The Ultimate Wingnut Challenge: Day One
Well, I've tallied the votes, and we now have our starting teams. The person who got the most votes on each team has been shot asked to leave the island, and the person who got the fewest votes has been made team captain.
Here's a run-down on the proceedings:
1. The Korner Kids
We basically had a tie here, with Kathryn Jean "KLo" Lopez and Rich "Too Bland for a Nick Name" Lowry each getting over 20 votes for their removal. We could keep both of them, but why would we want to? So, they're both gone.
Oh, and could KLo have heard about our contest? Her last blog post for yesterday asks "Who is the Worst Columnist in America?"
But no, it turns out that she is just linking to a post from the NRO media blog person. The blog person says that Frank Rich is the worst; KLo goes for Maureen Down. But have either of them read a Pastor Swank column?
Anyway, bye KLo. Bye, Rich.
Our strongest starting wingnut on this team is Jonah "Doughy Pantload" Goldberg, with the Pod and Sodomy Derb right behind him (so to speak). But still, this is a fairly lackluster group. And since we need four members on each team to start the competition, I have enlisted Pat Buchanan to join the Korner Kids. Sure, he's not as boyishly boyish as Rich, but he has spunk. (And we hate spunk.) Hat tip to listerplus for reminding us that Pat is at loose ends right now.
Korner Team:
*Captain Jonah "Doughy Pantload" Goldberg
John "Sodomy Derb" Derbyshire
John "Pod" Podhoretz
Pat "Hitler Wasn't All Bad" Buchanan
2. Town Hall Columnists
Sadly, the discount kidneys weren't enough to keep Thomas Sowell in the game. But Thomas, who knows that the free market is right about everything, accepts his fate gracefully, and goes out preaching the need for tough love conservatism when dealing with Africa:
Promoting dependency and irresponsible borrowing is not the way to help the poor internationally any more than these are ways of helping the poor at home. Such policies benefit the bureaucracies that administer foreign aid and enable vain people to see themselves as saviors, even when they are doing more harm than good.
So, apparently the best way to help Africans is to let them starve, because that teaches them the value of hard work.
But back to our remaining team members: our strongest starting player on the Town Hall team is Dr. Mike. But wait, is that a feminist I hear ... ? No, come back, Dr, Mike, it was just Doug Giles talking about metrosexuals.
The weakest remaining team member is Brent Bozell, who'd better do something quickly to win the hearts and minds of the public, since he is facing some strong competition. Here, maybe this excerpt from his official bio will make you love him:
L. Brent Bozell III
President of the Media Research Center, Parents Television Council,
and the Conservative Communications Center
Lecturer, syndicated columnist, television commentator, debater, marketer, businessman, publisher and activist, L. Brent Bozell III, 49, is one of the most outspoken and effective national leaders in the conservative movement today.
Founder and President of the Media Research Center, Mr. Bozell runs the largest media watchdog organization in America. Established in 1987, the MRC has made “media bias” a household term ...
Okay, maybe not.
But here's the Town Hall team:
*Captain Dr. Mike Adams
Ben Shapiro
Doug Giles
Brent Bozell
3. The Low-Rent Pundits
While the Debbies came close to canceling each other out, Justin Darr managed to quietly get himself banished. So, let's say goodbye to Justin by reading part of his column from last week, "Too Lazy to Win the War on Terror":
The essence of modern liberalism is laziness.
[...]
And as our troops fight terrorist daily in Iraq, Liberals are calling the War a disaster, comparing our soldiers to Nazis, and demanding a time table for America to tuck its tail between its legs and run home. It is easy to sit and claim the Left is opposing the War in hopes of picking up a quick political gain, and to a degree this might be true, but the real reason the Left has given up on winning the War on Terror is that they are too lazy to do what it takes to win. So rather than digging deep and doing what it takes, the Left has decided to give up and drag the rest of us down in defeat with it.
And what is Justin doing to help win the War on Terror? Well, per his bio, "Justin Darr is a veteran retail manager ...Justin is an expert in political philosophy, western world history, and the development of American society.
So, he's fighting the terrorists at K-Mart, so we don't have to fight them at home.
Okay, he probably also "digs deep and does what it takes" with the wife, if you know what I mean -- and that's an important job too.
Bye-bye, Justin -- while you will be missed, you never could have bested the Kaye the Leopard Woman, or Swank and his Homo Nups, so it's better that you get out now.
Low-Rent Team:
*Co-captain Kaye Grogan
*Co-captain Pastor Grant Swank
Debbie Daniel
Debbie Schlussel
4. Media Wingnuts
Garnering an impressive 32 votes for his dismissal, John Stossel showed why he is the Scoliosis of the Liberal Media. But he takes his defeat in the proper free market spirit, saying "Fighting for freedom is one thing. But freedom doesn't mean you own your job. Give me a break."
We will give you a break, Stossel, so you and your mustache are free to leave before Ann Coulter has you invaded, killed, and converted to fertilizer.
Media Team:
*Captain Ann Coulter
Rush Limbaugh
Bill O'Reilly
Michelle Malkin
5. Canadians
Poor, poor Danielle Crittenden. It seems that hardly anybody knows that she is the woman who announced to the world that it was her little dumpling who invented the Axis of Evil. She also wrote a couple of books about how all women should be happy to just stay home and care for their homes, children, and husbands -- she, of course, had the foreign nanny care for her home, children, and husband while she wrote the books.
And it seems that NOBODY knows that Danielle is now a regular blogger at the HuffPost, where her schtik is writing little fake screenplays to prove that Hollywood is composed entirely of Bush-hating, family-hating, religion-hating dummies. Here's a bit from her latest:
Just when you thought the summer couldn’t get worse for Hollywood, Paramount has announced that Oliver Stone will be directing the first major feature film about 9/11. [...] As always, the Huffington Post is first with the scoop. We have obtained pages from the super-secret script….
[...]
JIMENO
What’s going on?
McLOUGHLIN
Don’t know. But one thing’s for sure: the Jews aren’t showing up for work today.
McLoughlin returns his attention to his newspaper.
CUT TO: Ominous scene of passenger plane being cleared for takeoff at Logan airport
It's funny because Stone's movie JFK was about the theory that there was a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy -- and, see, some anti-Semitic nuts believe that Israel warned the Jews not to show up for work on 9/11, and that's like a conspiracy!
Okay, it's actually not funny, but she's gone now, and we will never read her material again.
Anyway, Danielle's other claim to fame is being Meaghan Cox Gurdon's good friend. And now the two of them can whine about those damned competent mothers together.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Canadian Team
*Captain (and designated stalkee) David Frum
Rachel Marsden
Adam Yoshida
Mark Steyn
6. "Lifestyle" Wingnuts
The people have spoken, and by a margin of just one vote, Meghan Cox Gurdon was the one chosen to get booted off Jasperwood Island. (Meghan got 13 votes, and Kathleen Parker and Dennis Prager each got 12, making this our closest match of the round). But Meghan is really, really stressed out, what with the homeschooling, the pregnancy, the writing, and the demands of husband, so it's just as well that she leaves now. After all, we have Lileks, and there can be only one!
But, as a parting shot, Meghan gives us some musings on the Harry Potter books:
When book five came out, I made the mistake of taking my eldest daughter and her friend Amy to pick up "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix," although we waited until a civilized 10 a.m. to do so. Right there in the bookstore (before I'd even got my hands on my own copy), Amy snatched up hers, flipped to the last page and shouted out, "Thank goodness! Hermione doesn't die!" I could have slapped her, which, if you do not happen to be a Rowling fan, goes some way to showing how high feelings run over these hotly anticipated books.
Or it goes some way to showing that Meghan is, as TBbogg said, "a Krispy Creme away from being Andrea Yates." I'm sure she can make good use of the time off, perhaps by getting some rest, asking her doctor if it's okay to have a daily quart of gin (for medicinal reasons) once the first two trimesters have passed, over-control the children, and brushing up on her pretentiousness.
Life-Style Team (and wouldn't they make a great LifeTime movie together?)
*Captain James Lileks
Kathleen Parker
Dennis Prager
Peggy Noonan
7. Blog Stars
By overwhelming demand (37 votes), Andrew Sullivan has been eliminated from this competition. And you had good reasons for dumping him: he's occaisonally right about stuff; he's the least wingnutty guy on the team; he's so 2003; and we all feel sorry for him lately. So, farewell, Andrew.
Also leaving us will be that Little Green Footballs guy. He, um, had to bow out due to personal concerns of a sexual nature. We thought we should replace him with a female blogger, so as to attempt to respond to the inevitable question, "Why do all the bloggers at Powerline have such gay blog names?" So, replacing the FGF guy will be one of the Cotillion ladies. (Hey, Michelle Malkin called them "the hot conservative gals of the blogosphere," and that makes them every bit the equal of Glenn Reynolds -- hat tip to aeonsomnia for suggesting them.)
Blog Team
*Captain Hugh Hewitt
John Hindrocket
Glenn Reynolds
A Cotillion lady
8, Respected Conservative/Libertarian Thinkers
Nicholas Krisof was voted off, on the grounds that although sometimes annoying, he's not really a conservative, as demonstrated by the fact that he cares about people in other countries who aren't necessarily missing white American women.
The second highest vote-getter was Victor Davis Hanson, mostly because nobody knew who he was (but hated his name).
It just so happens that VD (as his friends call him, possibly) is, per Wikipedia, "a military historian and political essayist, best known as a scholar of ancient warfare as well as a commentator on modern warfare. He is also a grape farmer and a critic of social trends."
Personally, I think we need more grape farmers/social critics.
Anyway, here's part of his most recent NRO column, in which he explains that we've actually won three wars in Iraq ... but we're currently engaged in the fourth one, which is the hardest one.
War IV is now unpopular, but that is understandable because it is the costliest in terms of American lives — and the only one of the four that was not just punitive and thus not fought in a solely conventional manner.
Creating consensual government has proven much harder than freeing Kuwait, taking over Saddam's skies, and toppling his regime — especially since all of those previous efforts did not really defeat and humble the fascists, and were confined only to our forte of conventional fighting.
In sum, after 15 years we are nearing a showdown with Iraq, since we finally chose to confront the real problem of a fascist autocracy — the result of Soviet-style Baathism imposed on a tribal society — recycling petrodollars to wage modern war at the heart of the world's oil reserves and international terrorism.
Okay, so he's both wingnutty AND boring -- let's replace him!
Yes, vote now for somebody to take VD Hanson's place -- whoever gets the most votes will join our Respected Conservative Thinkers team.
Thinker Team:
*Co-captain David Brooks
*Co-captain Charles Krauthammer
John Tierney
A respected thinker TBD
And that's our starting line-up. Tomorrow, one of the teams will compete against each other in a talent show ... and at least one of the contestants will be leaving us in a body bag disgrace. And somebody may have to drink spit.
2:36:46 AM 
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