Now that the Miami Herald requires registration in order to read certain content, I’ll just go ahead and paste an entire Carl Hiaasen column in which he rips apart Levi Johnson and, by association, Sarah Palin. Here’s the link.

Times are hard, but the pathway to fame in America has never been easier.

No talent is required — you can go on a shooting spree, give birth to octuplets or launch a homemade balloon from your backyard and tell the cops that your little boy is trapped inside.

Gripped by a stubborn recession and war anxiety, Americans remain the world’s most ravenous consumers of a celebrity journalism that features nitwits and naifs over Nobel laureates.

Exhibit A is a person named Levi Johnston, who ascended to junior stardom by knocking up Sarah Palin’s oldest daughter. He’s not the first teenager who forgot to use a condom, but few others have milked their dumb mistake with such gusto.

There’s Levi on CBS’s The Early Show, ominously suggesting he knows dark secrets about Palin.

There he is being interviewed in Vanity Fair as if he were a matinee idol, and there he is again in the pages of GQ, diapering the new baby.

There he is on Tyra and the Larry King show. And there he is at the Teen Choice Awards, a hope-affirming presence for all young unwed fathers.

There he is again in a national TV commercial, breaking pistachio nuts while the announcer wryly says, “Now Levi Johnston does it with protection.”

And, finally, there he is in Playgirl magazine, displaying every part of his anatomy except the one that propelled him into the headlines.

The spectacle isn’t entirely Levi’s fault. He didn’t set out to be famous, but last fall he suddenly found himself in the spotlight — presented to the world as the future son-in-law of the future vice president of the United States.

He was a popular kid, but he quit high school and had family problems, including a mother battling a drug habit. The McCain-Palin campaign dressed him up and gave him a prominent place next to pregnant Bristol at the Republican National Convention.

The couple would soon be married, Palin announced brightly, although Levi’s facial expression didn’t exactly radiate serenity.

He and Palin’s daughter both deserve some sympathy. The out-of-wedlock pregnancy was a potential embarrassment to the campaign, which had been working to portray Palin as a conservative Christian crusading for traditional family values.

Levi and Bristol were given upright roles to play, and they hung in there until election day. Afterwards, the wedding plans were scuttled, baby Tripp was born and Levi says the Palins began to treat him coldly.

Instead of going back to Alaska and politely fading away, he hired a manager-slash-bodyguard. This, of course, is the American way. Nobody settles for just 15 minutes of fame.

Obviously it was explained to Levi that his marketability would be enhanced — and fame prolonged — if he could dish some dirt about Palin. It was a brand new role, but he warmed to it.

Levi now asserts that Palin isn’t the all-American mom that she makes herself out to be — for example, she doesn’t really cook much at home!

At first she wanted to hide Bristol’s pregnancy, he claims, and adopt the child herself. Worse, he says, she sometimes referred to her own infant with Down’s syndrome as “the retarded baby.”

That Levi was saying such things wasn’t nearly so disturbing as some of the media’s reaction, which was to treat the kid like he was Ben Bernanke expounding on long-term interest rates.

Even if Levi’s stories are true, he isn’t sharing them to save the country from a Palin presidency. He’s hustling, period.

The irony is pungent. He owes his own overnight fame to the overnight fame of the woman he’s bad-mouthing. They are forever joined as family by his fathering of a Palin, and are destined to orbit the tabloid universe in tandem.

Once Palin quit the governorship to give speeches and sell books, she refueled Levi’s dubious celebrity. It’s no accident that his Playgirl photo spread coincided with the rollout of her memoir.

The snippy war of words benefits both of them. She sells more books, he gets more face time on television. What other kid from Wasilla ever heard himself called out on Oprah?

Certainly the media can be blamed for overhyping Levi, but he’d evaporate like a moose burp if the public quit paying attention. We are easily and shamelessly intrigued.

So, for all you Levi Johnston fans, here’s the latest: While hanging out at Hollywood’s trendy Chateau Marmont, he said he might soon be Dancing With the Stars, and he’s also considering — hang on to your hockey sticks — a gig on Survival.

The networks say it’s not true, but who are you going to believe?

A book deal can’t be far off and, after that, maybe a reality show with Octomom and Balloon Boy.

Rock on, Levi. Give the people what they want.

After former NH Republican Party chairman Fergus Cullen, whom I happened to run against in high school and who was later a Central Mass Striders teammate for several years, wrote an editorial deriding GraniteGrok.com in the wake of the Doug Lambert debacle, sole remaining Grokster Skip Murphy came out with guns blazing, or more accurately, popguns popping and squirt-guns dribbling.

This crew has had a hard-on for Fergus for years because he, like everyone not named Attila the Hun, is not nearly conservative enough and also has the temerity to criticize fellow Republicans where appropriate. Fergus’ column redoubled their hatred for him, which is funny because I’m sure he anticipated every last first-waving insult and impotent rebuttal Murphy has produced since the editorial as published. And, of course, it brought out the best of the typical Grok blogger and commenter’s prevarication skills and incompetence in various areas. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m thinking that it’s official. Virginia Foxx, a member of the U.S. House representing North Carolina, is in the uppermost echelon of well-known distaff nutjobs, joining Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Carrie Prejean, and Victoria Jackson. If they were drugs, they’d be Schedule I controlled substances: absolutely no rationale for ever taking these people seriously.

Foxx is claiming that Republicans were the driving force behind the passage of civil-rights bills in the 1960′s and that Democrats were of little help. Her comments: Read the rest of this entry »

This is some great stuff. I don’t know how many people were in on the job or how long it took, but I’m glad some clever editor conceived of the idea.

Sort of. Rabid (maybe even paranoid) anti-gay crusader and war-mongerer Judy Paris is no longer blogging for Granite Grok, but she’s been active in the comments section there lately and has only become more of a spectacle since I last saw any output from her.

I’ve been harassing Skip Murphy, the remaining Granite Grok blogger in the wake of Doug Lambert taking a break (and don’t ask me why the Monitor has found any of this newsworthy), because Skip, if anything, is even less able to string a sentence together or display any sense of awareness about the world than Doug is. If you enjoy Schadenfreude with your Wednesdays, have a look at some of these links: Read the rest of this entry »

This is just too funny. For a couple of years now, I’ve written off and on about the antics of the clowns behind the right-wing blog Granite Grok. Not only are they imperceptive and functionally illiterate, but they also lie. There’s no crime in posting ridiculous opinions on a weblog, however couched (if I couldn’t be a merry asshole myself I wouldn’t even bother with this enterprise). After all, there are those God-fearing souls who find my opinions about religious belief to be just as ridiculous as I find theirs (pretend for a moment that they are not brainwashed) and would call for an end to this blog if they could. But when you spread misinformation either because you’re a liar or because you’re too fucking lazy to do even a superficial amount of research, you deserve to be nailed for it, and refusing to admit error–the chief hallmark of wingnuts everywhere–marks you as not only stupid but weak in every way that counts.

I recently wrote a post that derided Doug Lambert (one of two bloggers at Granite Grok, the other being the equally addled Skip Murphy) for his support for serial harpy and nutcase Michele Bachmann. As you can see, Doug in his one comment had absolutely nothing to say about my examples of Bachmann’s lunacy and incompetence, choosing instead to babble angrily about my supposed efforts to de-convert kids at a Catholic school: Read the rest of this entry »

I really can’t get enough of superfluously bashing the useless Internet presence that less-than-flatteringly labels himself Gribbit, who in his real “life” is a functionally illiterate blowhard who likes spending his monthly SSDI disability check on bashing all things associated with liberalism.

The beetle-browed Gribbit is compelled by his reptilian sub-cerebral core to bash President Obama for the most trivial of “offenses,” and he’s done so now in a post brilliantly titled “Obama Bows To Yet ANOTHER Foreign Monarch” by bitching about the manner in which Obama recently greeted Emperor Akihito of Japan: with a traditional bow. I didn’t realize that Japan was an enemy of the state, but more to the point, I didn’t know that it was critical to avoid performing the symbolic equivalent of a handshake in order to preserve U.S. sovereignty. Read the rest of this entry »

1. Work at a plant where an employee shoots someone.

2. Have a spouse who’s not actually in college, but is thinking about getting an advanced degree in psychology.

This is essentially how Gribbit concludes that he is well-informed when it comes to post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. By the measures he uses, I would now be valuable source of information when it comes to Lyme disease and histiocytic sarcoma in dogs. Also, one of my ex-girlfriends is planning to get a BSN before long, so I guess that means I know how to start an IV. (Actually, come to think of it, I’ve done that, but I never will again and you get the point.)

It cracks me up when people get irked when mass murderers start talking about their PTSD or their shitty childhood or whatever it is they choose to blame for their actions. It’s expected. It virtually always happens in shootings of the Fort Hood variety, at least when the shooter lives. Hasan is a fairly high-ranking officer and is lawyered up; who out there thinks that his legal team wouldn’t be deep into the apologetics game by now?

Wingnuts are always indignant over the possibility of people buying into this sort of likely bullshit, perhaps an unconscious side effect of the fact that the minds of wingnuts are themselves a veritable bullshit-plagued stew of credulity. The fact that Nidal Malik Hasan is apparently attributing his actions to PTSD doesn’t mean that people are rushing to believe or forgive him. From a legal standpoint, it may not matter whether Hasan can indeed establish, in the eyes of the court he will face, that he has post-traumatic stress disorder.

Gribbit seems to think he can magically conjure up Hasan’s entire background and conclude on the basis of what he’s read on the Internet, combined with a few pages from his handy DSM-IV, that Hasan does not qualify. He may well not. But it’s asinine for anyone to pretend that he can divine someone’s psychological profile from afar. Hasan is either fucked up in the head (I suppose it’s reasonable to consider that anyone who shoots 29 people is “fucked up in the head” by definition, but I don’t buy that) or a true terrorist functionary or maybe both, I don’t know. What I do know is that he’s not being given a pass on the basis of his own claims. President Obama is apparently alarmed and indignant when it comes to certain areas over oversight pertaining to Hasan’s involvement with Islamic clerics.

Then again, by that standard, I could be mocked, often, several times a week, for pointing out that Gribbit has said something silly. It’s not like there’s no established pattern here.

I don’t materially disagree with Gribbit here, I just laugh at his standards for having a “working knowledge” of something.