Wonkette
We’ve read these ten columns from the Washington Post-Newsweek Interactive Kaplan Test Prep Daily’s Actual Sex Contest, and not a single one pissed us off as much as an average column by George Will, Richard Cohen, Charles Krauthammer, David Ignatius, Bill Kristol, Fred Hiatt, Jackson Diehl, Ruth Marcus, Michael Gerson, David Broder, etc. But maybe we just don’t know them yet?
Burton Richter:
Background: Oh he just won a little thing called the NOBEL PRIZE IN PHYSICS once, like Barack Obama. Teaches at Stanford; advocates for gay things like energy and environmental reform. Enjoys being white and old.
Column: It’s a great column, so why didn’t the Post just straight-up run it on the op-ed page immediately after receiving it? It’s about how Congress should restore a non-partisan office to assess technology and science, so all this information doesn’t come from third parties trying to push their agendas on legislators. Obviously Congress will never do this, and Burton Richter is a communist, but a good single column to be sure! Does Burton Richter have anything else to write, though, or was this one issue just his “thing”?
Courtney Martin
Background: A writer and teacher in Brooklyn! She will be the “starvation” columnist. Oh nevermind, she has a book deal, about how people who are young act differently than people who are old.
Column: People who are young act differently than people who are old! It’s a decent column about how men used to just work and women used to work while taking care of their families, and now everyone wants to work while everyone is taking care of their families. Her dad is so depressed you guys! “That’s good news for everybody, even my dear old dad who has at least a decade or two left to figure out who, not what, he wants to be when he grows up.” WE LOVE YOU, COURTNEY MARTIN’S DAD. Courtney Martin could get really annoying, however, if she keeps writing about her “guy friends.”
Darryl Jackson
Background: Former WR for Seattle Seahawks. Former Bush administration lawyer.
Column: Stop blaming the Seattle Seahawks. Stop blaming the Bush administration. Fuck Darryl Jackson.
Jeremy Haber
Background: Masshole Alert! “I’m a JD/MBA student at Harvard and former researcher at the Kennedy School of Government. From coaching little league to working in Rwanda, I have engaged in service-oriented activities for nearly a decade.” Now I plan to sell out.
Column: Contrarianism! Census redistricting will RUIN DEMOCRATS FOREVER, when… liberals from the Northeast move to McCain-won conservative states like Florida and Nevada? Also, Mexicans are helping the GOP win. This wasn’t a Slate pundit contest, silly Jeremy Haber.
Kevin Huffman
Background: Teach for America executive who — in the reverse of every other TFA employee — chose to go to law school for a few years and then join TFA.
Column: Ha ha we love this dude. He’s funny and doesn’t take himself too seriously and most importantly of all, makes fun of David Broder within his column! “‘The Dean’ — what’s cooler than that?” he writes, knowing that David Broder would take him seriously without realizing he was being put in the same class as Scooter Libby.
Lydia Khalil
Background: She is the President of the Middle East for the Council on Foreign Relations. Impress us, Lydia!
Column: IRONICAL: Some Arab Americans watch Fox News! No statistics, but there is one single anecdote of one Arab American person I know who watches Fox News! Arab Americans love Fox News because Glenn Beck tells them that Barack Obama is obviously the Ayatollah or Saddam Hussein or whatever tyrant they escaped (The American Army?) when they fled to America. So Fox News is an effective propagandist with certain people! Thank you Lydia Khalil.
Maame Gyamfi
Background: An actual person raised in the Washington area! “I have worked as an actress, teacher and lawyer.” She’s also dabbled in ironwork, flying stealth bombers, and running Fortune 500 companies.
Column: “We” watch and gossip about meaningless, fleeting items in the news as a form of escapism! Thank you Maame Gyamfi.
Mara Gay
Background: Young serf at Atlantic Media. Perhaps she is the “real” Andrew Sullivan?
Column: Aww, she paid for a fancy college degree and so did all of her friends and now they are all underemployed during a severe recession/depression. Where is the Obama Change? Is this justice? Went to college and jobs are limited now? AND WHAT ABOUT THE WAR: “In Afghanistan, the vast majority of Americans on the ground are under 30.” Investigate this!
Mark Esper
Background: Mark Esper lives in a secret ancient mountain valley in the middle of bumfuck where only eight humans have ever been and where Pangaean goblins once buried their treasures. It is unclear how he transmitted his words to the outside world.
Column: The last news story we “heard about” in our secret hell was the 1918 Spanish flu, because it killed most of us. Now we are “hearing about” the swine flu, again, because it is starting to kill most of us. Can someone please make this *not* happen? (We love Mark Esper.)
Zeba Khan
Background: “I am a social media consultant for nonprofits.”
Column: Here is some social media advice for nonprofits: put women in charge of social networking grassroots fundraising awareness organizational things. Women saved Tupperware, after all! Women can hold Tupperware parties as an organizational method to support health care reform? Hmm. We think she is one of those people who pretends that Internet social networking strategies matter as much as, say, having lots of money with which to win elections.
***
So, whatever.
America’s Next Great Pundit Contest [WP]
“In Afghanistan, the vast majority of Americans on the ground are under 30.” Investigate this!
Duh. Us olds (30+) have a hard time humping hills (mountains actually) of Afghanistan carrying 80 pounds of equipment, water and ammo. That’s why we olds got you inexperienced kids to do it for us.
As for Darry… it seems he doesn’t write well when he’s separate from his brother Darryl and Larry. Nice try asswipe.
Cheese, Jim, you come in on the weekend just to sound all languid and bored?
WHAT soft, cherubic creatures
These future pundits are!
One would as soon assault a plush
Or violate a star.
Such dimity convictions,
A horror so refined
Of freckled human nature,
Of Deity ashamed,—
It’s such a common glory,
A fisherman’s degree!
Redemption, brittle lady,
Be so, ashamed of thee.
Does this mean that Dickhead Cohen’s “retirement” is imminent? That would be two snaps and a circle, definitely.
I glanced at the drivel that is those 10 Cohenesque droppings this morning.
Overall impression: Can you write better than a 5th grader?
Thank you Jim, for the clear-cut answer.
!!All Hail the New Pundits!!
ManchuCandidate: Probably a lot of them are under 20.
Jim, you didn’t waste your Saturday reading the essays yourself? That is what interns are for. Well, really, everything on the Post’s editorial page, really.
First impressions based upon this review:
1) I didn’t know that Brooklyn is a suburb of D.C.?
2) Democrats blamed Hoover for everything for over 50 years. And he was highly educated and at least tried to do something to stop the Great Depression. Why are all the Bushites such whiners? I thought it took tougher men than this to torture and commit war crimes.
3)Slate has pundits? I thought they just randomly printed comments their web site got.
4)Maame Gyamfi? Sounds like you found your next Wonkette intern. Bit can we get a name change to Gaymif?
5)The real Andrew Sullivan goes by the name Ima Gay.
6)When Obama really kicks in Socialism, anyone that calls him- or herself as a “social media consultant” will be sent to work in the salt mines.
There’s no way these guys fit in at WaPo. I have yet to see one of them espouse such totally harmonious ideas as doing away with blue jeans and legalizing pot.
Send more old people to Afghanistan. The kind of energy they showed at town hall meetings this summer couldn’t hurt.
Delicious new snark fodder. Nom!
It’s not like being better than Roger Cohen is hard. Probably RC is really a computer program, rearranging cliche’s. Come up with a better program, a larger, more up-to-date, set of cliche’s and you’re in.
Zhu Bajie
To express how I feel about this contest, I have written a small work of theater;
me: If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention!!!
Average American: I’m not outraged. What?
me: WHAT?!! Are you insane? Have you seen what Glen Greenwald wrote about habeas corpus under the Obama administration? Have you read this Amnesty International study, and where America falls in it? Transcripts of interviews with military intelligence eavesdropping on phone calls of American citizens? Ack!! Have you seen these AIG executive compensation packages from after the taxpayers dug them out? Do you know anything about the state of DC public schools? That Baltimore is basically selling Carnegie libraries at a loss, because it can’t support them (Baltimore: the city that reads.) Can we talk for a minute about tasers?
Average American: Hey, I’m sorry, Vampire Diaries is on. Could we talk about this later?
72% of Americans get their news by drawing conclusions from the dialogue on Gossip Girl and Vampire Diaries.
NYNYNY: Ummm. You said Gossip Girl. Ummm. Taylor Momsen.
NYNYNY: There is another way?
shadowMark: win
Today we are all Mark Esper. But howabout on Monday?
People from countries that stone gays, chop hands off for stealing, dont let women drive like fox news. Who would of thunk it. Plus they can audition to be terrorist #5 in the next episode of 24.
EdFlinstone: From a country that just occasionally shivs gays, locks up people for stealing 20 bucks for 20 years while allowing financial “gurus” to skate with millions, it’s kind of a sign of progress, no?
I don’t get this contest thing. The Washington Post is now pretending that being a columnist, a position that they hand out like cheap candy to another barely literate right winger every week or so, is now worth something?
According to the OED Update, the phrase “Massively Better Than Richard Cohen” will now replace “Damn’d by Faint Praise” in standard English use.
I’ve never known any American who was called “Jeremy” who wasn’t an asshole — and not in a nice way. I got momentarily excited when I saw that Courtney Martin’s sexy how-to book was “Do It Any Way” then realized it was probably more like a naggy mom “Do It Anyway.”
Sauerkrauthammer? Stick him back in his vinegary brine.
I’m voting for the first one who constructs a sentence using vagina a verb
Re: Burton Richter. Doesn’t a Nobel Prize automatically qualify a person for space on WaPo’s editorial page without also winning a stupid contest? For God’s sake, I’VE been on the WaPo editorial page and I’m far, far away from Laureate status. Who’s running WaPo these day, goddamn POETRY publishers?
shadowMark: shadowMark said “plush”! Politicos in Pennsylvania are getting scritchy.
Re: Jeremy Haber. Ha ha. Jim said Masshole.
Lionel Hutz Esq.: “4)Maame Gyamfi? Sounds like you found your next Wonkette intern. Bit can we get a name change to Gaymif?” And how about adding a “d” after the first “a” in Maame? Then she could be a real elitist, doubling her employment qualifications for Wonkette.
Re: Mark Esper. He will win; it’s obvious the award will be posthumous and the Post won’t have to run any of his future columns. More room for Cohen!
“The average American newspaper, especially the
so-called better sort, has the intelligence of a Baptist evangelist, the courage of a rat, the fairness of a prohibitionist boob-bumper, the information of a high-school janitor, the
taste of a designer of celluloid valentines, and the honor of a police-station lawyer” H L Mencken
Neilist: Or ‘praised by faint damns’, anyway.
I vote for the Gates of Kong dude (Esper). Koooooooong!
There is no such thing as a “Real” Andrew Sullivan. He is the embodied personification of the worst fears of the gay Bear Subculture, and as such has no objective reality to speak of outside of bad Chili recipes and twink porn . I’m surprised nobody told you yet.
whatever, my column was better. fuck you wapo!!