He's the robot who takes on the MSM and he's back in business: celebrated pundit R. Robot, the world's first self-writing weblog. Enter the name of a friend or enemy, and he'll automatically compose a preposterous, Jonah Goldberg-style assault on his/her outrageous acts of seditious treason.
Originally a take-off on Andrew Sullivan, I built him in 2003, and from time to time have updated his list of "traitors." Since Little Green Footballs hasn't really budged since then, I don't think the joke has dated much. The robot broke down a couple years ago, but thanks to WordPress he's back in business, as unsparing as ever. Is it time to give R. Robot his own L.A. Times column?
The first version of the Robot ripped off Sullivan's HTML. But no one would recognize it anymore, now that the flesh-and-blood version of R. Robot, who used to warn of a "fifth column" of war protesters, has reinvented himself as a reasonable TIME columnist who only occasionally lets his earlier self show through: typically in his obsession with proving that whites supposedly have higher IQs than blacks. Say what you want about R. Robot: he's one contrarian who never went there.