Back in the Golden Years of Blogging, around 2001, a practice known as “fisking” came about, and it provided many hours of enjoyable snarkiness. If you’re relatively knew to blogging, or if you have an actual life, you may not be familiar with the term, which is defined on Wikipedia as:
A really stylish fisking is witty, logical, sarcastic and ruthlessly
factual; flaming or hand-waving is considered poor form.
I don’t see much fisking nowadays (which could be attributed to the fact that I don’t spend much time reading political blogs) and I miss it just a bit. So it’s good to know that the practice hasn’t vanished completely, and in fact has been adopted by the edgier members of the Legacy Media.
Following is a clip of Glenn Beck applying a proper fisking to the infinitely annoying Arianna Huffington. Now, I’m not a big GB fan; his style occasionally approaches the Infinite Annoyance that Huffington has somehow managed to exceed. Nevertheless, our ideologies have much in common, and he’s an equal opportunity skewerer when it comes to calling out chumps on both sides of the political aisle (and, believe me, there are plenty of them…enough to fill out, say, a whole branch or two of federal government). And, as he shows in the following video, Beck knows how to administer a proper fisking. Enjoy.
He did that on his radio show, too. I prefer his radio show – way funnier. He pointed out on the radio that HuffPo asked him to write for them around the same time that the Fox show was starting up. He declined their invitation. I think that was a wise move.
I’ve never listed to his radio show (I can’t work and listen to music or news at the same time), but I’m going to tune in tomorrow at 10:00 (CST) when he interviews Debra Medina. Should be great publicity for her.
He’s a pretty good interviewer. He actually asks the questions that I would ask. Makes me wonder why the real journalists aren’t asking them.
I can think of a great number of possible reasons, most of them completely tacky. 😉