Hello, I’m Kip Winger. You may remember me from such classic songs as “(She’s Only) Seventeen” and “(She’s Only) Seventeen (Unplugged)”. When I heard that The Editors wanted me to host the nominations for the Wank of the Year, I knew that was an opportunity that only comes around once in lifetime, so I put on my Magical Crown of Wingnuttery and transformed myself into a SOLID GOLD JPEG so I could be more easily uploaded to this weblog. For such is the Kipmas magic which comes in every bottle of Pert Plus!
Lots of wanks embarrass the wanker; but, for Wank of the Year, that’s not enough. A truly outstanding wank should humiliate the audience, shame the human race, and really raise some serious questions about whether this whole “Big Bang” enterprise was really such a hot idea. And of all this wanks which wankers have wunk, only one will be awarded me, The Golden Winger, the most storied prize in all of Wingnuttia!
(LEGAL DISCLAIMER: all Golden Winger selections are subject to review at any time by Ghosts of Kipmas Past.)
The Nominees for the 2008 Golden Winger for Wank of the Year:
After winning the 2006 Palme D’Haire, she should really be disqualified from future prizes. Also, she’s clearly insane, and making fun of her is like poking sticks through the bars at Bellvue. So why is she nominated? FOR I, KIP WINGER, HAVE DECREED IT SO! So thrill to the majesty of Pam’s 30,000 page opus explaining how Google can prove that Barack Obama is the illegitimate child of Scary Sixties Black Dude Malcolm X. Or, if you don’t want to waste a week and give yourself a brain tumor, just admire the wanktoitiveness required to make such an idiot of yourself. Even on the internets, she is something special.
The Doughy Pantload. The Jonanist. Doughbob Loadpants. 4-Way Dough Cube. By whatever name you know him, Jonah Goldberg proved in 2008 that his runaway 2005 Chickenhawk of the Year win was no fluke. His long-delayed masterpiece was praised to the stars by critics, provided these critics were wearing Jonah Goldberg’s ample pants. Conservatives turned away in disgrace, liberals pointed and laughed, monkeys peed in their mouths, and Jonah defended himself from this abuse with hilarious self-abuse. Wanktastic.
Fred Hiatt. Editorial page editor of the Washington Post. Utter wanker. Here, he combats the scourge of mean bumper stickers by pretending that the Select Committee on Intelligence’s “Phase 2” report on the use of intelligence to sell the Iraq War completely exhonerates the Bush Administration, when, in fact, anyone who looked at it for five minutes could see it did exactly the opposite. Not as creative as Pam What’s-Her-Name, but as brazen a wank as you are ever likely to see.
Whether putting out rigorous position papers in the competative, results-oriented world of a right-wing think tank; crafting powerful rhetoric for a WSJ editorial or National Review feature article; or spending hours rehashing the finer points of Vince Foster’s “suicide” on the SeanHannity.com forums; the John Galts of wingnuttia know that – while rugged individualists – they are all part of something bigger than themselves. An Army of Davids, a Fraternity of Fact-Checkers. And, like any fraternity, they know that even the most solitary, individualistic, and shameful pursuit is that much better when done as a team. Working together, even lending a helping hand when one teammate is too grossed-out or cramped to go on, they can make the merely risible into something truly disgusting. The Soggy Biscuit is awarded in honor of the biggest circle-jerk of the year.
Suffering: is there anyone who knows more about it than conservatives? No, there isn’t, and how insensitive of me to even ask! Scourged by the whips of political correctness; cruelly mocked at fancy cocktail parties by apocryphal liberals who spit chardonnay in their faces and fix them with a thorny Crown of Not Agreeing With Me; and, finally, led away from their just reward to be nailed to a rugged cross of Very Mean Blog Posts with rude nails of Naughty Words – such a Passion would break lesser mortals. But, as the bold Chickenhawk is invincible in battle, the wounded wingnut is unbroken in defeat. Stoically putting down his parasol and hand fan, manfully gathering up his petticoats and bustle, he runs sobbing – and with a quiet dignity - from the shade of the magnolia tree to the drawing room to pen an editorial about how nasty and horrible everybody is and how his small and shell-like ears have never heard such uncouthness and wah wah wah all the fucking way home.
Love, the Bard remind us, is a many-splintered thing*. I never understood what the Bard could have meant by that, until I considered that he lived in a time of rough, ragged wooden floors, and before advances in synthetic fiber technology gave us the durable and nigh-impenetrable kneepad technology we take for granted today. Though we may not suffer for love as we once did, does this mean we love our conservative idols less fully, less intensely, less unconditionally? Indeed, no. The love we have for our beloveds is as fulsome and rich as the love of any ‘tween for any Jonas Brother, and, if we were ever splintered for this love, would we not bare these scars proudly, crimson wounds pulsing with our own hearts’ blood a sign that …
OMG is that DAVID ADDINGTON?!?!?! The way he subverts the Constitution is SO DREAMY!!!!!! OMG HE’S LOOKING RIGHT ME OMG OMG OMG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Courage is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.
So said Winston Churchill, who was sort of the George W. Bush of 1938. Churchill faced utter annihilation at the hands of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis – sort of like the Barack Obama and the Daily Kos of the early 1940′s – and yet, despite every setback, never wavered in his determination to persevere and triumph. If any two characteristics define our nominees for Chickenhawk of the Year, it is their boundless enthusiasm, and their boundless failure. If I had to name a third, it would be “picked last for kickball”, but that’s not what we are talking about. We are talking about rhetorical courage, the puffed-chest bravado and keyboard-rattling grandiloquence from which true heros are made. Whether they are warning off the Moorish hordes, threatening to start a civil war if they don’t get their way, fearlessly yelling racial slurs from behind a pseudonym on the internet, or steadfastly proclaiming their indominable will to continue blabbing on about all the super-butch things they’d do if only they hadn’t already made plans to play Starcraft, these Warriors of Words are truly our last line of defense against not having to listen to them. Consider: if time ran backwards, Winston Churchill would be quoting them when talking about the true meaning of courage. Quoting them backwards. Think about it.
The Nominees for the 2008 Chickenhawk of the Year:
Chad Myers, CNN’s meteorologist, makes a bid for a Bailey:
CNN Meteorologist Chad Myers had never bought into the notion that man can alter the climate and the Vegas snowstorm didn’t impact his opinion. Myers, an American Meteorological Society certified meteorologist, explained on CNN’s Dec. 18 “Lou Dobbs Tonight” that the whole idea is arrogant and mankind was in danger of dying from other natural events more so than global warming.
“You know, to think that we could affect weather all that much is pretty arrogant,” Myers said. “Mother Nature is so big, the world is so big, the oceans are so big – I think we’re going to die from a lack of fresh water or we’re going to die from ocean acidification before we die from global warming, for sure.”
Wow. That’s just heaps of stupid poured atop a mountain made of dumb.
According to Myers, it’s arrogant to think that man could affect something as big as the weather or the oceans by virtue of our carbon dioxide output. Besides, sneers Myers, we’ll probably die first because of what our carbon dioxide output is doing to the oceans. Which are so big that it would be arrogant to think we could affect them.
You know, we’ll deserve what we get in terms of nature’s wrath.
Also, for the record, Lou Dobbs is a First Class, A Number 1 Douchebag. Someone should Curly Jefferson his ass.
I’m reading a lot about how Obama “reaches out” to his adversaries, and that’s why he’s building a track record of inviting avowed homophobes to stand front and center at his campaign events and now his inauguration.
Okay, I’m game. So we know being a gay-basher doesn’t disqualify you from a seat at the Obama table – in fact, it seems to be an outright qualification for proving Obama’s post-partisanship. If Obama prides himself on reaching out to all sides of every debate, then why is it that Obama has never sat down with, or promoted at his events, an avowed racist or anti-Semite?
(Via Kos.) To state the obvious: Rick Warren isn’t there to represent (metaphorical) “gay-bashers”, he’s representing (white) Christians. Now, Christians, as a group, are primarily concerned with stopping abortion, gay sex, and fucking generally – I understand this isn’t universal among Christians, but the anti-gay and anti-abortion jihadis do exist in large numbers in this country, and I doubt many of them come from the secular humanist community (all of whom are going to be tortured in flames forever by the Merciful Sky God for noticing that this is fucking retarded.) People with very well-thought-out theological arguments about why 70-whatever percent of Christians are not really Christian can present them to me right after I present my dissertation on why Batman could beat up Darth Vader if Thundarr the Barbarian let him borrow his Sun Sword, and also a hundred other brilliant arguments based on fiction. Apologies to believing Christians and Jedis.
To answer John’s question: give it a month. Barack Obama will then sit down with, and promote at state events, a parade of very non-metaphorical racists, anti-Semites, murders, tyrants, torturers, and worse, many of whom are our very great friends. He will do it for these essentially the same reason that he has, and will again, court Rick Warren – because they are players in the international sphere much as I gather Mr. Warren is in the domestic. And so they will be offered these symbolic concessions in the hope that they are stupid enough to trade them for material concessions. And it often works: you’d be surprised how many people expect politics to validate their identity, and for whom the ultimate prize is to win meaningless symbolic triumphs over their rivals. It’s called “politics”, the business of negotiating the world of humans, most of whom are scorching assholes and insecure idiots. There are ways of avoiding this unpleasantness, but they all involve not being a politician. The Game is the Game.
Is this smart politics? Will courting Warren indeed weaken the Republican stranglehold on white evangelicals? I don’t know, and neither do you. Warren is being given a symbolic victory in exchange for the possibility of material political gain for a liberal agenda. That’s a trade you take every single time.
Hello, I’m Kip Winger. You may remember me from such classic songs as “(She’s Only) Seventeen” and “(She’s Only) Seventeen (Unplugged)”. When I heard that The Editors wanted me to host the nominations for the Wank of the Year, I knew that was an opportunity that only comes around once in lifetime, so I put on my Magical Crown of Wingnuttery and transformed myself into a SOLID GOLD JPEG so I could be more easily uploaded to this weblog. For such is the Kipmas magic which comes in every bottle of Pert Plus!
Suffering: is there anyone who knows more about it than conservatives? No, there isn’t, and how insensitive of me to even ask! Scourged by the whips of political correctness; cruelly mocked at fancy cocktail parties by apocryphal liberals who spit chardonnay in their faces and fix them with a thorny Crown of Not Agreeing With Me; and, finally, led away from their just reward to be nailed to a rugged cross of Very Mean Blog Posts with rude nails of Naughty Words – such a Passion would break lesser mortals. But, as the bold 
. Which are so big that it would be arrogant to think we could affect them.
