ChronWatch Watch

As the old saying goes, there is no wingnut angrier than a wingnut living in the Bay area. Thus we have ChronWatch.

ChronWatch is the brainch...well, the creation of a particularly right-wing specimen named Jim Sparkman (and yes, he does live in San Ramon--how did you know?), who, after spending every waking minute of the last 30 years writing letters to the editor and getting maybe three of them published, discovered that thanks to the miracle of the intertubes he could become a Media Critic instead of just an embittered old crank.

And so he founded ChronWatch, to document and combat pervasive left-wing bias in the San Francisco Chronicle ("ChronWatch.com is a counter force to the liberal advocacy that is so dominant in today's media. The San Francisco Chronicle is critiqued as a prime example of media dedication to the liberal cause."). It's a really classy site--and by 'classy', I mean they have a 'Miracle pill halts disease!' ad smack in the middle of the front page.

It's too bad Sparky doesn't seem to be doing any writing for ChronWatch lately, because his columns are truly an experience. To read a piece by Sparky is to picture him in bathrobe and slippers drinking coffee and reading the Chronicle with cartoon steam coming out his ears, every section chock full of outrages, every page a fresh affront to his worldview. His work is full of adjective and insult and very little else; his logic, such as it is, is implicit rather than explicit and generally boils down to 'because I said so'. His ideological dedication was breathtaking: he could read a Pickleresque smear on the Democrats and declare it left-wing socialist propaganda. (For a sample of Sparkman's wit, see here.)

Sparky's absence, however, is filled by a stable of writers who apparently couldn't make the cut at Clownhall and so decided that Clownhall is just too liberal. We're talking the dregs of the dregs here, folks--writers who are hopelessly crazy and entertainingly inept.

At ChronWatch, you can find articles like What Is It With Jews and Guns? ("If liberals had their way and the Second Amendment was repealed, the only people in America with guns would be cops, criminals, and the military. Interestingly, of those particular groups, criminals are the ones liberals hate the least.") and Mrs. Clinton Discovers the Women with Needs Vote ("My guess is what many find alluring is her enthusiasm for redistribution of wealth schemes."). I guess Women Without Needs are all voting Republican?

There's Prove to Us That You're Still on Our Side, which despite its title is not about the Democrats and Iraq; no, it's about immigration ("Those elected to office need to prove to the American people that they are at least "on our side." A good way to do that is to immediately and successfully secure the borders."). As, less surprisingly, are quite a few of the pieces there--xenophobia being a staple for them as for better-known wingnuts.

They're not afraid to take on popular culture, as in The Price is Wrong, Rosie ("Rosie O'Donnell as emcee is a big step down for CBS: from Bob Barker's grandfatherly manner and superb business sense to Rosie's extremism and grandstanding."). Do they figure she'll hector contestants about gay marriage and 9/11 conspiracies? And what about the 'business sense' bit--do they think she'll put all the wrong prices on things? Read it and...well, still wonder about the latter.

My favorite, though, is a piece called Can America Survive Evolutionary Humanism?, which warns us that "Evolutionary Humanism is the most dangerous delusion thus far in history." Apparently 'secular humanism' has lost its shock value, so they had to re-brand; either that, or the Evolutionary Humanists are much more dangerous than the Secular Humanists who believe in biblical creation.

This one has it all: apocalyptic rhetoric ("If not stopped, as history warns us, this rapidly escalating downward process leads inevitably to totalitarianism, enslavement, and eventually mass murder"); a pseudo-rational classification system ("The primary denominations of Evolutionary Humanism are Cultural Marxism/Communism, Secular Humanism, Postmodernism, and Spiritual Communism"¹); and pseudo-scholarly footnotes ("'The Black Book of Communism,' p. 752"); all in service of the proposition that

America, the "moral force that defeated communism" is on the verge of completely rejecting God, the natural order, and moral absolutes, and instead, embracing the godless religion of evolution, amorality, and the unnatural.

Best of all, it has the Platonic ideal of batshit crazy wingnut non sequiturs:

Jeffrey Dahmer, a psychopath who cannibalized his victims, acted on Darwin's advice.

It just doesn't get any better than this.

(More ChronWatch hijinks here.)


¹The offshoots of these are among others, New Age/green environmentalism/Gaia, socialism, progressivism, liberalism, multiculturalism, and atheism. Now you know.