But I didn't win the award.
"Taibbi's truism: When truth is obnoxious, only the obnoxious can tell the truth."
"I Graciously Accept Rolling Stone's Obnoxiousness Award - Now Where's My Check
Since an excited friend emailed me that I had won Matt Taibbi's "Most Obnoxious Thing on the Internet This Month" award, I have been looking forward to my $10,000 check and working on my acceptance speech. Here is a draft of that speech:
Ladies and gentlemen...I stand before you humbled, awed, and amazed to have been recognized as the author of the most obnoxious thing on the internet.
My late father, a two-time Olympic medalist, had to triumph over thousands of talented and determined racing sailors. Muhammad Ali, to become "the greatest" (boxer of all time), had to beat out hundreds of thousands who have tried their fists at boxing. But to become the recognized leader in internet obnoxiousness...that, I am proud to say, is a nonpareil achievement.
Today, we are living in a world in which literally billions of people are competing in internet obnoxiousness: a world where cyber-hate and flame wars and even death threats abound, a world where internet porn takes up the lion's share of the bandwidth, a world in which a Google search for "Palin boob job" returns 110,000 hits. To even place in the top ten million, in internet obnoxiousness, is a magnificent accomplishment.
How, you may ask, did I manage this astonishing feat? To what do I owe my supreme success? What does it take to reach the coveted number one position?
As it turns out, my triumph -- for all it owed to hard work, pluck, determination, and a certain natural ability to be really, REALLY obnoxious -- finally boiled down to one thing: pure, unadultrated luck.
Taibbi, explaining why he felt compelled to award me the Obnoxiousness Prize, gave me high marks for my basic concept: the proposal for a taxpayer-funded mega-mosque at Ground Zero sporting Twin Minarets to replace the nanothermite-demolished Towers, erected as a monumental apology for falsely blaming Muslims for 9/11. But as it turns out, that wasn't enough. It was my proposal for a 9/11 truth museum that did the trick.
Taibbi explains:
He goes on. Note the excellent suggestion that the Mosque should house an "unflattering wax figurine" of former 9/11 landlord Larry Silverstein:
This mosque should house a 9/11 Truth Museum documenting the evidence that 9/11 was carried out by U.S. and Israeli insiders, not Muslims. It could include such artifacts as the laughably bogus “last will and testament of Mohammed Atta,” pieces of airplane wreckage from earlier crashes that were planted at the alleged 9/11 crash sites, WTC structural steel samples showing melting and evaporation caused by explosives, videos and other objects seized from the Israeli Mossad team that filmed and celebrated their colleagues’ destruction of the World Trade Center, unflattering wax figures of such 9/11 villains as Dick Cheney, Larry Silverstein, and Benjamin Netanyahu, and samples of nanothermite-laden World Trade Center dust.So not only should there be a Mosque at Ground Zero, the Mosque should include an unflattering and undoubtedly absurdly anti-Semitic wax caricature of the Towers' Jewish landlord. If that isn't the "This one goes to eleven" moment of conspiratorial quackery, I'm not sure what is. If anyone else has found something more offensive in the Ground Zero discussion, let me know, but for now this is my clubhouse leader.
What incredible luck! When I wrote the piece, I had randomly selected Cheney, Silverstein and Netanyahu (I might as easily have included Rumsfeld and Myers) as 9/11 villains, purely on the basis of evidence for their complicity in 9/11, without any thought of their ethnicity. In fact, when I try to imagine unflattering wax figures of these three, the one that comes to my mind's eye is the naturally-hideous Cheney. But fortunately for me, when Matt Taibbi hears the name "Larry Silverstein," he immediately imagines a stereotypical caricature of a hook-nosed Jew. Apparently it was Taibbi's own obnoxiously bigoted imagination, in purely fortuitous juxtaposition with my own undeniable genius for relatively innocent obnoxiousness, that carried the day.
So, while I am flattered by Taibbi's Obnoxiousness Award, I am not sure that it is not Taibbi himself who deserves it. Here are a few questions for him.
Hey Matt! Why are you so quick to imagine Silverstein, whose fingerprints are all over 9/11, as a stereotypical hook-nosed Jew...and then to condemn your own depraved imagination by projecting it on me? Are you equally disgusted by the millions of stereotypically "Muslim" images of Bin Laden--who, by the way, repeatedly denied any involvement in 9/11 and deplored the attacks as un-Islamic before his death in December 2001?
Since Taibbi is experiencing a powerful inner conflict between the anti-Jewish stereotypes he cannot help entertaining, and a superego commanding him "don't say anything negative about Jews" (actually that may be the media-dominators he works for, rather than his superego, issuing the command), I wonder how he would react to this article in Veterans Today: Israeli Control of America
For the next Obnoxiousness Award, I nominate Israeli Control of America--which, unlike my mega-mosque proposal, actually DOES talk about Jews and Jewish power in America. The only question is whether it is the article itself, or the list of facts it contains, that is disturbing.
Anyway...In gratitude for his generous decision to honor me with the coveted Obnoxiousness Award, I have coined a new expression and named it after my esteemed benefactor.
Taibbi's truism: When truth is obnoxious, only the obnoxious can tell the truth.
--MORE--"
