Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

Republicans do not pay their debts.

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

Bark louder, little dog.

You can’t love your country only when you win.

Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.

The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

Just because you believe it, that doesn’t make it true.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

Optimism opens the door to great things.

It’s time for the GOP to dust off that post-2012 autopsy, completely ignore it, and light the party on fire again.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

Republicans in disarray!

You are here: Home / Post of the year

Post of the year

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Batocchio from Crooks and Liars is continuing a tradition started by the much-missed Jon Swift/Al Weisel, the “Best Posts of the Year, Chosen by the Bloggers Themselves.” Nominate your favorite blog post of the year, from anywhere, in the comments.

John and I are hoping to get it together to start a Jon Swift/Al Weisel award for internet humor but we’ve been slow to get on the ball. In the meantime, pitch in and tell us some of your favorite blogs posts, from your own blog, or elsewhere in the comments.

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105Comments

  2. 2.

    Jeremy B

    Here’s my personal best: “Avatar, Vietnam, and the War on the Trees”
    http://redgreenandblue.org/2010/01/14/4535/
    An excerpt:
    One thing the blockbuster film “Avatar” showed in glorious, graphic 3D: In war, no matter who wins, the forest nearly always loses.

    In the normal course of life, average folks tend to be conservationists. Why shouldn’t they? Just like the Na’vi of “Avatar”, most human societies throughout history developed systems that enabled people to live on the same patch of ground for generations.

    The Bible actually commands: “When thou shalt besiege a city a long time, in making war… thou shalt not destroy the trees thereof by forcing an axe against them.” This was also the norm in the intercity warfare of classical Greece; The Spartans only cut down Athenian olive trees when their enmity became really nasty. 

Trees are part of that stability, whether it’s olive and fruit trees for food, or other species for lumber, shade, and cover. You plant trees for yourself, and for your children and grandchildren.

 Today we call that “sustainability”…

  9. 9.

    Cat Lady

    I rarely leave this boat anymore cuz the world has all gone fucking nuts on me and this is my happy place, so I offer this post of Cole’s. I bookmarked it and read it every so often to remind myself why BJ is teh awesome.

  10. 10.

    M. Bouffant

    Sweet Blood of Jesus, I’ve cranked out 2,100+ items so far this yr. (Quantity IS quality!) & as I literally spend 16-18 hrs. a day (minus a few minutes in the kitchen & an occasional foraging expedition, & possibly an hr. or two of telebision viewing) trawling the Internet for anything I can mock or at least amuse myself w/, there’s just no way to remember any single item, whether mine or from serious people. Or there just weren’t any so “good” that they stuck in my overloaded memory.

    So let’s go w/ my lowest yet most “popular” moment this yr. Due to the more popular venue (thanks & sorry, Thers) it did get a bit of accidental/unintended attention.

  14. 14.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    This is not my favorite blog comment of 2010.

    If this confuses you don’t worry, sometimes it’s better to just walk away, Rene.

    Oh and Merry Christmas, you blockheads.

  15. 15.

    CA Doc

    If you get to count the comments as part of the perfection of the entire post, I’d nominate the “Touchdown Jesus DIAF” post. That was this year, right? I’ve never laughed so hard at work; I had to close my door!

  16. 16.

    JPL

    No matter how you celebrate today and tomorrow have a wonderful time. I’d like to nominate Anne Laurie as the point person to post pictures of the babies and tots Christmas.
    R-Jud, Kitten and Suzanne have a wonderful Christmas morn and if we don’t see photos, it didn’t happen.

  17. 17.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    Actually I do have a real one: any list of best bloggy moments of 2010 has to include this entire live chat with Matt Taibbi about Griftopia at a FDL Book Salon and in particular two comments of his, the first about how he and his Rolling Stone editors figured out that during their recent meeting, David Gergen thought he was Matt Bai the entire time, and the second this comment about Fred Hiatt, which I believe DougJ linked here some time later:

    Fred Hiatt was the Moscow bureau chief when I was there in the nineties. He would have made an excellent Soviet reporter, let me put it that way.

  20. 20.

    El Cid

    It’s a really good question as to whether or not I remember a particular blog post that was actually over the last year (I wondered first about Stalin Summer re HCR but that was over a year ago) and not recall something more than an entire cloud of blog hornets buzzing around some issue.

  22. 22.

    WarMunchkin

    Almost all of Hyperbole and a Half is the best that I’ve ever read on the internet, just saying.

  24. 24.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    @El Cid:

    not recall something more than an entire cloud of blog hornets buzzing around some issue.

    Well yeah but then you’re usually reading Balloon Juice, right?

    ;)

  26. 26.

    Southern Beale

    @Cat Lady:

    I rarely leave this boat anymore cuz the world has all gone fucking nuts on me and this is my happy place, so I offer this post of Cole’s.

    Oh man that was good, in a cynical “let-me-crawl-back-to-bed-and-cry” sort of way….

  36. 36.

    stuckinred

    @MikeJ: Asta funny, I knew a guy once, looked just like you. His name was Emanuel Ravelli.

    Ravelli: I’m Emanuel Ravelli.

    Spaulding: You’re Emanuel Ravelli?

    Ravelli: I’m Emanuel Ravelli.

    Spaulding: Well, no wonder you look like him…But I still insist, there is a resemblance.

    Ravelli: Ha, ha, ha, ha…hey, he thinks I look alike.

  42. 42.

    Dave in ME

    @Cat Lady:

    I could not agree more. I just don’t hit any of the other blogs in my bookmarks folder because I never know when some unadulterated fucktardedness will appear. I come hear and hear plenty of opinions and discussion and get to hear stories about animals and all is right with the world for me, at least for the short time I am here.

  44. 44.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    @Omnes Omnibus: Oh good idea. About the family. I was being entirely unintentionally obtuse.

    BTW de Horse wrote Tractatus Pimlicus. Subtitled “places I have known.”

  46. 46.

    El Cid

    Perhaps this might be the winning post of the year, or part of a series of winning posts, for its valiant effort to portray Sarah Palin as writing any of it.

    Iran continues to defy the international community in its drive to acquire nuclear weapons. Arab leaders in the region rightly fear a nuclear-armed Iran. We suspected this before, but now we know for sure because of leaked diplomatic cables. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia “frequently exhorted the U.S. to attack Iran to put an end to its nuclear weapons program,” according to these communications. Officials from Jordan said the Iranian nuclear program should be stopped by any means necessary. Officials from the United Arab Emirates and Egypt saw Iran as evil, an “existential threat” and a sponsor of terrorism. If Iran isn’t stopped from obtaining nuclear weapons, it could trigger a regional nuclear arms race in which these countries would seek their own nuclear weapons to protect themselves.

    The lady doesn’t fucking read newspapers and can’t string together any coherent sentence having to do with anything but her stupid family and snide bitching about how awful anyone is other than her dumbass right wing followers and how “elite” they are.

  47. 47.

    Michael D.

    How about that one where the gaywad said something funny about Republicans doing Riverdance in bathrooms and John thought is was funny and asked him to be a front-pager?

    That was awesome. :-)

  54. 54.

    JMC_in_the_ATL

    The cross country dog move post at Hyperbole & a Half.

    And pretty much everything TNC wrote during Confederate Month.

  58. 58.

    SGEW

    I really think that the best blog post I read this year was Ta-Nehisi’s April 13th piece “The Ghost of Bobby Lee.”

    It’s the one where he first starts quoting passages from the original secession documents from the Civil War, and contains this extraordinary line: “The Lost Cause is necromancy–it summons the dead and enslaves them to the need of their vainglorious, self-styled descendants.”

  60. 60.

    srv

    I would nominate and link to Dengre’s Confederate Party series, but he never put them in a category for the linky…

  63. 63.

    david mizner

    The winner is this one, of course.
    http://fafblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/mule-variations.html

    ———-
    We know that Barack Obama, in his heart of hearts, truly wants Real Change. We can tell this by examining the furrows of his brow as he squints meaningfully into the middle distance, by carefully measuring the sincerity-per-pixel count of his campaign posters, by reflecting on the inspirational Martin Luther King quotes he delicately intones before carpet-bombing an Afghan village. But we also know that despite his best efforts, Barack Obama can’t achieve Real Change, confounded as he is by such institutional barriers as Congress and the Pentagon and Barack Obama. We know, for example, that Barack Obama wants nothing less than a sweeping overhaul of America’s health care system, but has been hopelessly blocked at every turn by conservative Democrats like Ben Nelson, Joe Lieberman and Barack Obama. And we know that Barack Obama did everything he could to oppose a trillion-dollar no-strings-attached bailout of a corrupt finance industry, but was helpless to stop it, boosted as it was by notorious corporate whore Barack Obama. And we know that Nobel Laureate Barack Obama is a devout lover of peace, but has been powerless to prevent the American military’s rampant bloodletting throughout the Muslim world, as the nation’s armed forces remain in the hands of that bloodthirsty warmonger Barack Obama.

    And we know that although Barack Obama is an idealist, representing the very best and brightest of American Liberalism, he’s also a hard-nosed pragmatist, willing to compromise between extremes of Left and Right, between black and white, between war and more war. That’s why when the Left wanted to close Guantanamo and the Right wanted to double Guantanamo, Obama doubled Bagram instead. That’s why when the Left wanted to cut greenhouse gas emissions to 350 parts per million and the Right claimed global warming was an international Masonic conspiracy, Obama bombed a village in Pakistan. And that’s why when the Left wanted universal health care and the Right wanted hundreds of billions of dollars for Wall Street, a capital gains tax cut and a domestic spending freeze, Obama gave them hundreds of billions of dollars for Wall Street, a capital gains tax cut and a domestic spending freeze.

    And we know that as disappointed as we might be in Barack Obama – in his little failings, in his petty slights, in his odd betrayals, in his unseemly habit of dancing naked through the streets of Oslo smeared with the blood and entrails of Afghan children – we also know that the alternative would be far worse. Why, with a Republican president, we might be at war with Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and possibly Iran, or facing some hideously draconian corporatist scheme to compel poor people to buy private insurance they can’t afford, with a government that not only excuses the torture regimes of the past but dramatically expands them while giving itself license to murder anyone it likes anywhere on the planet. With Barack Obama, on the other hand, we have all that plus a man who can sparkle wittily on late night television. Now, I think that has to be worth at least a couple thousand dead Muslims, don’t you?

  64. 64.

    Peter J

    I nominate the facebook post where Sarah Palin made sense. There wasn’t one? Then I don’t have anything.

  66. 66.

    benintn

    @Cat Lady: Yup. Cat Lady wins. I am with SoBeale.

    Just an aside – the past 2 weeks is what the Senate would look like if it weren’t for the fact that Republicans completely hijacked Democracy and created the meme that you need 60% support to actually pass any legislation.

  70. 70.

    schrodinger's cat

    Was the post about the naked mopping incident, this year or last year. If it was this year, it is my choice for the nomination.

  76. 76.

    demkat620

    Hey you know our Kenyan Mooslim Overlord did not release a White House Dog Holiday Video with Bo Cam.

    WTF has that guy been doing all year? Not like he accomplished anything else.

  80. 80.

    Dennis SGMM

    I nominate myself and all of the others who choose not to blog: we have reduced the amount of redundancy on the internet by .0001%

  81. 81.

    MikeTheZ

    Someone find the post that coined “NANCY SMASH” and nominate it, STAT.

    …me? I’m FAR too lazy to do that much work right now.

  82. 82.

    Shadow's Mom

    @Lysana: Oh, that one about achieving adulthood was brilliant.

    @MikeTheZ: I believe that this is the Nancy Smash post that you reference? It came from Rumproast. That was one of the better posts of the year; I’d nominate it!

    @benintn: To your aside, I favor the proposal that before a filibuster there must be 40 votes in favor and those who chose to filibuster must remain on the floor. Put the onus on those seeking to stop legislation rather than those trying to get it to open debate and a vote. Under those rules, DREAM act might have passed.

  83. 83.

    Batocchio

    Thanks! I’m mainly looking for bloggers submitting their own best work, but I’ll try to contact the authors of the other pieces mentioned. (Also, I only guest post over at C&L, but am a regular visitor over there.)

  87. 87.

    HRA

    Sorry I don’t have the link. The one where the dishwasher spit out the suds on Tunch and he slither out into JC’s view had me crying from laughing so hard. I also shared it with family and friends for days.

  89. 89.

    Hungry Joe

    Hyperbole and a Half’s “The Party.” Or “The Year Kenny Loggins Ruined Christmas.” Or “Dogs Don’t Understand Basic Concepts Like Moving.” Or “How a Fish Almost Destroyed My Childhood.” Or damn near anything Allie Brosh writes and draws. She may be, at this moment, the funniest human being on the planet.

    http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/

  99. 99.

    Jill

    Since I usually write at 5 AM when I’m still half-asleep and can’t even taste the coffee yet, it’s hard to remember.

    I still like my Christmas Eve post from 2007:

    http://brilliantatbreakfast.blogspot.com/2007/12/some-thoughts-from-nonbeliever-on.html

    …and my favorite from this year is my cats discussing the relative merits of different kinds of cat food — a useful reference for future retirees:

    http://brilliantatbreakfast.blogspot.com/2010/11/maggie-and-jennys-guide-2-kat-fud-4.html

  100. 100.

    Lysana

    Just to be painfully clear, I am not Allie Brosh of “Hyperbole And a Half.” My Tumblr’s linked on my name here. My most recent entry’s not so bad, but I’ve done better over time on my LiveJournal.

  103. 103.

    Menzies

    I’ll join in and submit what I think is my best post. Takedown of a really old piece, though – some bullshit Richard Cohen wrote in ’06.

    I wouldn’t consider it relevant except for his #1 on the Hack Thirty.

    Link here.

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