Earlier this week, outgoing Fox News host Glenn Beck illustrated David Carr‘s criticism of Midwesterners as “neanderthals” by doing an offensive caricature of a mentally disabled person. Mediaite’s Frances Martel wrote a relatively mild critique of Beck’s performance, given the level of offense, and for her trouble, conservative website Big Journalism has accused Martel of anti-disabled bigotry, and defended Beck’s vile minstrelsy by (I’m not kidding) asserting that those offended are mentally deficient.

Jack Stuef, the Wonkette editor who rendered the intertubes a sputtering mess of indignation following the misfired jokes in his post about Trig Palin‘s birthday, has written a farewell post as he leaves the world of political blogging to try his hand at entering the much less toxic world of TV writing.

In the wake of last week’s Wonkette/Trig Palin controversy, people keep sending me updates, related stories, and new slights against the special needs population, the latest of these being a Los Angeles Times editorial that calls Sarah Palin a “special-needs case.”

This is as good a time as any to clarify a few things about the issue of special needs-bashing.

For those wondering where the mainstream media is in covering the brouhaha over Wonkette’s birthday attack on Trig Palin (since deleted), CNN’s Reliable Sources answered the call Sunday morning. Host Howard Kurtz gave a quick recounting of the offensive post (and perhaps too much credit for an apology), and while the panel unequivocally disapproved, the [...]

Those looking forward to Keith Olbermann‘s installation of a new rear entrance for Wonkette in his Worst Persons segment might be a little disappointed in the web impresario’s denunciation of Jack Stuef‘s Trig Palin story, but the segment is somewhat redeemed by Olbermann’s clever (so clever he hyped it in two separate tweets!) “special greeting” for Trump: “FOK off!”

Meghan McCain, daughter of Senator Jack McCain, recently interviewed Donald “The Donald” Trump for the Daily Beast. And, predictably, the interview is getting quite a bit of negative feedback from around what some people who aren’t me might refer to as the “blogosphere.” Yes, that’s right, it’s H8er Week here at Mediaite. Kick back, grab a Pabst, and go with it.

Red Eye host Greg Gutfeld is, as you may have guessed, none too pleased with Wonkette writer Jack Stuef‘s recent post about Trig Palin – a post that frequently referred to the three-year-old as “retarded” and insinuated he may have been the product of rape and incest. Stuef has since apologized for some of the more offensive choices he made in writing his article, but stands by the post’s basic idea – that Sarah Palin uses her son’s disability as a “prop” to get attention and support.

Update: Wonkette has deleted the post, and replaced it with this message: (h/t Little Miss Attila) Rude Post Deleted By Editor; Author Apologizes A post on this page satirizing Sarah Palin using her baby as a political prop was very badly done and sounded like the author was mocking the child and not just Sarah Palin/Sarah [...]

Political humor website Wonkette has long been trending toward nihilistic snark for snark’s sake, but Jack Stuef‘s column “honoring” Trig Palin’s birthday is about the most irredeemably vile, unfunny thing I’ve ever seen. As if jokes about Trig’s Down Syndrome aren’t bad enough on their own, Stuef goes the extra mile to pen kneeslappers about incest, child rape, and fetal alcohol syndrome. I don’t want to reproduce too much of it here, but this quote is fairly representative

Conservative site Newsbusters is going after Wonkette for a recent post the liberal political humor site published about Trig Palin, the youngest son of former Alaska governor Sarah Palin.

Newsbusters prefaces its story by asking “What has become of today’s liberalism that makes it acceptable to attack the mentally handicapped if they or their parents are conservatives?”

A diverse gaggle of online media outlets (from Drudge and Hot Air to Wonkette and HuffPo) are enamored with the idea that a series of 2007 speeches that Joe Biden gave regarding the possible impeachment of George W. Bush are now applicable to President Obama‘s Libya policy.With varying degrees of shrillness, they’re playing “Gotcha!” with Biden’s promise that a unilateral move to war with Iran would be met with impeachment, and applying that promise to Obama’s Libya policy.

A few years ago, photographs of American soldiers cheerfully posing with blindfolded and naked inmates at Abu Ghraib became a symbol of everything critics found wrong with that prison and the entire War on Terror. A picture’s worth a thousand words after all. Now, a new yet depressingly similar story has surfaced. In Afghanistan, a group of 12 American soldiers are facing various charges dealing with brutally murdering Afghan civilians, taking drugs, and “severely beating a comrade who blew the whistle.” The soldiers are also charged with taking photographs of the dead civilians. Some of these pictures have been leaked.

Ever wonder where the TSA gets all these intrusive patter-downers from, especially since Craigslist shut down its Erotic Services section? Clues are beginning to emerge—hot, tasty clues. It seems that the Department of Homeland Security has been recruiting TSA agents by placing help wanted ads on (wait for it) pizza boxes.

By now, millions of Americans have been introduced to Tennessee gubernatorial candidate Basil Marceaux, mostly through his train wreck viral video pitch. Stephen Colbert also spread the word, picking up where Wonkette left off in deconstructing Marceaux’s impenetrable website.

It didn’t surprise me, then, when the first thing Basil said to me when I called him for an interview was “You’re not gonna make an ass of me, now, are you?”

The answer is no. In a microscopic news cycle, there’s always more than meets the eye, and that’s what I was hoping to discover.

A video has been going viral since yesterday evening of Basil Marceaux, a gubernatorial candidate from Tennessee, discussing his platform on Nashville’s WSMV 4 in a slightly less than lucid fashion. This was supposed to be a quick post for me (throw up the video, make a joke, get out), but I’ve been staring at my screen forever and I can’t do it. I just can’t make fun of this guy. Part of the reason is that Wonkette has already completely (and hilariously) eviscerated him, but the other part is because it just doesn’t feel right. So I’m going to take a different route and point out how this viral video works as proof of what is so great about our country.

The Alvin Greene for US Senate campaign is officially online! After several impostors brought their love of all things Alvin Greene to the internet and were summarily dismissed by the candidate himself during his media tour, Greene confirmed to, uh, satirical blog Wonkette that AlvinGreeneForUSSenator.com is his one and only online presence.

Something funny happened to political satire blog Wonkette on the way to their latest joke: the media took them seriously. After editor Ken Layne wrote a post pondering aloud the possibility of Sarah Palin getting breast implants, the New York Daily News, the Washington Examiner, the UK Telegraph, E!, and myriad others in the media began to ask the same thing. The investigation culminated in a courageous Greta van Susteren popping the question to Palin herself.

Well, this will do something to silence those who complained that Gawker would not survive after the major staff rearrangement earlier this year. After it’s politics editor Alex Pareene left for Salon last month, Gawker media has hired Wonkette editor Jim Newell to replace him; or, as Newell put it: “After replacing Alex Pareene at Wonkette in 2007, I will now replace… Alex Pareene… at Gawker’s politics slot, which he left very recently. As long as I keep blatantly copying his style, I should have steady employment for life, as he is very talented.”

As the nation awaits the 2010 elections, candidates from all walks of life are trying to outdo each other with increasingly absurd “common sense” proposals. This gem, uncovered by the good folks at Wonkette, features Alabama gubernatorial candidate Tim James playing the role of a menacing white-collar figure pacing about a home, consumed by the concern that multiculturalism at the Department of Motor Vehicles will destroy his home state.

Political satire blog Wonkette is making its mark on magazine giant Conde Nast. Two Wonkette alums separately announced today that they are joining magazines within the Conde Nast family. Original Wonketteer Ana Marie Cox, who has also worked for Time and the now-defunct Air America Radio, became the newest addition to the GQ staff. But that’s not all.

The hits just keep on coming. The Republican National Committee flubbed the roll out of their new web identity in glorious, grand ole, fashion on their own yesterday. Today the dark underbelly of the internet decided to help them finish the job. What’s a conservative to do? Twenty-four hours into the life of the RNC’s new website and parodies of the Faces of GOP web banner are circulating on the internet. Some are apt, some are funny and naturally, most are offensive.