(Note to literalists: the Watched column presently contains only a smattering of 'warblogs' because the facilitator of the template-change--Dr. Menlo--is not very familiar with them, and will be adding more as they are sent to him. Also, this blog may contain areas of allusion, satire, subtext, context and possibly even a dash of the surreal: wannabe lit-crits beware.)
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[Watch this space for: Pentagon and Petroleum, The Media is only as Liberal as the Corporations Who Own Them, Wash Down With, and Recalcify]
WARBLOGGER WATCH
Wednesday, June 05, 2002
Quite often, after having beset upon a hapless warblogger with what seems to them fury disproportionate to their journalistic crimes, my mailbox fills with denunciations, calls for apology, and demands to know exactly why I was so damn mean. It amazes me as a delete their messages en masse that never have they realized that their graceless bangings away offend Enlightened folk endlessly. One appearance in blackface was enough for the remarkably boorish Ted Danson. The warbloggers, however, don't seem to get it. They continue to show up, Beta Theta Pi membership cards in hand and stage makeup on face, to wonder why polite society shuns them.
On balance we here at warblogger watch are neither overly excitable nor quicker than most to indignation. Why Roy Edroso has been giggling over James Lileks's idiocy for what seem to be years, and I myself continued to read The New Republic long after gold-digger Marty Peretz spent his wife's money to convert it into an anti-Arab brickbat. Brad Olson helped someone in George Wallace's motorcade change a flat tire circa 1968. But what we cannot abide are uninformed idiots setting up shop as "pundits" and discharging the most obnoxious opinions imaginable. And with the belief that they deserve an audience.
When you take on one, whether over the demonstrable dissimilarity of their preferred version of events to authentic history or over the poverty of their "thought," you end up taking on the whole lot. They may be different individuals working independently of one another but we see no reason to believe this is so. Why, give them a nominal democracy under which to operate, some of the most generous lending libraries anywhere, and uncensored access to the Internet, and the best they can do is the homogenous and fetid baygall we have before us. The idiots are only able to differentiate themselves from the mass by venturing increasingly idiotic statements, a trend that if not stanched will certainly carry Rich Lowry to the White House or Reichschancellery by decade's end.
Today one of the more asinine warbloggers, Stephen Green, links to Laurence Simon, possibly the only man rivaling him in the stupidity stakes. Simon had rejoiced after reading this BBC story on a failed Syrian dam. I reproduce his glee-finding below:
I don't know what Yahweh has in the back of his vicious mind for you scumbags, but I'm sure that the last one'll be a bitch. You can count on it. With all new Modern Plagues of Jehovah, folks, people will be asking "Syria? What's a Syria? Is that some sort of new breakfast food or something? Wasn't that a boy-band in 2010?"
Now quit fucking with Israel through the Hizbollah in Lebanon. God can see through your middlemen as easily as he can see through the hair in your noses. Go back to killing your own resident minorities and you might just earn a lukewarm pit in Hell instead of an endless field of rotating spits. Sure, you earn 72 virgins in the afterlife when you martyr yourselves in attacks on the Tribe... they rotate on flaming spits and sear for all time as well!
Think about that seriously as you paddle around your pathetic pool of tears.
Man, is that ever rich! Green calls Simon's site funny and characterizes the above as "righteous rage." How delight at the imperiling of a civilian population is at all righteous Green does not say. He seems to be doing nothing so much as claiming the role of Andrew "Dice" Clay for himself. Absent talent, wit, significant neural horsepower, self-confidence, and simple decency, the only way he can attract page views is by turning up the ill-bred amperage. Could he have picked a more shopworn formula? Isn't this what you're doing?