The Blocker Awards: Day One

(Photo of the late Dan Blocker)

Blocking people on Twitter is usually a trivial thing and often a necessary thing.  I do it all the time -- it almost always involves 10-follower MAGA whatabots (whatabout + bot) (tm) who want to shart Republican talking points at me.  Hardly worth mentioning.

But sometimes the context of the act is itself so hilariously revealing that it deserves special mention.

Hence the Blocker Awards.

Today, we count up your ballots, recount them because we believe that all votes should be counted, factor in the envelopes full of untraceable cash some of you have sent our way, and hand out the Blocker Awards in the Both Sniderist category.

The Both Sniderists category is reserved for influential media personages who built their careers as absolutely relentless peddlers of Both Siderism, who have blocked your humble scrivener for suggesting -- repeatedly -- that Both Siderism was bullshit.  Of the dozens of nominees in this category, the finalists were:

Matthew Dowd
Ron Fournier
Jonathan Capehart

And the Blocker award goes to...  Mr. Matthew Dowd.  

It really had to be Mr. Dowd.

Ron Fournier has more-or-less checked out of the business of lying about politics under the color of journalism, and now writes drivel for his marketing company.  And Jonathan Capehart has only slightly more "influence" in the media than your average Liberal blogger.  On the other hand, as ABC News' chief political analyst, Matthew Dowd can actually affect the scope and trajectory of our public political discourse.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, no one was fatuous, thin-skinned and self-righteous in his Both Siderism than Mattew Dowd.  And no one was more aggressively insulting to anyone who brought receipts to his Beltway's Both Siderist orgy.  And after the election of President Stupid, no one took that wild, careening 180-degree pivot to "OMFG Both Siderism is bullshit!" while at the same time using his position in the media to indignantly insist that he never believed otherwise harder that Matthew Dowd (including deleting inconvenient Tweets to the contrary.)

Plus he went out of his way to personally insult me as a purveyor of fiction and my readers at fools for believing it.

Congratulations, Mr. Dowd, on being the very first recipient of the soon-to-be-prestigious Blocker Award.

Tomorrow:  The How Greenwald Was My Valley Blocker Award.

 Behold a Tip Jar!

And now, a delightful and disturbing story about television and Dan Blocker as told by the late Harlan Ellison from "Revealed At Last! What Killed The Dinosaurs! And You Don't Look So Good Yourself" :

...
I used to know Dan Blocker, who played Hoss Cartwright on Bonanza. He was a wise and kind man, and there are tens of dozens of people I would much rather see dead than Dan. One time, around lunch-break at Paramount, when I was goofing off writing a treatment for a Joe Levine film that never got made, and Dan was resting his ass from some dumb horsey number he'd been reshooting all morning, we sat on the steps of the weathered that probably in no way resembled any saloon that had ever existed in Virginia City, Nevada, and we talked about reality versus fantasy. The reality of getting up at five in the morning to get to the studio in time for makeup call and the reality of how bloody much FICA tax they took out of our paychecks and the reality of one of his kids being down with something or other...and the fantasy of not being Dan Blocker, but of being Hoss Cartwright.

And he told me a scary story. He laughed about it, but it was the laugh of butchers in a slaughterhouse who have to swing the mauls that brain the beeves; who then go home to wash the stink out of their hair from the spattering.

He told me—and he said this happened all the time, not just in isolated cases—that he had been approached by a little old woman during one of his personal appearances at a rodeo, and the woman had said to him, dead seriously, "Now listen to me, Hoss: when you get home tonight, I want you to tell your daddy, Ben, to get rid of that Chinese fella who cooks for you all. What you need is to get yourself a good woman there can cook up some decent food for you and your family."

So Dan said to her, very politely (because he was one of the most courteous people I've ever met),"Excuse me, ma'am, but my name is Dan Blocker. Hoss is just the character I play. When I go home I'll be going to my house in Los Angeles and my wife and children will be waiting."

And she went right on, just a bit affronted because she knew all that, what was the matter with him, did he think she was simple or something, "Yes, I know...but when you go back to the Ponderosa, you just tell your daddy Ben that I said..."

For her, fantasy and reality were one and the same...