Wonkette

“One more hit, baby. Just one more toke on the ole oil pipe. … Give me one more pop from that drill, please, baby. Just one more transfusion of that sweet offshore crude.” PUT THAT AWAY. [New York Times]

On-again, off-again douchebag New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman was pleasantly trenchant in his column on the “gas tax holiday” yesterday, in which he proved in eight or nine different ways why John McCain is a traitor for proposing this. A CNN anchor brought up Friedman’s column with McCain today, and McCain comically called Friedman a gay New York rich liberal pinko elitist. And then he felt bad and said he loves Thomas Friedman. What gives? We’re hearing that his campaign advisers forgot to give him his strawberry cream cheese-coated “Remembrall” this morning. MORE »

Here is New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman getting pied at Brown University by some Communists. It’s tragically comical, watching him slip ‘n’ slide across the stage like some… hmm… let’s think of a good Friedmanian way to say this… slip ‘n’ slide across the stage like a rikshawallah in Bangladesh trying to navigate the cyber-global marketplace while sending “SMS” messages via Blackberry to his half-koala, half-Robocop legal associate in Java (in Outer Space). [YouTube]

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote a decent book many years ago and has since made a living by promoting the Iraq War, going on sabbatical, and coming up with useless concepts like these: “the world is flat,” “a Lexus is like an olive tree, in that both are on my book cover,” and “I used my NYT corporate Amex credit card to buy a trinket from this Pakistani, which I’ll conflate into a hackneyed worldview cliche.” This modern day soothsayer spoke to some kids at Brown University last night about the environment and got pelted with green pies, which is what happens in the Global Marketplace of Ideas. MORE »

“I saw that Onion thing about Rudy running for president of 9/11, too, and once again I have been to China.” [New York Times]

And just like that, TimesSelect is gone. Everyone can read year-old Bob Herbert columns again! For free and everything! We haven’t read a Times op-ed in two years (we did have a TimesSelect subscription, but still, it was kinda annoying). Thankfully the New York Times knows exactly what the nation needs right now, and they’ve given us, on this, the first day of totally free content in so long, the trifecta of terribly annoying and increasingly irrelevant columnists: David “BoBos Drive Like This” Brooks, Maureen “All the Democrats Are Pussies Except Hillary Who is a Dyke” Dowd, and Thomas “My Dr. Phil Mustache Is Here to Reassure You That Losing That Manufacturing Job Was a Good Thing” Friedman. Ye gods put it back behind the paywall, please. Yes, we did read them all. We’ll save you the trouble: MORE »

This week, spies caught The Prime Minister of Mongolia, Senator Jay Rockefeller, Good Charlotte, Bob Saget, Anthony Williams, Thomas Friedman, and Condoleezza Rice bumming around DC like common tourists. Their stories are after the jump.

MORE »

Study this carefully, young journalists, and maybe someday you too can write blowjob profiles of Tom Friedman and then get your book pimped in his NYT column: MORE »

This is a very special party crash, because we actually did crash it: despite being on the panel that selected one of the winners, we weren’t actually on the list for The Week’s annual award dog-and-pony show. It all worked out in the end, of course, as we’re consummate complainers.

The event, held last night at the Four Seasons, honors people whose opinions a group of rich old people can generally agree are pretty good, or at least entertaining. Oh, and a blogger.

We attended, of course, with the lovely Liz Gorman, whose lovely photos are here. Our write-up can be found, as always, after the jump.

The Week Opinion Awards Gallery

MORE »

The tipsters have gotten themselves on the “good” list and uncle Wonk’d has loads of stocking stuffers for an early Christmas. These presents might not be as good as the ones Laura Bush was seen buying, but you get what you pay for. Unwrap a jaywalking John Bolton, an over-caffeinated Katherine Harris, an anatomically correct Anderson Cooper, and an occasionally anonymous Dan Bartlett that comes with elephant sidekick, under the tree.

MORE »

Just as Sept. 12 was the day the White House actually got it together, some of the iconic Sept. 11 moments happened in the days and weeks after the attacks. Here are some memories we refuse to surrender:

* A Nation Challenged That was the first time we laughed after 9/11. A Nation Challenged? Good job maintaining that NYT air of comical pomposity under tremendous pressure!

* Somber Wagnerian dirges on CNN Just to add to the “Empire Strikes Back” vibe, all the cable-news stations switched to this outrageous “Imperial March”-style music, which was a hell of a lot more foreboding than we knew. When you were drunk enough — which was always, remember that? — you could almost see Darth Vader walking out of the Ground Zero smoke.

MORE »

• Ned Lamont is a gnat on a dog’s ass, electronic spying is cat’s meow. [Blackfive]

• Let’s argue about what is the most evil: Evilness, the Soviet Union at the peak of the Cold War, or Nazis. [TPM Cafe]
• Cheery how-to-fix-Iraq Power Point slide. [Crooked Timber]
• The word “naughty” is never ok. [The Volokh Conspiracy]
• “I think a lot of people put up reviews on Amazon about liberal and conservative books without even reading them. Now, the same thing is happening with milk!” [IMAO]
• Reuters and Lauren Weisberger inspire alternate, better covers for books you read excerpts of in The Atlantic. [HuffPo]

Oy. MORE »