What Do You Get Your Mommyblog For Your Tenth Anniversary? A Brief History Of The Last Year And Change At Your Wonkette

Hello bitchez! Do you know what today is? It is the tenth anniversary of your Wonkette. (Actually, tomorrow is the tenth anniversary of your Wonkette, but tomorrow is Saturday and you will be drunk.) We know this because we tweeted at Ana Marie Cox and asked her "oh hey, do you happen to know when the tenth anniversary of Wonkette is?" and she told us. And you say we're not real journalists.

What were you doing 10 years ago? We were working at some fucking "newspaper" and being full of Sad that nobody had asked us to be the founding editor of Gawker's awesome new "politics" blog, "Wonkette," which is not even a word. We had a political "blog"! (It was just on paper.) We made dick jokes in it! And here was this lady, Ana Marie Cox, doing what should have been our job and becoming Amerikkka's No. One Favorite Forever Crass Broad, and all we could do was sit at our cube, looking through our magic picture box at somebody three thousand miles away typing dick jokes on the Internet, and a dozen or more times a day hit "refresh."

Today we will bring you many Reminisces from Wonkettes and Wonkers past and present. Which ones? Definitely Sara Benincasa and Ken Layne, because they wrote theirs already. Maybe some others! We do not know! A whole bunch of people said "oh yeah sure I will write you a thing," but we do not know how "reliable" they are. Probably not reliable at all! Ana Marie Cox will not be writing us anything, because she is writing about what it was like to found yr Wonket over at The Guardian? o_O No no, Ana Marie, it's cool. We're not gonna #WAR you. OR ARE WE??? (Yes, of course we are.)

We will start, though, with us, because we are the publisher and owner and editrix of this here mommyblog and recipe hub and #WARblog, and therefore the most important of everyone.

Here is just your typical story of how we came to publish and own and editrix your Wonket:

Awesome woman who is great at her job being editor-in-chief of an LA alt-weekly (yes we were, shut up bitchy LA journalist bitches) quits her job in a fit of Standing Up for Editorial Autonomy in November 2008, which will never be a problem because of how everyone will want to hire her because of how she's kind of the greatest. Three years and change later, she is still unemployed, and also is dying of the worst kind of deadly breast cancer, except she does not actually have breast cancer at all psych! In the middle of her 39th birthday party, which people flew in for because of how she is (not) dying of deadly breast cancer, she gets to tell them oh whoops I am not dying of breast cancer but it is not like they get to be mad about it ha ha and then Ken Layne, who bought this #WARblog from Gawker when Gawker decided to divest itself of this "politicks" nonsense and with whom she had one single, disastrous date 14 years earlier, emails her in the middle of her party, where she is not dying, and is like 'what up do you want to buy Wonket' and she says 'hmmmmm I do not have any money because of how I am so very unemployed' and Layne is all like 'oh well, you are probably good for it.'

The end.

Man, the more we tell that story the more it really loses its oomph.

But what happened next? Readers, it is a Dickensian Tale of Horror and Sadness!

First, we were greeted with rose petals, as liberators. Wait, no, that was Iraq. We were greeted with the Great Commenter Riot of 2012. The Wonkers, they were so mad! They were all like, "we are Phil Robertson and you are oppressing us FRIST AMENDMUNT!!1!" or something like that, who can even remember the Idiot Nonsense they came up with, and of which we quickly disabused them, we can't, that is who can't.

Wonkette commenters are fucking monsters .

What was it like taking over Your Wonket? Well, it was exhilarating. Like we said before, it had literally (the literal kind of literally, not the Joe Biden kind of literally) been our dream job for eight fucking years. Would we be funny enough to write for the world's premier political dick joke weblog? Would we break it? Would all the good writers leave? (Yes.) Would all the commenters leave? (Some of them!) Would everybody be all like "RIP Wonkette, Rebecca Schoenkopf broke you because Rebecca Schoenkopf is a LIFE RUINER" before we'd even written a single thing?  (Sure why not.) So that was some pressure.

But we were good with pressure. We hardly even cried every day at all! We had gone back to grad school as an old woman (specialized journalism of urban policy, suckers, because "smart thing") so we knew how to do ALLLLL THE WORK IN THE WORLD and wake up at the crack of ass and work some more. (If you ever want an earful about Youth Today, talk to a "returning student" about the work habits and paper-turning-in practices of her young grad school fellows.) This came in handy, because you people don't really love it if we aren't cramming hot garbage into your gullets by no later than 11 a.m., and we are on the wrong coast for that. If we threw in enough garbled tween talk and cusses and saying the opposite of the things we meant, "funny" would happen automagically. The trick was to WORK. Like Boxer at the glue factory, We Would Work Harder.

We worked 12 hours a day (minimum), six and a half days a week. We cried a lot. We drank a smidge. We didn't make any money at all. Like for real almost zero money. We are not even kidding about how none money there was. We cried some more. We cried ALL THE TIME. On Election Night, we punched our (grown) son in the head, when his only crime was to be slouched insouciantly next to a pile of dog shit as big as whatever cat was surely missing from the neighborhood while telling us "oh, I was just resting, I was about to clean that up." He offered to call the police for us. We offered to let him learn firsthand just what the police would think of a grown man sitting on his sainted, slaving-away-for-him single mother's couch NOT CLEANING UP THE DOG SHIT. (Also, we may have fought a waitress, by which we mean we did fight a waitress. She was a BAD WAITRESS who SHOULD NOT BE A WAITRESS. Seriously that waitress was Teh Worst. )

Our mom said we were "stressed" and that was why we were drinking so much, because we had too much Adult and needed more Child. She thought it might help if we made out with more people. We cried and cried. We cried like Darrell Issa not getting to be governor of California. We made out with some people. Betsy Rothstein was a cunt about it.

Then A Thing happened, and that thing was us throwing away what was left of our dignity (dignity is overrated) and asking you for money. You sent us so much, we were able to hire Doktor Zoom at a living wage (for Idaho) plus Obamacare. We stopped crying so much all the time. Zoom took cares off our plate and did the scutwork and sometimes even posted things in the morning when we dawdled in bed till the unforgiveably late hour of 7 a.m. like we were Elizabeth Taylor, the Queen of France. He made our life better. Then more money came in, and we felt guilty getting rich off you guys so we hired Snipy too. (We are kind of bad at Capitalism.) She made HappyNiceTimePeople.com for us, so we could expand our Media Empire, and wrote like a bandit. Also, whenever people offered to sue us, she looked at their letters and told us whether or not to be scared. Pretty helpful having a lawyer on staff when you are Yr Wonkette!

Then it turned out we were a little bit awesome at business, and we started making lots of money. That is why you get like three posts out of us now (on a good day) instead of the 10 we were pounding out when we first bought this bitch. We are busy doing emails and ad tags and fixing the ad tags we fucked up and emailing people to ask why the ad tags we fixed are still fucked up and then fixing them again, but they are still fucked up?, and also tricking people into paying us ridiculous CPMs (industry term) and coming up with "ideas" like "oh we will make cups!"

Anyway, like we said, we started making quite a bit of money. Like, we would just flat out how tell you how much, but then Ken Layne would feel bad about how much more better at businesslady entrepreneurin' we are than he was when he ran the joint, and also, he would want a cut. And that is why your Wonket gives you a seizure every time you look at it, with the ads -- hey! did you know you are this blog's ONE HUNDRED THOUSANDTH VISITOR???!!!! -- and the terribleness and the flashing and the crazy, all crammed one on top of the other like a game of Naked Advertisement Twister. (Sorry not sorry.) Does that mean you get to stop sending us money? DON'T BE RIDICULOSE! Of course it doesn't! Because we took that "money" and "invested it" back into the business like business owners are always claiming they do! (Invested it back into the business = hired Dok and Snipy so we wouldn't die.) Also, we hate crying.

So. We think that's it?

• Bragging about awesome businesslady entrepreneuring, check.

• Props to Dok and Snipy, got it. Left out the other bloggers but we're sure they know we love them, usually.

• Subtle money-begging, yep.

• Crying, oh yeah. So much crying. 

Just kidding, we did not forget you, Terrible Ones. We know we said this last week. But it is not just because you send us money that we love you. (Considering there are about half a million of you who come through every month -- YES BETSY ROTHSTEIN, SOMETIMES MORE AND SOMETIMES LESS -- most of you DO NOT in fact send us money! And that's okay! You might not think it is okay because of how we are always dunning you, but that's almost just a reflex by now. Only send us money if you are rich, or at least have a job. We are not Pat Robertson up in here!) It is because you are the funniest, smartest, best educated, worst and most depraved commenters in the known universe, and you make us horribly, sickeningly proud. Do you think Arianna Huffington loves her commenters? Well, maybe she does, that lady's got issues. But she shouldn't. Those people are cretins! Do you think Politico loves its commenters, or Mediaite? God, I should hope not. But you we love. And we thank you for reading. And here's to 10 more years, and then 10 after that, and then we shall be 60 and it will be time to die.