March 11, 2005

The Intellectual Gravitas of Wonkette

THE WOMAN WHO WOULD BE THE BLOGOSPHERE'S ANN COULTER enlightens the audience at the current gas summit about gaining position: "Ana Marie Cox says it's not necessarily about staking out a position but about being shrill. Her case in point: Coulter. If you're tall and blonde and shout, you get attention, she says. You also get attention from sodomy jokes, she adds -- but that's about being clever."
-- BuzzMachine... by Jeff Jarvis

We're not sure what's 'clever' about exposing the adventures of your rectum to the world, but it seems to be working for Ana Marie Cox. She's the current goto favorite of cable news producers when they want to spice up their blogging panel. I'm sure her parents are working hard at changing their name.

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Posted by Vanderleun at March 11, 2005 09:07 AM | TrackBack
Comments

Unless her parents are from the infamous Boomer generation, in which case they would no doubt be patting themselves on the back that their daughter has "made it" in the world.

Posted by: Stephen B. at March 11, 2005 11:36 AM

You neglected to mention what I believe is the money quote:

"AMC says the reason she has a blog is because no one would print her."

Perhaps she could have become the NY Times resident Op-Anal columnist.

Posted by: physics geek at March 11, 2005 12:53 PM

Some time ago, persons with little gift for genuine humor chose to interpret the phenomenon of mannerly people laughing to hide embarrassment at an off-color remark made in public as the gateway to a new, "edgy" level of wit. They adopted indecency as a substitute for the keen grasp of life's many incongruities that they did not possess.

Indecency masquerading as humor is now ubiquitous. People still laugh -- some in defiance of decent standards, and others because, like our grandparents' generation, they're embarrased by barefaced public crudity and use laughter to disguise it.

Whether we will ever recover from this error is impossible to predict.

Posted by: Francis W. Porretto at March 11, 2005 01:00 PM

More like a lot of folks never got past Freud's anal-fixation-stage-of-childhood.

Posted by: P.A. Breault at March 11, 2005 03:52 PM

Francis,

Whether we will ever recover from this error is impossible to predict.

The Victorians seem to have recovered from the Elizabethans. If the President who follows Bush maintains W's standard of personal conduct for two terms then people will no longer snigger at the notion of "counseling" an intern. The ringleaders of Hollywood's Dopus Dei just don't have much cachet today, do they? The people in the press who are shoving the person in question in our faces are doing so as much to denigrate the legitimacy of bloggers as for any other reason. Glen Reynolds was very dumb to promote her in the first place, now he gets to pay for it.

Ignoring her as if she did not exist may be the best way in which to assure her disappearance. A refusal to appear with her on the part of bloggers wouldn't hurt either - if they have the guts to step away from the dim limelight. There is a very limited market for talentless sluts who have lost their shock value.

Posted by: Rick Ballard at March 11, 2005 03:53 PM

All good points, Rick, and may we all hope that your envisioned pleasant possibility of a return to public propriety is actualized. (I almost wrote "is actually actualized." Well, it's very early.) But there are other paths into the future as well, as the Roman and Byzantize Empires indicated. For the moment, it wouldn't do to be too confident that we'll avoid the nastier ones.

Posted by: Francis W. Porretto at March 12, 2005 02:48 AM

As benign and trivial as Wonkette.com is, it can be entertaining. Too bad she's starting to lean further left every day. She's turning into the female Bill maher.

Posted by: IChiWawa at March 12, 2005 06:51 AM

Francis,

I am not at all confident that we shall avoid a descent to bread and circuses. It did take over two hundred years to swing from Elizabethan licentiousness to Victorian prudery. My main point is that any blogger who appears in a public forum with the slut debases that which he is trying to elevate - and those who set the lineups know it full well. A few publicized refusals would enhance rather than diminish credibility.

Posted by: Rick Ballard at March 12, 2005 08:34 AM

I saw Ana Marie Cocks on FOX News one day on Rick Fulbaum's mid-day show. They were yakking away when she said something lascivious as a sort of come-on. You could almost hear the producers screaming into Rick's earpiece, and Rick mumbled something about 'not going there because this is a family show', and then she was gone. Ms. Cocks' own 'hot' air will be the wind that snuffs her candle. By the way, I think the Victorians were as salacious as the Elizabethans, if not more so. They just went to extraordinary lengths to cover it up.

Posted by: Amy at March 12, 2005 02:15 PM

If Wonkette were really salacious, she'd be intresting. As is, she is dull, her politics are dull and her blog is dull. I can't believe anybody reads it. For the porn? You can do better on the internet by typing a random URL. I think her numbers are inflated.

Posted by: Dandelion at March 16, 2005 08:18 PM
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