Year-end Space Filler: The 10 Lamest Stories of 2017

By A.J. Liebling
Meta-Content Generator

With the first string gasbags languishing in St. Barts or trying to stay one step ahead of their wives' process-servers, the end of year is the time when those trapped in New York or DC fill space and air with their top ten lists for 2017.  Could anything be lamer?  Well, actually, they could – as these top 10 lame stories from the past year will demonstrate.

10. What does the Korean madman want? 

Gee, who could suss this one out?  Why does Kim Jong Un refuse to give up his nuclear arsenal at the demand of dotard President U Bum?   He is either a lunatic on a suicide mission or he has seen what has happened to fellow dictators in Libya and Iraq who tried to face down the United States without a few A-bombs in their pocket.  You make the call; your media savants somehow can't.

9.  Where will Jeff Bezos go next?

World-class city to Jeff Bezos: We have it all!

Having exhausted the labor market and gullibility of Seattle, Jeff Bezos has announced he is graciously prepared to receive tribute to locate some sort of office somewhere else pleasing to him.  The winning vassal state must have the right combination of a highly educated labor force, a major international airport, an established web of high-tech institutions and companies he can raid, and a government complaisant enough to toss him billions of subsidies for the privilege of hosting his minions.  In other words, nowhere.

Of course he will choose someplace, we hope not here, subject to sufficient bribes to please his most excellent crap merchant and labor sweater.

Let's see: educated work force, major airport, lots of culture, easily corrupted government officials.  Looks like the inside track belongs to Moscow.

8.  TV star marries unemployed Brit

Actually we like stories about plucky clever black/Jewish girls making good, and it doesn't get much gooder than landing a genuine if rather thick high-mileage British prince.  However, 10,000 words on the layers of meaning hidden in a slinky dress she wore in a photo is – what's the word? – lame.

7.  Those Silicon Valley geniuses

This lame-o perennial features a fawning profile of some Asperger's case who by dint of his coldness, ruthlessness, and just dumb luck made billions by rolling out a product that while no more innovative that what was already out there (Apple Mac, Friendster) managed to be adopted universally.  That makes the twerp the source of all wisdom on all subjects, including those on which he (and it's always he) knows nothing, like human relationships.

Never mind that such genius was utterly oblivious to Russian manipulation of his product, missed the last two major turns in technology, or had turned his startup into the sh*ttiest frat house at Ole Miss, the media hung on every banal utterance.

6.  Local person buys doughnut for The Poor

This is more a local news B-block staple following the fires, overturned trucks, and any good murder within 300 miles of the transmitter: some unfortunate person's Christmas was brightened when an unnamed/named benefactor bought doughnuts/turkeys/toys for the poor/a little old lady/whoever was standing in line behind them at Market Basket, thus showing what generous and wonderful people we are.  That these same generous and wonderful white people overwhelmingly voted for greedy, bigoted white men who devote their entire lives to screwing the poor, with tremendous success, somehow goes without mention.

5.  Grifter-in-Chief is now acting Presidential

This one was more prevalent in the first half of the year, before the media's Charlie Browns realized that Lucy was never in fact going to hold the football.  Every time U Bum managed to read a speech from a teleprompter without wetting himself, the media chorused that such effort represented a decisive turn from the torrent of witless bigoted insults that passed for a Presidential campaign.  Of course the next day U Bum resumed the cheap shots.  Meanwhile the grifting and the chaos went on as always.  We're hearing less of this narrative now as the catastrophe visited upon America by plutocracy and bigotry has become clear to even the meanest newsroom intelligence, a little too late.

4.  How we were supposed to know?

He was like totally better

Replacing lame narrative #5 has been the rising chorus of shocked self-righteous attacks on U Bum from, wait for it, Republicans.  Not Republicans who have to run for office, who remain hostage to their party's demented primary voters, but Republican gasbags who have long earned a semi-dishonest living providing much-unneeded “balance” to op-ed pages and cable news panels.

While we appreciate the return of Jennifer, Ana, Bruce, Steve, Nicole, and Billy to the side of the light, we have to ask where were they during the reigns of St. Ronald of Bitburg and George W. for Waterboarding?  Oh, that's right: working for those nefarious schmucks and shilling for their horrible policies, which bear a remarkable resemblance to those being promoted by the Grifter-in-Chief.

Thanks, but we'll look elsewhere for our moral re-armament.

3.  What makes white men kill people?

Funny when the gunman is black or brown, the answer is clear (thug, terrorist).  But when it's a white man with home-made machine guns, no one has a clue.  Usually we settle on some sort of unknown and unheard of mental illness.  The real question – why do we allow serial domestic abusers easy access to weapons of mass murder? – goes unasked and unanswered, although we suspect it may have just the teensiest bit to do with the Republican opposition to any sort of reasonable gun regulation that might get between a white wife beater and his vantage point high above the country-music concert.

2.  Why won't Hillary go away?

She won the popular vote by a margin of only 2,900,000, so why does Hillary Clinton think she has any right to participate in political life?  Especially when she refused to divorce her tomcattin' husband and made compromises in pursuit of what she saw as larger principles.  The nerve!  Surely it has nothing to do with the continued effort to silence outspoken women (although we'd be more righteously outraged if 53% of white women hadn't voted for someone else).

The question we have:  since no one ever asked this of John Kerry, John McCain, or Wilfred M. Romney, why won't this story go away?

But the winner has to be the lamest news story of 2017 (cue fanfare of assault rifles being shot and meth cookers exploding):

1.  U Bum's voters are still with him

"He tells it like it is"

Journey with our intrepid reporter into darkest (by which we mean whitest) Pennsylvania, Arkansas, Kentucky, Alabama, or other uninhabitable sh*thole and meet those adorable white critters who still support the Bigot-in-Chief.  Why?  Usually it takes 1000 words to get the answer, but the cuckoo eventually pops out of the clock.  It's that U Bum has given them what they want: an endless stream of bigotry and hate that matches what's in their hearts and lets them enjoy their unearned feelings of superiority as they waste away from lack of real jobs, health care, and hope.  

What the 74% of the American electorate who didn't vote for the Tangerine-Faced Pussy Grabber think one year on is of course not interesting to anyone.