at 2:16 pm

” Chrisitan_h, Glenn Greenwald is ignoring lots of Supreme Court precedent and quite a bit of legal reasoning that goes against him. The understanding of the Obama administration is that there is a war against al-Queda, so all al-Queda members are targets, and can be killed at will. In that article he doesn’t mention this salient and important fact.”

Where ‘Al Qaida’ means – well, anything, and ‘Al Qaida Member’ means – well, anything.

I gotta love your use of the word ‘understanding’. If I’m caught with somebody else’s car, can I acquit myself by saying that I ‘understood’ that the car was mine?

I am spending way too much mental time on this contest. One thing bugs me, though. We know, all of us who have read Atrios, that Thomas Friedman is the no. 1 wanker. It is an almost self-evident proposition, like all men are mortal. And this really deflates the whole contest. So, casting around for a solution, I came up with one that is simple, brutal and clear: simply expell Friedman from the running. Make the criteria: neither dead people nor Tom Friedman can be candidates. Of course, this might be difficult to justify. I’d go for the Olympic excuse. While the others are surely excellent wankers, only Friedman is a professional wanker. That is, he never stops, he is a wanker week after week, he doesn’t let any non-wankerishness peep in. He, in other words, tries too fucking hard! Once Friedman is excluded, we have a much more exciting field for top honors.
So please,Mr. Black – exclude Friedman! Give him, perhaps, the God of Wankers award. There is nothing us punters hate more than a sure thing!

Nobody from TNR has yet been honored, so I think Peter “prime fighting age” Beinart is still strong in the running. Andrew “fifth column” Sullivan, “not a relation” Samuelson and Kevin “Dow 36000” Hasset should be still in the race too.

I think the criteria are: Pundit, not politician and not really conservative. but “centrist” oder “liberal”.

What about Arthur Laffer? Or some Iraq war expert, like Pollack or Michael O’Hanlon.

Re Watson L.:
I don’t read Greenwald very often, not nec. b/c I disagree w him but just b/c I never got into the habit.

I would think Greenwald has distinguished the WW2 precedents on the ground (among others) that WW2 was a declared war of the traditional sort in which an end to hostilities could be foreseen and identified. No end to hostilities can be identified with any clarity w/r/t the so-called ‘war on terror’. Plus the traditional definition of ‘unprivileged combatant’ was hopelessly fuzzed up by the Bush admin, which insisted on inventing its own categories. Greenwald is too good a lawyer not to have made these points.

Anyway these issues have been churned through before at CT more than once and I’m not sure why Watson wants to churn through them again.

Firstly in the true spirit of narcissism , I’d like to nominate myself for the wanky internet pseudonym that I have grown fond of (though it contains a papist and royalist in-joke about Milton).

-The very self-regarding Slavoj Zizek who is seemingly determined to make “the Left” appear as insane as is intergalatically possible. (Lacan the student molester gets a honorable posthumous mention.)

-Bernand Henri-Levy: a total do-nothing lightweight poseur and serial exposer of chest hair who thinks he’s the goddess of Democracy herself; A neo-Kantian Andre Rieu.

Jeffrey Archer: no explanation needed.

Francis Fukuyama: people who think Niall Fergusson is bad should remember Fukuyama’s supremacist attempt to petrify History for the material gains of his kleptocratic neo-liberal power elite.

– Christopher Monckton is waaaay beyond mere wankery and well into far more clinical realms

Happily for the rest of the planet Earth, he is unknown outside of Australia, but dear absent Lord, Cardinal George Pell is a solipsistic half-wit and spiritual non-starter!

And if you gonna dump on Jack Vance why does J. K. Rowling get away scot-free? Ditto Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson.

And anytime anyone mentions “he trashed the place, and it’s not his place” I am contractually obligated to point out that that was only the second most fatuously arrogant quote from Broder in that piece.

“The judgment is harsher in Washington,” says The Post’s Broder. “We don’t like being lied to.”

Oh silly slow-witted me. I just got the Jack Vance joke.

And yes, that is very funny.

Couple more nominees: Donald Trump (probably too Freidmanite obvious however)

Melanie Phillips

Did they hang out together during the ‘72 campaign?

Don’t think so. Both were at The Washington Post, but Greider was assigned specifically to the McGovern campaign while Broder was national politics in general. And going back and looking at a few passages, it looks like Broder was much more senior than Greider. Broder was also not as comfortable with the whole Rolling Stone/ Hunter S. Thompson scene that Crouse was part of.

It did remind me of a couple of items which Broder’s later carrier made me look at with a new, more jaundiced eye. His 1969 “Breaking of the President” column (reprinted here by Digby) and his story on Muskie’s melting snowflakes speech being the one which really highlighted that detail, while other stories barely mentioned it. Recounted here (1/3 of the way in). The lede:

With tears streaming down his face and his voice choked with emotion, Sen. Edmund S. Muskie (D-Maine) stood in the snow outside the Manchester Union Leader this morning and accused its publisher of making vicious attacks on him and his wife, Jane.

To be fair, Broder himself admitted he was later uncomfortable with the role his story played in the whole thing.

I would think Greenwald has distinguished the WW2 precedents on the ground (among others) that WW2 was a declared war of the traditional sort in which an end to hostilities could be foreseen and identified.

Also, the relevant Geneva Conventions are mostly from 1949.

I nominate Eric “Son of Erick” Erickson, CNN Contributor.

Matt Drudge deserves some kind of wanker category all to his own. Dark Lord of Wankerdom?

Well deserved, especially considering his latest stuff is even worse than what he was producing during the Bush Years

Well played, Duncan

Truly…and the trip down memory lane to Neal Pollack’s old blog was a nice bonus.

Don’t leave big Dick out of the race.

My sentimental pick for #1 would be Josh Trevino. A longshot, but a wanking champion.

Peggy Noonan..read the “Where is Sally?” homage to George Bush Jr.

Yeah, I’ll be really shocked if the Mustache of Understanding isn’t the grand prize winner. Brooks would have been a great choice for this list, but there are a lot more than 10 world-class wankers of the last decade, sadly.

Hiatt, representing WaPo, a popular choice for first runner-up. All that’s left now is the possibility of a stunning surprise tomorrow –

This deep into the thread I will engage in a bit of self-indulgence in honor of the very appropriate naming of Fred Hiatt: a somewhat dated appreciation of some of the main movers at the WaPo (the semi-original piece here with actual links to some of the supporting quotes and stories).

Outlined against the troubles of a nation, the Four Postmen wrote again. In internet lore they are known as arrogance, pomposity, cluelessness and idiocy. These are only aliases. Their real names are: Broder, Woodward, Howell and Hiatt. They formed the crest of the cyclone before which the reputation of the Washington Post was swept over the precipice these past ten years as a million readers peered at the bewildering panorama spread out on their breakfast tables and computer screens.

And then on to more ancient sources:

9. [Broder] And I saw when the rabid lamb opened one of the links, and I heard, as it were the sound of wankery, one of the four courtiers saying, Come and read.

10. And I read, and beheld two fatuous quotes: and he that spoke them knew not his hypocrisy; and many spots on Sunday morning television were given unto him: and he went forth being arrogant, and to show all that he well and truly was a dick.

11.[Woodward] And when he had opened the second link, I heard the second courtier say, Come and read.

12. And there I read another work of stenography: and power was given to him that wrote therein to transcribe the thoughts of the mighty, and that they should flatter one another: and there was given unto him great riches for his efforts.

13.[Howell] And after she had someone help her open the third link, I heard the third courtier say, Come and read. And I read, and lo, she that wrote it had a pair of balances in her hand.

14. And I heard a voice in the midst of the four courtiers say, A measure of column space for a Democrat, and three measures of column space for a Republican; unless the news is bad and then the measures shall be reversed; and see that thou hurt not the status quo.

15.[Hiatt] And when he had opened the fourth link, I heard the voice of the fourth courtier say, Come and read.

16. And I read, and beheld a mass of distortions and lies: and his name that edited it was Idiocy, and the neocons followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the estate, to mislead with pen, and with words, and with images, and with the shameful iniquity of their lies.

“Iniquity” is like the best word, ever.

Wow Friedman’s wiki page already lists his most recent honor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Friedman

Friedman takes the prize.

NOBODY COULD HAVE PREDICTED

Well, that was fun. How about some hockey blogging? Michael?

That should obviously be downcast, but I guess it doesnt really matter. Considering were all doomed

Well played.

Hi,

Okay, regular wanking may now resume. That is all.

Antti.

Now this is ‘wanking’

http://bcove.me/niwf3k8y