GQ: Seven Minutes in Heaven, Six Hours with CNN

One of my handlers at GQ — a stern but humane gentleman who obeys the law — had an idea: if CNN has been this bad during the rest of the campaign (and it has), then it's going to be a spangly, exploding abortion on Super Tuesday. And ordinarily, he'd be correct. Only, this time, against all odds, something went right with CNN.

Still, there were mistakes and weirdness. Virtual conventions? Yeah. Gloria Borger. Oh, Lord, yeah. Bad riffs, telescoping simulacra and gleeful invocations of Taco Bell? GIMME A HELL YEAH.

Click on the Stone Cold Wolf Blitzer below for a liveblog of six hours of CNN Super Tuesday coverage.

Tampa GOP Debate: Deleted Scenes, Despicable Whores

Yesterday, GQ ran an article I wrote on NBC's Republican Presidential Debate, which was conducted at the University of South Florida in Tampa. If you haven't read it, please go check it out. Otherwise most of this won't make sense.

I tried to rationalize not going. I deeply dislike these people, and their fans sometimes seem even worse. After all, they could choose leaders from among the great teeming possibilities of humanity in this country, and they instead chose Newt, Mittens, the Butt-Lube Guy and the Paranoid Race Goblin with a publishing problem. It's like the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, only the thing that crumbles is America, and choosing poorly doesn't have any direct punishment for them.

I broke down and went. After all, if I was willing to drive to see Rays games back when their starters were so bad that they posted 14.00 ERAs, I am already accustomed to commuting for failure. Besides, maybe something fun would come of it. When GQ said they were interested in some local color, that sealed the deal.

It went a bit long, and their blog format accommodates only one graphic per article. What that means, of course, is deleted scenes—and many pictures! My friend and local director Jonathan Wolding was nice enough to come with me at the last minute and take pictures of the spectacle. (You may remember him from the photos for the "Awake the State" anti-Rick Scott rally.) As always, click to embiggen.

GQ: Obama Dumb!

As part of their DEATHRACE 2012 coverage, the good people at GQ.com asked me to talk about the frequent Republican refrain — and sometimes dog-whistle racist appeal — that Barack Obama is essentially stupid.

Even when they don't have the stones to make the case directly, GOP candidates run to old lines about "the teleprompter" (a device every politician uses), or echo the sighing smug-fuck paternalism of someone like Mitt Romney, who says that Obama is a "nice man" who's just "in over his head." Barack Obama's being dumb is an empty claim that explains everything and requires no actual intellect or analysis.


Click the aw-geez Obama to be taken to GQ.

Jonathan Swift Ate Caylee Anthony Because He Was Really Fat

I rarely relish an opportunity to not know something, but the Casey Anthony trial furnished me with the dual concepts of something horrible and something easily ignored. Despite Facebook's best baiting attempts, the topic never mattered.

Yesterday, though, a smart guy I know wrote a smart thing about crass jokes and emotional crassness relating to the trial. He was right. The guy who makes the dead baby joke and runs to the comfort of "too soon?" just after making it knows that the joke is always too soon. He relies on the simple step of conceptual proximity to seem daring, when in fact he's anything but. The fact is that "too soon?" is the shuddering refrain of the coward and the idiot, the self-promoting worry that buries actual human concern, promotes the speaker as "interesting" and pushes real dialogue and real understanding far away from the discourse.

Click here to keep reading on GQ.com.

GQ: LeBron James Is a Dickhead—A Taxonomy

Thanks to the good-natured badgering of Bethlehem Shoals (a/k/a @freedarko), I have a piece today on GQ about the various kinds of LeBron hatred and where they seem to come from.

It's peculiar how unwilling many people are to accept the story of a man who essentially did what he was supposed to: take less money, to be part of a team, to win a championship. Those are the sorts of high-minded goals we demand of sports figures, but this time they don't seem to count.

Although there wasn't space to explore the idea in the piece, it's interesting how LeBron's conduct is so readily dismissed as phony; yet, when a former superstar devalues his own play by being lazy, troublesome or a malcontent, then cleans up his act after a low-value trade to a contender, we are often willing to see the act as redemptive. There's a value in preemptively being a cad: it makes the steps of ingratiating yourself seem laboriously insincere instead of slickly insincere. Lie to us if you must; just make it look like work.

Also, for those of you who might panic that this place will be closing shop and the contributors off to seersuckier pastures, in the land of glossy pages and cravat blogging ("SEE THE FALL '11 ASCOTS!"), I own too much Hickey Freeman and not nearly enough Italian stuff to hang out with quartered gentlemen.

Click here to go to GQ.