Popularized by the blog Sadly, No, the term "Wingnut Welfare
Queen" refers not to a poor
person, but to a low-talent, self-appointed pundit of the right, male or female, of the type who have become prominent in large patches of media, Washington D.C. think tanks and the Republican Party, and who depend on some mix of right-wing
money, praise or contacts to boost and further their careers. Putting the "wingnut" in Wingnut Welfare
Queen means the media figure
will be not just predictably or reliably conservative or ultra-conservative, but doggedly and irrationally so.
Many Wingnut Welfare Queens style themselves "Populists"; nonetheless, some some appear to take relish in the abrasiveness and ad hominem quality of their attacks on individuals they perceive as not necessarily contrary in ideology, but lacking in fervor.
A Wingnut Welfare
Queen's natural adversaries inhabit the best-recompensed strata of left-wing academia and the leftmost
edge of the Democratic Party, with some holdouts on the op-ed pages of
liberal metropolitan daily newspapers; they are the upper-tier of the class called Poverty Pimp (q.v.), code-word "Progressive."
.
"What I dislike most of all is not her meretriciousness or meanness, but the way she acts as though she were God's Gift to American
politics."
--
"Yep. Follow her career and you'll see how a gossipy media princess with a right-wing tilt became a full-
blown wingnut welfare
queen."
.
