Oh yeah that’s right

Roy Edroso’s Village Voice year-end review, The Top 10 Rightblogger Stories of 2008, really jogs the memory. In my case, it’s the memory of a person with spotty short-term memory loss. (Gosh, I already completely forgot about Ashley Todd.) After reading about the outstanding (if by outstanding one means delusional) wingnut stories of the year, you realize that wingnuts have all the fun (if by fun one means paranoia, cognitive dissonance, strong Aspergerian tendencies, histrionic personalities, sexual anhedonia, crappy writing styles, and faith-based beliefs in non-sequiturs).

Speaking of which, Jack Cashill takes one more
whack at it before the year ends.

There is no science to validate the thesis that follows, no academy to adjudicate it, and little hope of convincing the Obama faithful even to consider it, let alone concede its validity. That much said, the evidence is self-evident, accessible to all, and overwhelming.

Funny, just eliminate the stuff about the Obama faithful and conceding validity and this is pretty much how I began my doctoral defense of “Why I Self-Evidently Deserve a PhD in the Area of Expertise of My Choice.”*

Just what is so unassailably self-evident that its being self-evident is itself evidence enough? Oh, you know, that Bill Ayers either wrote, co-wrote, or “breathed creative life into” -- depending upon the Cashill column at hand -- Obama’s memoir, Dreams From My Father.

See what I mean? Wingnut writers have it easy peasy because wingnut readers devour crap like that. Need proof? How about the extremely self-evident Jonah Goldberg, one of the sloppiest thinkers and messiest writers on the planet and yet he makes an obscenely good living at it. You know life is (self-evidently) unfair when a man so intellectually impaired he could never hold a job at a recycling sorting facility is rewarded with precious editorial page space in major newspapers and semi-major magazines.

And if George W. Bush won’t say it, then, by God, Victor Davis Hanson, swearing on his desktop bust of Pericles, will: The media won’t have Dubya to kick around anymore. Sure, right, okay. Except for the fact that Bush, like Nixon, is forever. Someday our kids or grandkids will be watching Burgundy/Bush the way we’re watching Frost/Nixon, no doubt wondering as we do, What the hell?
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*Not to be confused with my senior thesis, The Lucy-Ethel Paradigm: Depictions of Female Friendship in Post-World War II America, which, had I ever gotten around to actually writing it, would have been a fun read.