The Blocker Awards: Day Four -- The Mocker Blocker Award

Twitter is city dump -- while you might find gold there, don't plan your retirement.  Its full of lunatics and salesmen, which is why occasionally blocking someone on Twitter has become just a matter of good grooming.  Except when the context of doing so is itself such a delightful window onto the soul of the blocker that it deserves special mention.

And thus the Blocker Awards were born.

Monday we handed out the award for Both Sniderism:  those delicate souls who built careers flogging the Big Lie of Both Sides Do It, blocked me for pointing out pointedly that Both Siderism was bullshit, and who then reversed their position entirely without ever acknowledging that they had ever believed otherwise.

Tuesday we handed out the award in the How Greenwald Was My Valley category: hardy Greenwald myrmidons and fair weather "friends" who flipped out when I started writing about Mr. Greenwald's flaws, lies and hypocrisies.

Wednesday we handed out the award in the Never Trumper Historical Revisionism category:  that band of Conservative entrepreneurs who ruthlessly dismember and misrepresent the past for profit and professional advancement and who cannot abide anyone who shows up to their Lethe Orgy with a buzz-killing sack full of inconvenient history.

And today we hand-recount your ballots -- even from people who went around the block and changed hat just so they could vote twice! -- to determine the winner in the Blocker Award in the Mocker Blockers category.

A Mocker Blocker is someone who mocks people who block others on Twitter as feeble and pusillanimous while at virtually the same time blocking someone (in this case me) on Twitter for making them look stupid.   The Mocker Blocker is such a rare and special creature that only two were nominated this year, and since each case is compelling in its own, shabby way, the judges have ruled it a tie.  So --

Professional Republican poo-flinger Rick Wilson and ... 

Noted Hollywood character actor who is just plain off his fucking wingnut rocker Nick Searcy 

-- come on down and claim your joint Blocker Award!

For story behind each nominee's award-winning performance see "Rick Wilson is a Delicate Little Wisp of a Man" and "Nick and Me".

Of course under the "Two men enter!  One man leaves!" rules of combat under which we now operate, this means that eventually Messrs. Searcy and Wilson will have to enter Wingnut Thunderdome and fight to the death.

Sad!

Tomorrow: The Blocker Award for The Roll of Honor.

Vote Here! (Just kidding.  It's my Tip Jar.)

The Blocker Awards: Day Three -- Never Trumper Historical Revisionism Award

Twitter is sewer -- useful, just don't drink out of it.  And blocking someone on Twitter is such a mundane, garden-weeding affair that it barely merits mentioning.  Except when the context of doing so is itself such a delightful window onto the soul of the blocker that it deserves special mention.

And thus the Blocker Awards were born.

Monday we handed out the award for Both Sniderism:  those delicate souls who built careers flogging the Big Lie of Both Sides Do It, blocked me for pointing out pointedly that Both Siderism was bullshit, and who then reversed their position entirely without ever acknowledging that they had ever believed otherwise.

Tuesday we handed out the award in the How Greenwald Was My Valley category: hardy Greenwald myrmidons and fair weather "friends" who flipped out when I started writing about Mr. Greenwald's crippling lies, flaws and hypocrisies.

And today we hand-count your ballots -- even those from our fighting men and women overseas and those found at the post office under a pile of expired Sears catalogs -- to determine the winner of the Blocker Award in the Never Trumper Historical Revisionism category.  To qualify for this category, nominees must have accomplished the following:

1. Spent their entire adult lives building the GOP monster machine from which Trump was birthed.


2. Spent the last three years pretending that the last 30 years of GOP history never happened. That everything was just fine with their Republican Party right up until Donald Trump descended the Escalator of Doom.


3. Have used various synonyms for magical trickery (hypnotized, mesmerized, bamboozled) or force (hijacked) the explain how Donald Trump won the nomination of their racist shitpile party when literally all Trump did was talk just like the base of their party talks, act just like the base of their party acts, and promised to deliver on the same crazy, racist claptrap they had been teased with on Fox News and Hate Radio for decades.


4. Have gone right on pretending that no one could have foreseen that their Party of Reagan could have come to this.


5. Have gone right on on pretending that we on the Left do not exist and have not been warning of precisely this danger for decades ... while at the same time ripping off the Liberal critique of the Right and profiting materially by filing off the serial number and re-selling it as some kind of brilliant epiphany.


6. Blocked me for pointing this out.

Of course, pretty much every Never Trumper is now making a tidy income running some kind of Historical Revisionist side hustle based on sticking to points 1-5 -- 

-- but these three gentleman have all gone the extra mile by blocked me for making them look stupid on the Twitter, and so our nominees are:

Charlie Sykes
Rick Wilson
Jonah Goldberg 

And the winner is ... Fredrick G. "Rick" Wilson.  Because his timing was so fucking perfect.

Literally moments after Joe Scarborough finally decided to admit on live teevee that "Holy Shit, the Left really was right about the Right all along" -- and then dropped that piping-hot turd into Rick Wilson's lap (thus gutting Mr. Wilson's "I knew nothing!  I saw nothing!" alibi that is the foundation on which he built his book) -- Mr. Wilson took time out of his busy day to block me for pointing out to him, over and over again, that "The Left really was right about the Right all along".

For the sheer nekkidness of his mercenary motives, today we award Fredrick G. "Rick" Wilson the Blocker award for Never Trumper Historical Revisionism.

Tomorrow: The Blocker Award for The Mocker Blockers.

Vote Here! (Just kidding.  It's my Tip Jar.)

The Blocker Awards: Day Two

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 brave all eleven members of the Broward County wingnut mob to count your ballots and determine the winner in the Blocker Award How Greenwald Was My Valley category.

Several years ago -- as Glenn Greenwald was alternating his weekly hot oil massages on MSNBC with screeds about what a dump MSNBC was and how the Obot-stooge media refused to give him a platform to express his opinion -- a non-trivial fraction of Mr. Greenwald's orthodoxy enforcement squad (dubbed by one wag as the Spleenwald Horde) lost their shit when I started pointing out that Glenn Greenwald sometimes flat-out lied, frequently argued in excruciatingly bad faith, bent any tragedy he could lay his hands on to serve his political agenda and routinely went from zero to spittle-flecked ad hominem attack mode in under four seconds.

They also did not like me pointing out that his habit of reacting to any criticism from anyone with full nuclear hysterics was having the effect of taking attention away from (translation: shitting on) whatever actual story he was trying to report.  I was practically ordered to recant my heresies and ignore Mr. Greenwald's hysterics if I wanted to stay on good paper with some in the Liberal High Command.

I have never been to Liberal High Command, nor materially supported by them in any way, nor have I ever been invited to take part in any of their rituals or festivals, so the threat was somewhat barren.

As this was happening, many of my former dear Liberals fair-weather allies either dove for cover and/or blocked me and/or hunkered down in my comment section to tell me what a bad Liberal I was.  At several once-prominent-now-extinct "Obama Is Worse Than Boosh!" Liberal blogs which had never before acknowledged my existence in any way, I was suddenly a poster boy for Jackbooted, Obot Traitors to Greenwald's Glorious Revolution.

It was, taken all in all, hilarious, and provided an ample field of nominees for the How Greenwald Was My Valley category.

But then a funny thing happened.

As the Rise of Donald Trump and Trump/Russia blew all of his Purity bullshit to flinders, Glenn did what Glenn was bound to do all along.  He damn near Thelma and Louised the fancy, quarter-billion-dollar media supercar that Pete Omidyar bought him. 

He crawled right into Putin's snuggle sack.  He started making regular guest appearances on Fox News as Tucker Carlson's wacky "Liberal" sidekick.  All while escalating his endless fusillade of  mad tirades directed at anyone who questioned the inerrancy of his wisdom.

And then he noticed  me tap dancing in my "I Told You So" shoes just long enough to block me.

Then ol' Glenn -- who boldly called people "cowards" for deleting their past Tweets -- deleted 27,000 of his past Tweets lest they ever be used by his drooling, jackbooted critics to point out that driftglass was right about Glenn and his Spleenwald Horde all along.

So today, with all the ballots counted, the winner of the Blocker Award in the How Greenwald Was My Valley category is the man for whom the category was named:  Glenn Greenwald.  Who is shown here telling Democrats that the only honorable way to advance a progressive agenda is to deliberately let Republican Party stab them in the heart, over and over again.

Spoken like a man whose never needs to worry about health care because all of his expenses are being picked up an internet billionaire.

Tomorrow: The Blocker Award for the Never Trump Historical Revisionist Society

Vote Here! (Just kidding.  It's my Tip Jar.)

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...