Wingnut with Moonbat Tendencies: The Political Blogger's Bait-and-Switch

Apparently, Darwin is not done with me. Bloggers that once prompted me to yank out strands of my strangely thinning hair are now making me guffaw aloud.

nota bene: My most egregious guffaws pale in comparison to the grunting and screeching of the women racket-euses currently breaking the sound barrier over at Wimbledon, or, as the locals call it: Wimpleton. Michelle Larcher de Brito is the current bad girl in the groaning arenas of the staid grass courts. She is sixteen years old and while cast as a future vedette, she is also being booed -- not the foundation for fond memories, for the tennis crowds or for the budding star. As usual, the world of tennis jurisprudence is laughable. TimesOnLine notes that: "Tennis officials are now calling foul on grunting. The problem they face is determining whether a noisy exhalation of air is natural or done on purpose to put off an opponent."

Wow, gosh, golly-gee, I hope they can dig their way out of that conundrum.

Back to the train of my thought.
Choo-choo-choo.

Oh, hell. I am not a preeminent blogger (O, get up off the floor and be quiet); This thing must be written in ways that make me laugh, in ways that answer my needs. Communication ought to be my goal, but really? I blog to feel better.

So screw the ready apologies, and enjoy a Thurber moment, from his essay University Days... which opens with Thurber's own trouble with the microscope in his Ohio State botany class and ends with Bolenciecwcz, a university football star, fumbling his way through Economics 101.

I need to do Thurber at least once a year, more often when my years resemble this year. Better to shut The-I-Me-Me-My down, better to be doubled-over from a severe case of Hoots -- than not.

I remember being forced to listen to Thurber being disparaged in a most unsavory and recherché comparison with Don DeLillo's End Zone. Can you believe that? DeLillo's End Zone versus Thurber's short piece University Days?

I'm just sayin'.

Somebody Somewhere Needed Tenure -- in a bad-bad way, way -- Way-y-y-y Down, Down, Down in Gothic Wonder-wonder Land!

ABD, the blessing in disguise.

Choo-choo-choo:

Another course that I didn’t like, but somehow managed to pass, was economics. I went to that class straight from the botany class, which didn’t help me any in understanding either subject. I used to get them mixed up. But not as mixed up as another student in my economics class who came there directly from a physics laboratory.
He was a tackle on the football team, named Bolenciewcz. At that time Ohio State University had one of the best football teams in the country, and Bolenciecwcz was one of its outstanding stars. In order to be eligible to play it was necessary for him to keep up in his studies, a very difficult matter, for while he was not dumber than an ox he was not any smarter. Most of his professors were lenient and helped him along. None gave him more hints in answering questions or asked him simpler ones than the economics professor, a thin, timid man named Bassum. One day when we were on the subject of transportation and distribution, it came to Bolenciecwcz’s turn to answer a question.
“Name one means of transportation,” the professor said to him.
No light came into the big tackle’s eyes.
“Just any means of transportation,” said the professor.
Bolenciecwcz sat staring at him.
“That is,” pursued the professor, “any medium, agency, or method of going from one place to another.”
Bolenciecwcz had the look of a man who was being led into a trap.
“You may choose among steam, horsedrawn, or electrically propelled vehicles,” said the instructor. “I might suggest the one which we commonly take in making long journeys across land.”
There was a profound silence in which everybody stirred uneasily, including Bolenciecwcz and Mr. Bassum.
Mr. Bassum abruptly broke this silence in an amazing manner. “Choo-choo-choo,” he said, in a low voice, and turned instantly scarlet. He glanced appealingly around the room.
All of us, of course, shared Mr. Bassum’s desire that Bolenciecwcz should stay abreast of the class in economics, for the Illinois game, one of the hardest and most important of the season, was only a week off. “Toot, toot, too-tooooooot!” some student with a deep voice moaned, and we all looked encouragingly at Bolenciecwcz. Somebody else gave a fine imitation of a locomotive letting off steam. Mr. Bassum himself rounded off the little show. “Ding, dong, ding, dong,” he said, hopefully.
Bolenciecwcz was staring at the floor now, trying to think, his great brow furrowed, his huge hands rubbing together, his face red.
“How did you come to college this year, Mr. Bolenciecwcz?” asked the professor. “Chuffa chuffa, chuffa chuffa.”
“M’father sent me,” said the football player.
“What on?” asked Bassum.
“I git an 'lowance,” said the tackle, in a low, husky voice, obviously embarrassed.
“No, no,” said Bassum. “Name a means of transportation. What did you ride here on?”
“Train,” said Bolenciecwcz.

Anyway! Now that I am rejuvenated, I must go back to my beginning -- you recall that, yes? My observation that I remain in the evolutionary stream? "Darwin ain't done with me yet"?

All because über-ultra-conservative wingnuts (I prefer the unadulterated wingnut to the hyphenated form. O, get up off the floor and be quiet) -- all because they have me stuttering when I write, laughing when I read.

They do things like write a fairly cogent post about, say, Sonia Sotomayor -- in the guise of -- oh, I don't know -- a post about Obama's inability to speak without use of the teleprompter. Follow along now, it makes perverted sense! Then The Dickwad -- oops, I mean The Wingnut -- directs traffic in the comment section, where perversion goes to be brought to fruition. Now... my example is of a Two-Stepper but to really make nice with The Evolutionary Bilge, you should go in search of a nicely done Three(or Four)-Stepper, usually constructed with an intermediary entry that serves to narrow the topic focus. In this instance, I could see a post about The Supreme Court reversing one of Sotomayor's rulings... and wouldn't it be absolutely Faustian were that to turn out to be something about discrimination "against whites"? Mwa-ha-ha!

Ah, but what actually happened in this particular real blog is... well, more boring. But very, very effective as wingnutting goes.

She advertised an upcoming post with the following headline: SOTOMAYOR GAY? WHO CARES?

It's freaking brilliant. You'd think she might even have schooled Limbaugh, given her facility with The Introduce-{Smile Benignly}-Then-Duck-and-Weave Maneuver. I used to give the standard warning -- don't do this maneuver at home -- but I must confess that, liberal though I may be, I believe that HOME is the ONLY appropriate place for such tactics!

Read, and learn:
"Okay, now the speculation about Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor is getting stupid. Whether she’s the sharpest knife in the drawer, or a bitchy bully, or a reverse racist seems mild in comparison to the current 'is she a Lesbian?' nonsense. So what? Even if she is, what the hell difference does it make?"

WAIT FOR IT WAIT FOR IT WAIT FOR IT. Short pause, then:
"Don’t get me wrong, some things I don’t know about her do worry me. Mainly because Barack Obama chose her, and I don’t trust him as far as I can throw the Empire State Building. I worry that she might not be supportive of abortion rights, or gay marriage. But, that’s because I worry that the Pretendident’s lip service to those issues hides a contrary agenda. The fact that he won’t actually take a stand and actually do something to protect women and gays not only worries me, it pisses me off. And, because I don’t trust him, I wouldn’t put it past him to try to put a stealth candidate on the Court. Sotomayor’s reticence on those issues is not exactly confidence building, ya know?"

And you, the reader, have left behind that titillating gasbag morcel of Homosexuality Crumbs (on sale at the Vermont Country Store, 4 oz/$12.99) for more Baseless Bashing That Is Really Incredibly Open Progressiveness.

Oh, what the hell. A bit more won't kill you. I think. The edges and ends become less round; The subtlety, what there was of it, is gone; The trustworthiness of the author? Well, Death of the Reader comes to mind as a suitable corollary for all those gasping, agonal promises about the Death of the Author.

"Some might posit that a closeted Lesbian is likely to take a harsh stand on gay rights issues in order to avoid being outed, while others would suggest that closeted or not, a gay person is more likely to have empathy for plaintiffs they can relate to identity-wise. Pure unadulterated happy crappy hogwash, if you ask me. Gay people are no more likely to behave monolithically than black people. Okay, bad example. But, I’m black, and knowing that doesn’t mean squat when it comes to my lack of support for the most Historically Historic Conveniently Black Candidate of Color Ev-ah being elected President of the United States of AmeriKKKa. Or, however the ya-gotta-vote-for-the-brother, Sistah, folks put it.

Like Sotomayor’s sexual orientation, Barack Obama’s skin color means nothing to me..."

Oh, I am blessed with an abundance of Hoots today.

Just to show you what a fan-freaking-tastic student of rhetoric -- be it wingnut or moonbat -- I am, here is a tantalizing hint about an upcoming elle est belle la seine la seine elle est belle editorial effort:

Is anyone else scared (and I mean really heebie-jeebie scared) by the Burger King King?

Yeah, girder your loins, get snacks.
Choo-choo-choo!