'Hate-F***Gate': Fire Them All

Over at NTCNews, we have a daily editorial called "300 Words Or Less," the idea being to address a timely topic in the specified length. Today's entry addresses the media scandal known as "HateF***Gate":

Obscene insults and raw hatred are not new in the online world. What made Guy Cimbalo's article about "hate-f***" fantasies so shocking was that it was published by Playboy.
Did no one in the editorial process at Playboy.com think twice before hitting the "publish" button on an article that said of Rep. Michelle Bachmann, "Chemical castration has begun to look appealing"?
Cimbalo's article required someone to build multiple Web pages, someone to find, crop and embed photos, someone to write headlines and captions -- hours of paid labor during which various editors had the chance to say, "Hey, wait a minute. Maybe this isn't a good idea." . . .

Please read the whole thing. We hope that our blogger friends will find NTCNews a useful resource, It's a work in progress, so have patience if you haven't been blogrolled yet.

Frequent Commenter Smitty (who has been known to wear bowties, alas) and Jimmie Bise Jr. of Sundries Shack are my partners in this latest insane project. Of the site's inspiration, Jimmie says:

Tucker made a big mistake in calling out the HuffPo before his site was anywhere close to being live. Three weeks is an eternity in the blogosphere and, by the time his site finally does make it to the masses, all the buzz will be gone.

I won't tell you which one of my partners described the Underpants Gnome business plan of NTCNews:

1. Post a metric ass-load of brief news pointers.
2. ? ? ? ?
3. Profit!

Don't try this at home kids. These men are professional bloggers. We're already showing up occasionally in the Memeorandum feed and being linked by Fisherville Mike, So It Goes In Shreveport and No Sheeples Here, among others.

If you want to be a guest contributor to the "300 Words or Less" series, please e-mail Smitty or e-mail Jimmie. Remember (a) the subject must be timely, (b) it must include linkage to articles and blogs about the topic, (c) your entry will be competing for publication against other offerings, and (d) it must be 300 words or less, including the title and you signature. (Try composing it as a Word document, which automatically counts the words.)

As payment for your contribution, you'll have your choice of three lucrative options:

• 100% of the cash value of the traffic generated by your entry, not to exceed $1 (one U.S. dollar);
• Reciprocral linkage to your blog at The Other McCain and NTCNews.com; or
• One cold beverage, if you are ever able to catch me, Smitty or Jimmie in a bar with cash in our pockets. (Good luck.)

What a deal, huh? At any rate, even if you don't decide to take us up on this offer, we invite you to visit NTCNews, where we strive to prove daily that you have to be a rich preppy to aggregate the news.

And please hit the tip jar, so I can afford to buy one of those spiffy bowties like all the smart pundits wear.

UPDATE: Smart pundits? Dan Collins:

Stacy McCain is quite right . . .

And speaking of inspiration, I owe a lot to Protein Wisdom for their slogan: "Because not just anybody can summarize the news." Ironic implications, you see.

Tucker Carlson seems to believe that you have to be a rich famous TV pundit to summarize the news. I hate that kind of stuck-up attitude. A little story:

At CPAC 2006, I was engaged in my usual CPAC activity -- schmoozing like a mofo -- when I decided to take a smoke break. So I go outside, light up, and start talking to this guy with a beard who was puffing Marlboro Reds.

He looked familiar. Kind of like . . . an Ewok.

At that point in time, I had very little idea of just how big Ace of Spades was in the blogsophere, and didn't know the guy from Adam's housecat.

Which is the point. You can be huge in the blogosphere and yet be an obscure nobody compared to the famous TV pundits. And that's OK, but the problem is when the famous TV pundits get the idea that you actually are nobody.

In Tucker Carlson's mind, Ace of Spades and Jeff Goldstein are zilch compared to the 26-year-old assistant producer at Fox News, because the 26-year-old can schedule him on TV -- so we all can admire Tucker's wisdom and good looks -- and Ace and Jeff can't do that.

Yeah, well, Ace and Jeff are all right with me. You know who else is all right with me? Carol at No Sheeples Here. Because she lets me steal her cool Photoshops:

UPDATE II: Speaking of obscure people I met at CPAC 2006, Little Miss Attila says, "Fire them all? Works for me."

OK, let's talk obscurity and fame. All acolytes of The Rules (or, as Jimmie calls them, "The Million Hit Squad") know Little Miss Attila as She Who Must Be Linked, the Kharma Queen of the Blogosphere. She's like the blog-fu temple goddess. If your traffic is sucking, just ask yourself, "When was the last time I linked Little Miss Attila?"

Two days after I met Attila at CPAC 2006, Ann Coulter gave the speech destined to be known to history as The Raghead Heard 'Round the World. And somebody on Bloggers Row decided to circulate a petition denouncing Ann. (Which even Ace signed, having succumbed to the fever of civic-virtue Joiny McJoinerism that was apparently pandemic on Bloggers Row that year.)

Well, I'm sort of Coulter Fanboy No. 1. Don't judge me.

Having done a stint as a humor columnist for The Rome News-Tribune -- after Lewis Grizzard died, my Menshevik editor, Pierre Rene-Noth, decided I should try my hand at the Bubba McGrits schtick -- I know how hard it is to be consistently funny.

If a columnist can give three good laughs in 700 words, that's success. Four good laughs per column, that's national syndication. Five laughs in a column and you are a newsprint Vishnu: I Am Become Death, Destroyer of Worlds.

Coulter is funny, and if you've never tried to be funny in print, you've got no idea how hard that is. It's like stand-up comedy. Next time you're watching some brick-wall third-stringer doing a routine on cable TV and thinking to yourself, "Ah, he's not so funny. Anybody could do that," how's about you take a stroll down to the next open-mike night and try it yourself, asshole.

So I leapt to Coulter's defense after the "raghead" comment, and one of the people I leapt on -- figuratively, no matter what any gossip tries to tell you -- was Little Miss Attila. She had put up a post slamming Ann and so, with all the vitriolic ad hominem I could muster, I told Attila to get herself a nice hot cup of STFU. Hulk Hogan never slammed Andre the Giant so hard. Meghan McCain never slammed tequila shots so hard. Matt Sanchez never . . .

I regret slamming Attila like that. But it's out there somewhere on the Internet, and you can't retrieve those pixels once you hit the "publish post" button. But Attila has forgiven me, and this is one of the reasons (certainly not the only reason) she's the Kharma Queen of the 'Sphere.

One of these days, Attila will write a post called "Ann Coulter Is Da Bomb," admitting that her 2006 anti-Ann posts were wrong. At which point, she'll begin knocking down Instalanches like she knocks down vodka martinis. And then we'll all be grateful we're on her blogroll.

Er . . . not that we weren't already grateful.