As Simplistic as a Hazardous Condition

The Poor Man has his Golden Wingnut Awards, but winners of that dubious distinction are judged solely on the demerits of their political ineptitude.

I'm looking to confer some sort of recognition on the web's worst writing, regardless of political orientation. Let's call it the Humpty-Dumpty Medal.

Humpty-Dumpty, you may recall, was the character in Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass" who told Alice, "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less."

For a long time I didn't bother with this kind of evaluation, because I thought Pastor J. Grant Swank, who holds forth at Men's News Daily, had no competition.

And Swank is good, no doubt about it. In a recent piece about corruption in Louisiana, he asserts that "The New Orleans police office needs the spy glass closely scouring its walls."

This raises the question of why anyone would use a telescope for a job that could be done a lot more easily with a bucket of warm soapy water and a stiff-bristled brush, but I'm sure Pastor Swank, tapping the same logic my students used to plead their cases with me, knows what he meant.

However, Swank has been outdone, at least this week, by Kaye Grogan, whose snorty postings appear at Alan Keyes's blog, "RenewAmerica.US". Grogan wins this week's Humpty-Dumpty just on the strength of her latest column's saucy title: "Border control is simplistic...so just do it."

There are numerous juicy segments in Grogan's disjointed screed, but lengthy quotes would take the fun out of reading the entire masterpiece, and I hope everyone will.

Just in passing, though, this particular bad writer, whose political philosophy is not easy to pin down, but might be called "Soccer Mom Baroque," specializes in misplaced prepositional phrases, such as the memorable, "(President Bush) should have seen the open-door policy of our borders as a haven for the terrorists to slide into America with their suitcase bombs intact as a hazardous condition a long time ago."

Just how intact is a hazardous conditon? And is there any doubt that Kaye Grogan is the deserving winner of this first weekly Humpty-Dumpty Medal?