This is funny.

Actually, the idea that anybody would award Trump’s monkey butler (I will never let that term go) a conservative media award is hilarious. And other-worldly.

The New York Times’ Bret Stephens is taking aim at news that Sean Hannity is receiving just such an award.

Channeling billionaire Warren Buffett’s theory that history cycles through “‘the innovators, the imitators and the idiots,'” Stephens wrote in a Times op-ed that the conservative Media Research Center’s decision to award Hannity the William F. Buckley Jr. Award for Media Excellence signaled the decline of the conservative movement.

Indeed. When the need for a strong conservative uprising is at its most critical, you have to wonder how it serves the cause to have organizations like the MRC dipping into the shallow end of the pool to hand out accolades.

Stephens went on, noting that while the MRC award wasn’t one of the “big” awards, it still matters, at least as a means of foreshadowing the movement’s direction.

“But sometimes symbolism is more potent than fact,” Stephens writes.

“If we have reached the point where rank-and-file conservatives see nothing amiss with giving Hannity an award named for Buckley, then surely there’s a Milton Friedman Prize awaiting Steve Bannon for his insights on free trade. And maybe Sean Spicer can receive the Vaclav Havel International Prize for Creative Dissent for his role in exposing ‘fake news.’ The floor’s the limit.”

Or, for Hannity, Stephens added, “the crawl space beneath it.”

Ok, this guy is in competition with the guy from National Review Online, who referred to Hannity as “the self-abasing monkey butler of Trump,” and I’m loving it.

“And so we reach the Idiot stage of the conservative cycle, in which a Buckley Award for Sean Hannity suggests nothing ironic, much less Orwellian, to those bestowing it, applauding it, or even shrugging it off,” he writes. “The award itself is trivial, but it’s a fresh reminder of who now holds the commanding heights of conservative life, and what it is that they think.”

Hannity, of course, being the “counterpuncher,” went on a stampy-footed Twitter tirade, in response.

https://twitter.com/seanhannity/status/883119818022559744

https://twitter.com/seanhannity/status/883132341543198720

Better yet, what did Buckley actually think of you? Did he leave the show satisfied that there was productive give and take, or did he leave with a sense of foreboding for the movement’s future?

https://twitter.com/seanhannity/status/883117638100144128

https://twitter.com/seanhannity/status/883118174375464960

https://twitter.com/seanhannity/status/883118553540558849

You’ll do none of those things.

Tell me, Sean… how does pushing internet hoaxes and propping up Russian shills, such as WikiLeaks and Julian Assange advance any of the things you claim to fight for?