The End of Roy's Weekly Wingnut Roundups

Alas, after six years, the Village Voice has canceled Roy Edroso's brilliant weekly column looking at conservative bloggers. The columns were anthropologically fascinating, historically valuable, politically insightful, and damn entertaining to read. Roy would cover the sincere, rabid and crazy conservative base as well as the professional conservative hacks (and the former auditioning to join the latter). Dissecting insanity and bullshit is always valuable (and a good work in too short supply), but to also make the whole endeavor not only funny but genuinely witty is quite the feat. It's also a difficult act to sustain, but Roy did it, and made it look easy. Although he's continuing to post great stuff at his site, alicublog, the Village Voice columns were a concentrated and thorough examination of "rightbloggers" and their manufactured scandals of the moment. It's the kind of feature that some other outlet should pick up and fund.

"In "#EmployRoy: The ‘Employ Roy Edroso Because He Is A National Treasure And Not The Girl In This Picture’ Project," TBogg makes the case for just this (and supplies a hatchtag). Quoth the Bogg:

Needless to say this is a national disgrace because Roy is a Fucking National Treasure, who should have a regular paying gig writing commentary somewhere, slipping his rhetorical shiv in between the 7th and 8th rib of a conservative and giving it a delicate twist and wiggle.

While the secret leftwing email listserv, DestroyAmerika!!!AbortBabiesList, will no doubt get the word out, please see your way to maybe possibly sorta kinda dropping a hint here and there at one of those websites you visit when you’re at work and you’re supposed to be working on next years budget or awaiting for the launch codes in order to destroy mankind as we know it.

Some good political bloggers have managed to acquire decent-paying gigs, but that number remains relatively small. There's not a robust liberal counterpart to conservative wingnut welfare or the conservative Wurlizter. It's also far more common for conservative hacks to be given lucrative gigs over genuinely insightful analysts, even at supposedly legitimate media outlets. The commentators at alicublog ("the alicurati") are trying to pressure Roy to install a donation button at least, but it'd be great if some other outlet picked up his canceled feature. (I can think of several other writers on my blogroll who deserve steady gigs as well, but any progress would be welcome.)