Hot Air's Top 40 for 2012: 21-30

Once again, we’re looking back at the Hot Air posts that garnered the most traffic in 2012.  We had plenty of off-the-mark prognostication in this set, but a couple of surprises, too.  Enjoy the trip down Memory Lane; we’ll be back with 11-20 tomorrow.

• #30 – Letterman: Say, Obama’s kind of lying about this GM bankruptcy thing, huh? – I’m not much of a fan of late-night TV comedy — but when you throw David Letterman, Rachel Maddow, and a soupçon of disillusionment into the mix, hilarity results.  Or clarity, at least.
• #29 – Video: What a history lesson can do for an Occupier – What can a survivor of the Soviet Union teach an Occupier?  Plenty, as this video proved, although it’s still unclear whether the Occupier was capable of comprehending it all.
• #28 – ‘Piss Christ’ returns to New York along with ‘Piss Moses’ – “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam,” President Obama declared … but some NEA grant funding can belong to those who slander other religious figures.
• #27 – New Florida poll shows vindication of Eastwood Strategy – For a while, anyway, Floridians seemed to like Clint Eastwood’s extemporaneous riff on Obama as an empty suit, er, chair.
• #26 – The Blaze: “Hustler” smears S.E. Cupp; Update:Planned Parenthood, Sandra Fluke denounce – “How do you shame Hustler?” Allahpundit wondered in this post about the latest degradation from Larry Flynt.  Obviously, you don’t, but this disgusting photoshop “fantasy” briefly resulted in the consensus that Flynt is a disgusting jerk, which is also nothing new.
• #25 – Angry old man yells at Paul Ryan for 90 minutes – I’ve watched political debates ever since the 1976 presidential contest, but I don’t ever recall seeing anything as bizarre as Joe Biden’s meltdown.  Not even Dan Quayle’s deer-in-the-headlights performance against Lloyd Bentsen was this bad … and neither had any impact at all on their elections, either.
• #24 – Michael Barone’s prediction: Romney 315, Obama 223 – Well, a lot of us had irrational optimism in that final week.
• #23 – Fact-checking the factcheckers on Ryan’s speech – If political prognosticators got their comeuppance in this cycle, so too should the “fact-check” industry.  There seemed to be plenty of pronouncements of “facts” that turned out to be ill-informed opinions, and this was one of the worst.
• #22 – Open thread: The first debate – I don’t have the time-trend stats on these posts, but I’d be willing to bet that the traffic on this started picking up steam in direct proportion to Obama’s dissipation of momentum.  This was the moment that made those later optimistic polls look so believable.
• #21 – Confirmed: Line-up of speakers at Democratic convention is simply terrible – And it was.  When the final-night highlight is Joe Biden — who actually gave the best speech of the night — you know you have problems.  Unfortunately, none of those problems were insurmountable for Obama in the end.