Wonkette
CURSE YOU, HIATT.
We had been checking for the Big Winners all day with nothing, and then word came of the rejection letters a few hours ago — it’s bloody, friends, the streets are bloody and on fire, heads rolling (sorry, locquaciousmusic!) — and now it’s secretly, finally available online. But a Saturday Halloween means nothing to us, Hiatt! Check back tomorrow afternoon for special Weekend Wonkette coverage.
All we have to say for now is that there’s one fat old white male all the way to the left, so this competition is already gamesetmatch. Oh wait nevermind, he’s a Nobel laureate (the egalitarianism of this tournament’s already so evident!) in Science, and the Post can’t have that — would make George Will look bad. Hmm… Eh, hot chick on the right looks like a winner, then. Oops, wait, not her either, she’s muslin. Muslins… Fred Hiatt… muslins… OH GOD HOT MUSLIN LADY, IT’S A TRAP, YOU’RE NOT SAFE IN THOSE OFFICES!
America’s Next Great Pundit [Washington Post]
My initial feeling says third from the right chick has this in the bag.
You’d think she’d know how to keep a sekrit by now…
Lydia Khalil runs the world, Middle East subdivision, from the Council on Foreign Relations and the best topic sentence she could come up with is, “Despite his star power, not everyone loves Barack Obama.”
It’s a dark and stormy night here where I’m at, but not everyone here in fact nobody here got past your first sentence.
But of the ten faces yours is the only face I’d want pacifying my K9 unit.
I say give it to Lieberman if he’ll leave the Senate. He can say any shit he wants to and he’ll fit right in with Kristol & Krauthammer.
TJBeck: Oddly enough, there are nine essays at the linked site — and hers is the one that’s missing.
Also, this guy is a Dubya alum. Of course, he goes off on how the Obama administration is constantly saying they came into power with a wagonload of problems — the ingrates. So the Post, in its search for fresh voices, has just stumbled on a black conservative Dubya apologist. Control you excitement.
Oh and yes, I wrote one, and it wasn’t very good — so whatever shit I give these writers, their entries were still more coherent and better in at least several ways than mine.
I’m too lazy to read ‘em, but did anyone of the finalists do their essay on how the phrase ‘great pundit’ is pretty much always an oxymoron?
That one gets my vote.
Contestant #2 talks about her “guy friends, late in their 20s and starting to spend fewer nights on bar stools . . .”
That is because now that the unemployment benefits have run out, they have progressed to crack.
shadowMark: Heh. Lydia will be the perfect New WaPo Pundit. Well, almost perfect; it did take her three whole sentences to get to her first distortion/lie.
But a good editor could tighten that up!
Lascauxcaveman: The seemingly heavy-set seemingly black woman fourth from the right does get a little postmodern about punditry:
In the end, as any recovering addict will say, the high of the drama will dissipate and the daily challenge will be left: to live our lives the best we can with the cards that we have been dealt. By turning away from the drama of others and living our lives, we soon discover that we have drama of our own. Not always fun, but ultimately rewarding.
I’m going to start following her advice by turning away from her writing.
Oh, and I better get this done before that evil Korean/Vulcan from Canada city scoops me:
No, yes, no, no, no, yes, no, yes, no, yes.
chascates: Speaking of Fuckhammer, the ol’ world class diver was in Germany bad-mouthing Obama to Spiegel. “Obama is average,” said the man who knows average. Or rather, below average.
The Khalil lady had the best observation: FOB and first generation immigrants can be amazingly conservative. It’s their kids that all become hippies.
Lascauxcaveman: but did anyone of the finalists do their essay on how the phrase ‘great pundit’
How about great “pundints?” As in, Snowbilly doesn’t like pundints who favor the nukular option.
chascates: Chuckie K got his start at an open audition for the New Republic. And we see how well that has turned out.
Lascauxcaveman: With you the whole way except that I give #4 a yes because he has a pretty mouth.
Darryl Jackson, third from the left, goes punditing all the way back to 1954:
Like Terry Malloy, the former prize-fighter turned dockworker played by a young Marlon Brando in the film, “On the Waterfront,” Obama was a contender.
Bloody Cthulhu 1954 is older than Star Trek. Even TOS.
Darryl could have just said Obama eventually may be a Picard but he’ll never be a Kirk and gotten ten or twelve years more contemporary if “contemporary” is measured by the percentage of vaudevillians you reference who are still alive.
Here’s some more information about Contestant #2:
Her pussy has a mouse over.
I’ve read (or at least scrolled through) the words from all ten and I think they need to get right to the twitter competition, 140 chars typed or thumbed in swimsuits or lingerie. My money’s on Lydia Khalil, fifth from the left.
mollymcguire: win!
shadowMark: as any recovering addict will say, the high of the drama will dissipate and the daily challenge will be left
I’m a recovering addict, at least in the parlance of the 12-Step programs I have avoided, who thinks stupid refrigerator magnet sayings like this don’t help anyone but parasites who use the language of recovery as a crutch for their lack of imagination.
I’d vote for the cablinasian third from the right simply because she looks like she may be the youngest & so also possibly also the least set in her ways. Not that I’ll ever start reading WaPo opinion pieces.
Lascauxcaveman: Here are the contestants’ true indentities:
1. William Donohue
2. Your mom
3. Gordon Robinson
4. James Franco
5. A penis
6. Ofra Haza
7. Esther Rolle
8. Tigra Woods
9. Christopher Hitchens
10. Sarah Silverman
In other words: Best. Orgy. EVAH!
hobospacejunkie: Extemporanus: For what it’s worth:
I came upon my drag queen cablinasian honestly and without your assistance. (Though a little help cleaning up would be appreciated…)
hobospacejunkie: no shit. I don’t get high on drama, i get high on booze, coke, pills, weed and pussy. drama just gets in the way of all that.
Crank Tango: No shit, indeed. Being addicted is motherfuckin’ boring. Drama has very little to do with it, apart from the quitting. That was pretty painfully dramatic, until the suboxone kicked in. Miracle fucking drug, that one.
Extemporanus: I attribute our cablinasian mind-meld to Wonkette ESP.
I would do the hot chick on their right.
OK, I only felt like reading the 1-line summaries.
1. “Science is good.” Bzzzt, wrong!
2. Fake trendlet with a Friedmanesque catch phrase (”the porous life”). Win.
3. “The inheritance card” — see how he did that? It’s not the race card, it’s the inheritance card and stop picking on Dubya!
4. Democrats are doooooooooomed. Win.
5. She is arguing that news is stupid in a newspaper?
6. WTF is he talking about? And why do I care?
7. Health care. Boring!
8. Fox News. Boring!
9. “The Women of the Web” - that is so 2006. Yes, the person of the year is YOU!
So what was the point of creating a “next great pundit” contest if every finalist was going to be a media insider? One of them works for The Atlantic, fer chrissakes.
I don’t know why I’m grumpy. I didn’t even submit an entry. I guess I was hoping for one that would be a hilarious failure, instead of a lot of typically banal Washington Post failures.
Isn’t EVERY night “news dump” night at the Post?
tiny mexican: I was going to enter this contest, but I figured that since I’m also a media insider, it wouldn’t be fair. You can check my credentials–I got two free-verse poems published in a small Penn State student literary journal in 1988.
Now I see the error of my ways. This would have been the perfect path for me to realize my dream: to become the next Mike Barnacle.
O.K., I actually read them.
1. He’s got a good point, but he is a rather unattractive specimen, isn’t he?
2. Peggy Noonan, Jr. And I don’t think that word, porous, means what she thinks it means.
3. Oh, for Fuck’s sake. Absolutely pathetic, disingenuous, retarded bullshit. He will probably win.
4. You, sir, are no Nate Silver.
5. Of course we want drama. Why should we want news with no drama?
6. I guess the hardest part of writing a column is choosing your topic. He did that badly.
7. The flu epidemic of 1918, I think, qualifies as old news.
8. The nice muslim lady raises a valid point. She’s toast.
9. Puma.
Final analysis: Whoever wins, it’s still the Washington Post, and still retarded.
I say it goes to the former Bushie. I liked Gyamfi’s best but the Post would never pay someone who encourages people to point and laugh at the giant blundering news machine.
And they totally fucked up Khan’s excerpt. Also:
“The Post picked 10 contestants from about 4,800 entrants to move on to the next round of competition. Here’s what finalist Zeba Khan wrote in her initial entry:It may have been the youth that used the web to elect President…”
#7 demonstrates what an evil influence Thomas Friedman has had on newspaper columnists.
Wouldn’t you know the first of the 3 hotties I check out thinks, “I’m an expert on the Middle East and international security…”. Do REAL experts ever call themselves experts? If she really is, why doesn’t she already have a writing gig? I can only overlook this outrage if she returns my love letters.
Just one new pundit? Either hire them all, or bring our pundits home. LISTEN TO THE GENERALS!
This would have been a much better contest if it was to decide which of WaPo’s existing pundits it was going to take out and scourge.
SHOW US THE GLANDS, WAPO, AND STOP SENDING THESE AWFUL DRUNKEN EMAILS! They’ve been on a fit of insanity for the last 12 hours entitles Pundit, which is unfair for an unruly Populace. This is now a spam contest.
No Halloween deserves this level of insanity. Leave us alone, you dying newspaper, you.
I think the Huffmann guy is a wonkette reader.
The writer from the mountains did a pretty good job. The rest need a good editor.
When they sent out the initial e-mail telling me I was a failure, there was a link so that I could discover other ways to submit content, for free, to the Washington Post. Then, a few hours later, I got this note:
Our e-mail system appended a prefix to the link in the last e-mail, which created complications for some recipients.
So we’re going to try again:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/21/AR2009042103705.html
If you still run into problems, copying and pasting the link into your browser should get you where we wanted to send you. The link is also on our Opinions section front, toward the bottom left, labeled as ‘Frequently Asked Questions.’
Thanks.
I guess they’re taking reader submissions to run their website, too!
Which one wrote “Bomb Them! Bomb Them! Bomb the little Brown Bastards! Bomb Them!” Over and over for 300 words? Clearly that would be the winner.
This contest is still a little on the boring side. I say they take the the final contestants, film them, and turn it into a reality show, like “Hell’s Editor” or “Project Schmoozeway.” You could have an episode where Fred drives them to a house on the Eastern Shore and tells them they have just half an hour to write an essay about why Obama should bomb Iran. The final column will then be judged by a panel of judges including Krauthammer, Richard Cohen, and Howard Kurtz.
Another episode could feature them having to try and suck up to Dick Cheney at a cocktail party and whoever gets invited duck hunting will be the winner. Or for another challenge, they’ll get to go on Meet the Press and whoever does a better job of saying that the eventual passage of health care reform will be good for the Republicans wins.
Didn’t Darryl Jackson (the black guy who is criticizing Obama for pointing out the mess Bush made) used to play bass in Emmmy Lou Harris Spyboy Band?
Scuzzlebutt’s out. I blame Wonkette.
gurukalehuru: Goddammit I can’t believe Miss Piggy quit! Though bad for the Dem in this race, it should actually be good for Dems in the long run, as it gives the green light for fringe conservatives to attack their own party’s candidates from the far right, which should further alienate the republican party from normal people.
Lionel Hutz Esq.: p.s. More Troops!
hobospacejunkie: Presumes that normal people count in teh USA, these days.
~
I expected them to turn up something interesting like “Floyd Klumpf is a forklift operator from Winchester, Virginia, with a PhD in medieval studies. His column is called ‘Pre-School Girls Can Learn to Box, Too’. ‘When I was a kid, I got beat up enough. Even by girls sometimes. It was embarrassing. So that’s when my mom–not my dad–decided it was time for me to learn to box. Besides the satisfaction of knocking little Jenny Saunders flat on the ground, I learned a few things about gender roles…’”
You know, something like that. None of these Nobel laureates and Harvard trust-fund children. Jesus. Where are the real discoveries of original thinkers out there in America, hm?