Wonkette

On this day 231 years ago, Philadelphia blogger Thomas Paine released version 1.0 of his popular political pamphlet, “Common Sense.” The booklet sold some 500,000 copies at a time when there were only about 5 million colonists (along with 700,000 African slaves and whatever Native Americans hadn’t been killed or run off to French territory at that point).

Read all about the first American bestseller, after the jump.

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wonkette: i’m sorry, but indulge me.
wonkette: WHAT THE HELL IS MICHAEL KINSLEY TALKING ABOUT?
operative: i think you need some wacky theme music to kick in when you ask that
operative: benny hill, or something
wonkette: HE FORGOT TO GET TO THE OPINION PART OF THE OPINION PAGE
wonkette: it’s like you keep reading it, figuring he’ll get to some sort of point, and then…
operative: is he hopping mad? or he’s the happy one?
operative: perhaps some editor cut out the graf before the last line that explained everything
operative: because if it made sense, then it wouldn’t be a Kinsley column, would it?
wonkette: next week he will write an op-ed on Kim Jong-il that sums up the history of the Korean war, and then says “shit, figurin’ out stuff is hard!”
operative: if only he had been alive 220 years ago, the Federalist papers would have kicked ass!
wonkette: if he’d been alive 220 years ago, the federalist papers would’ve been a sarcastic summary of the magna carta
operative: I think that was Tom Paine’s bit at the Continental Congress Talent Show
wonkette: all i know is “speaking of crazy talk” is just about the most appropriate way possible for kinsley to start a paragraph MORE »