Even though there are still 3 days left in the second quarter of 2009, self feels utterly compelled (in his loser way, of course) to put up the next of what may be a new (?) Saturday Night Loser's Club tradition (??), namely a quarterly Daily Kos poll where you get to vote for the loser of each quarter (well, duh), begun here last quarter. The hope (???) is to continue the series for as long as possible, if not longer, depending on how long self keeps his sanity.
Certainly coming up with loser candidates is easy, almost too easy. The trick, however, is....
....to limit the choices only to 15. In reality, with the "other" option, that means 14 choices. I also decided not to repeat selections from the Q1 poll, to try to bring "fresh (loser) faces" to the list, even if some of those loser candidates just keep on giving, loser-wise, like the obvious example, Michael Steele. My running list ran well over 18, some for slightly obscure reasons, some for more trivial reasons than others in the grand scheme of things. I had to prune some of the selections, at least the "lighter" ones, which I'll list in the tip jar (i.e. the "real one", not the bot-generated one, if I follow the advice from an SNLC regular last week).
I didn't include the usual gang of monstrous meta-loser bigots like B-chm-nn, B-ck, H-nn-ty, L-mb--gh, -'R--lly, & S-v-g-, because they haven't diminished in stature and noxious influence this quarter. Of course, you could say the same thing for the 12th candidate on the list, so.....well, I never claimed to be perfectly consistent. In addition, I chose not to include Scott Roeder in the poll, even though clearly he is a vicious, cold-blooded slimebag of a human being, to put it kindly. Dick Polman (am I the only person on DK who links to his blog on my blogroll?) took care of that characterization for me here:
'Anti-abortion groups insist they are shocked, shocked about the vigilante murder of Kansas doctor George Tiller....
Cry me a river. Spare me the phony piety. The hypocrisy of these people is so thick that you need a sledgehammer just to dent it.
For decades, they demonized the now-departed doctor as "George 'The Killer' Tiller"; as "George 'The Baby Killer' Tiller" (a favorite epithet repeatedly employed by Bill O'Reilly on Fox News).....They created the noxious climate for domestic terrorism, whereby some loser could take it upon himself to act as jury, judge, and executioner.
And now they've reaped the whirlwind. Sure enough, the captured suspect in the Tiller case turns out to be a right-wing extremist who reportedly believes in the doctrine of justifiable homicide, and who in the past has allied himself with a fringe movement (the "Freemen") that deems itself exempt from American laws, regulations, and taxes.'
Somehow, I hesitate to risk characterizing people like Roeder (even if he is still legally innocent until proven guilty - not that the latter should be hard, one hopes - although on this blog, at least, he's guilty until legally branded so) with the label of "loser", because of a worry that I might be trivializing what such people have done. In that same sense, I decided not to include Phil Spector in the poll.
Besides, for all the people left off the list, some of those may wind up on the Q3 poll. So, happy voting, and after that, feel free to share your loser stories for the week below....