BEGALA AWARD WINNER 2002 (Andrew Sullivan's Year-End Awards)

BEGALA AWARD WINNER 2002 (for excessive liberal rhetoric): Bush's 'mandate' "includes using the taxing power to transfer wealth from working people to the rich. It includes giving corporations a free hand to eviscerate the environment and control the regulatory agencies meant to hold them accountable. And it includes secrecy on a scale you cannot imagine. Above all, it means judges with a political agenda appointed for life. If you liked the Supreme Court that put George W. Bush in the White House, you will swoon over what's coming. And if you like God in government, get ready for the Rapture. These folks don't even mind you referring to the GOP as the party of God. Why else would the new House Majority Leader say that the Almighty is using him to promote 'a Biblical worldview' in American politics? So it is a heady time in Washington — a heady time for piety, profits, and military power, all joined at the hip by ideology and money." - Bill Moyers, paid for in part by your tax dollars, on PBS.

BEGALA AWARD RUNNER-UP: "Give the Republicans credit. They know what they stand for. Tax cuts. Guns. Bombs. Oil. Big business. Old boy networks. Privatization. Plundering the earth. Pillorying and padlocking the poor. Party-line votes." - Derrick Z. Jackson, the Boston Globe.

BEGALA AWARD HONORABLE MENTION: "But W., who was always the Roman candle and hatchet man in the family, has turned his father's good manners upside down — consulting sparingly, leaving poor Tony Blair to make the case against his foes for him, and treating policy disagreements as personal slights." - Maureen Dowd. Notice "his" foes. Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are apparently only Bush's personal enemies.

SONTAG AWARD WINNER 2002 (for egregious anti-Americanism in the war on terror): "It is not enough for Bush to be President of the United States, he must become the Emperor of the World. This unclothed emperor is, as they say in Texas, all hat and no brains. In the years before us, I fear there will be causes worth dying for. There will be tyrants so unstoppable that we will have to fight them to preserve our own freedom. But that is not the case now. Instead of standing up against tyranny, we are bringing it to our own doorstep. We have met the enemy, and it is us." - Glenda Gilmore, professor of history, Yale University.

SONTAG AWARD RUNNER-UP: "Having swept the Palestinians into the arms of the supreme terrorist Ariel Sharon, the Christian Right fundamentalists running the plutocracy in Washington, now replenish their arsenal in preparation for an attack on the 22 million suffering people of Iraq. Should anyone need reminding, Iraq is a nation held hostage to an American-led embargo every bit as barbaric as the dictatorship over which Iraqis have no control. Contrary to propaganda orchestrated from Washington and London, the coming attack has nothing to do with Saddam Hussein's 'weapons of mass destruction', if these exist at all. The reason is that America wants a more compliant thug to run the world's second greatest source of oil." - John Pilger, The Observer.

SONTAG AWARD HONORABLE MENTION 2002: "You are a disgrace to this country and I am furious you would even think I would support you and your aggressive baby-killing tactics of collateral damage. Help you recruit. Who, top guns to reign [sic] death and destruction upon nonwhite peoples throughout the world? Are you serious sir? Resign your commission and serve your country with honour. No war, no air force cowards who bomb countries with AAA, without possibility of retaliation. You are worse than the snipers. You are imperialists who are turning the whole damn world against us. September 11 can be blamed in part for what you and your cohorts have done to Palestinians, the VC, the Serbs, a retreating army at Basra. You are unworthy of my support." - Peter Kirstein, professor at Saint Xavier University, in response to an email from a cadet asking for help advertizing a political science assembly.

DERBYSHIRE AWARD WINNER 2002 (for right-wing hysteria and hyperbole): "In fact, Andrew McKelvey's network [Americans for Gun Safety] kind of operates and sounds a lot like Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda. A billionaire with an extremist political agenda, subverting honest diplomacy, using personal wealth to train and deploy activists, looking for vulnerabilities to attack, fomenting fear for political gain, funding an ongoing campaign to hijack your freedom and take a box-cutter to the Constitution. That's political terrorism, and it's a far greater threat to your freedom than any foreign force." - Wayne LaPierre, at the NRA Convention, according to Americans for Gun Safety.

DERBYSHIRE AWARD RUNNER-UP 2002: "It counts as evidence that Fr. Maciel unqualifiedly and totally denies the charges. It counts as evidence that priests in the Legion whom I know very well and who, over many years, have a detailed knowledge of Fr. Maciel and the Legion say that the charges are diametrically opposed to everything they know for certain. It counts as evidence that Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger and others who have looked into the matter say that the charges are completely without merit. It counts as evidence that Pope John Paul II, who almost certainly is aware of the charges, has strongly, consistently, and publicly praised Fr. Maciel and the Legion. Much of what we know we take on trust. I trust these people." - Richard John Neuhaus, First Things, still trusting whatever the Catholic hierarchy says about its members.

POSEUR ALERT WINNER 2002 (for stupendously pretentious writing): "If there's anything that confounds the British more than American optimism, it's baseball, which brings together on one bright pastoral greensward those twin nineteenth-century American deliriums: industrialization and individualism. Baseball turns into fun the oppressions of industry—management, productivity, accounting, specialization, even stealing—and yet the pageant of winners and losers in this proto-corporate world also allows for goodness to be measured, made immutable, and, thanks to the eternal vigilance of statistics, kept alive. Baseball is a game—some would say a ritual — of hope." - John Lahr, The New Yorker.

POSEUR ALERT RUNNER-UP 2002: From Vanity Fair's "Proust Questionnaire" of Gary Hart: "What is your idea of perfect happiness? HART: Reading The Odyssey in classical Greek on board a three-masted schooner off the island of Chios."

VON HOFFMAN AWARD WINNER 2002 (for spectacularly bad predictions): "Why is Bush in free fall? * Support for an invasion of Iraq has dropped from 72 percent to 62 percent in the past 14 days. Bush and his folks are so distracted by their diplomatic dance with France and Russia that they have fallen down on the job of convincing the American people that an invasion is needed. * Bush has been hit with a continuous six-month fall in his ratings on "managing the economy" - from 64 percent approval on April 30 to 55 percent on July 2 48 percent on Oct. 22. * By campaigning for Republican candidates around the nation, Bush seems to be undermining the case for a military emergency requiring immediate action against Iraq." - Dick Morris, New York Post.

VON HOFFMAN AWARD RUNNER-UP: "Diplomacy with North Korea has scored a resounding triumph. Monday's draft agreement freezing and then dismantling North Korea's nuclear program should bring to an end two years of international anxiety and put to rest widespread fears that an unpredictable nation might provoke nuclear disaster. The U.S. negotiator Robert Gallucci and his North Korean interlocutors have drawn up a detailed road map of reciprocal steps that both sides accepted despite deep mutual suspicion. In so doing they have defied impatient hawks and other skeptics who accused the Clinton Administration of gullibility and urged swifter, stronger action. The North has agreed first to freeze its nuclear program in return for U.S. diplomatic recognition and oil from Japan and other countries to meet its energy needs. Pyongyang will then begin to roll back that program as an American-led consortium replaces the North's nuclear reactors with two new ones that are much less able to be used for bomb-making. At that time, the North will also allow special inspections of its nuclear waste sites, which could help determine how much plutonium it had extracted from spent fuel in the past." - The New York Times, wrong yet again, October 19, 1994.

RAINES AWARD WINNER 2002 (for blatant but unacknowledged media bias): "[T]hat question, known as a generic ballot question, is a measure of national sentiment, and does not necessarily reflect how Americans will vote in the governor's races around the country and in the handful of close Senate and House races that will ultimately determine the control of Congress." - The New York Times, spinning their 47 - 40 Republican-Democrat poll of the weekend before the November elections. The Times editors so hate Republicans they even blew their own pre-election scoop.

RAINES AWARD RUNNER-UP: "In March, 2002, General Mofaz sent thousands of troops into the West Bank, repeating the exercise three months later after a spate of deadly suicide attacks by Palestinian militants. As chief-of-staff, General Mofaz directed some of Israel's most controversial military operations. These included: The March 2002 assault on Jenin, where Palestinians claim a massacre took place - though UN officials later denied this." - BBC News, in an article on the new Israeli Defense Minister, Shaul Mofaz. Well, did the massacre take place or not?

MAN OF THE YEAR: I don't understand why Time couldn't manage to say it, but the Financial Times gets it right. This was George W. Bush's year. Slowly building toward ridding the world of Saddam's threat, shrewdly identifying North Korea, Iran and Iraq as an axis of evil, demanding democracy from the Palestinians, presiding over modest economic growth despite a terrible global outlook, winning an almost unprecedented vote of approval in the November elections, capping it all with a Philadelphia speech that was a watershed in the GOP's struggle with its own internal demons - by any measure, this was a spectacular performance. The high-point? The U.N. speech. Here's the FT: It was a defining moment of the year, when the leader of the last remaining great power bowed to international opinion not out of obligation but out of choice. At the UN, Mr Bush displayed the combination of power and restraint that has elevated his presidency in 2002. Under his leadership, the US has acted more multilaterally, more cautiously and more wisely than many had feared after the provocation of September 11 2001. Forget the bloviations of the Hate-America-First crowd. History will one day credit Bush with patience, multilateralism and conviction. But right now, history is still being made. And there is a war to be continued and to be won.

10.Steve Jobs, for the iPod alone. 9. Roger Ailes, for kicking media ass. 8. Al Gore, for finally leaving the stage. 7. Ozzie Osbourne, for showing that love makes a family. 6. The Blogosphere, for coming of age. 5. Karl Rove. You can't take away last November. 4. Steven Pinker, for the best book of the year. 3. Eminem, for making it out of hell. 2. Condi Rice, for making it. 1. Pat Tillman, for giving up a promising and lucrative NFL career in order to serve his country.

10.Janet Reno. Not even the primary. 9. Madonna. You've got to have off-years. 8. Jennifer Lopez, for talent-free ubiquity. 7. Michael Jackson, for child abuse. 6. Bernard Cardinal Law, for child abuse. 5. Howell Raines, for wrecking a brand almost beyond repair. 4. Trent Lott, for still not getting it. 3. Tom Daschle, for running on prescription drugs in wartime. 2. Gerhard Schroder, for self-defeating opportunism. 1. Saddam. You wait.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: "The cigarette is 'somebody to whom I go asking for solidarity and comprehension and company and friendship when I am very tired or very angry or very sad or even when I'm very happy.'" - Oriana Fallaci, in the Financial Times. Don't miss the rest of her Paglia-esque riffs on the threat of Islamism to the West.

MAMET ON ANTI-SEMITISM: The playwright David Mamet has an excellent little piece in the current Forward, about his recent trip to Israel. He's tough on himself, for his absence when Israel is under such pressure. But he's also got a typically good eye: Before my trip, I was strolling through Newton. There, before me, was a broken-down Volvo of old, the vehicle of my brethren, the congenitally liberal. It was festooned, as are its kind, with every sort of correct exhortation: "Save James Bay," "Honor Diversity" and so on. A most interesting bumper sticker read: "Israel Out of the Settlements." Now this is a legitimate expression of free speech. Israel has been involved, as we know, in a rather protracted real estate dispute with several hundred million of its neighbors. This legitimate political expression, however, had all its "S"s transformed into dollar signs. Here we have, one would have supposed, a civilized person (one would assume that one could reason with the owner of a Volvo) sporting a slogan which could best be translated as "Hook-nosed Jews Die." Ah, yes. But the Volvo owner has accurately imbibed one of the potions now keeping the dying far left alive.

MORE EVIL: Alongside North Korea, one of the remaining truly evil regimes in the world today is the military cabal still holding the beautiful country and gentle people of Burma hostage. Here's a story that should have garnered more attention: mass rape as an instrument of terror against the ethnic minorities in that country's border areas. These thugs are genocidal.

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: "Villain of 2002: George Bush. This illiterate buffoon cheated his way into the White House with the help of his well-connected family and friends. Having dismally failed to anticipate or prevent the atrocity of September 11, he spent the rest of the day zigzagging around the country like a jet-propelled chicken. His personal cowardice was mirrored in the country at large, and he fanned it to his advantage in the mid-term elections, and now, to foment an unprovoked war that has nothing to do with terrorism and everything to do with oil. His record on the environment is as appalling as you would expect. Bush is rightly despised throughout the world, and it is humiliating that Britain is seen as his only ally." - Scientist Richard Dawkins, spewing what has now become the conventional wisdom among Europe's decadent and ignorant liberal elites.

No war, no air force cowards who bomb countries with AAA, without possibility of retaliation. -- Peter Kirstein, professor at Saint Xavier University.

Bonus award here, for most creative use of Anti-Aircraft Artillery.

"If there's anything that confounds the British more than American optimism, it's baseball, which brings together on one bright pastoral greensward those twin nineteenth-century American deliriums: industrialization and individualism.

Hmpf. I'm not confounded at all by baseball, I rather like it. I'm Chief Wahoo's biggest fan on my side of the pond.

Regards, Ivan

TOP TEN WINNERS OF 2002:

1. Pat Tillman, for giving up a promising and lucrative NFL career in order to serve his country.

I'm pleasantly surprised that Sullivan selected Tillman as #1 in his Winners catagory.

He's a great choice.

DERBYSHIRE AWARD RUNNER-UP 2002: ". . . It counts as evidence that Pope John Paul II, who almost certainly is aware of the charges, has strongly, consistently, and publicly praised Fr. Maciel and the Legion. Much of what we know we take on trust. I trust these people." - Richard John Neuhaus, First Things, still trusting whatever the Catholic hierarchy says about its members.

Ah, right, instead of evaluating the facts of the case, we should condemn anyone even accused of sexual abuse as guilty guilty guilty and assume the Pope is a liar and a fraud. Brilliant.

8. Jennifer Lopez, for talent-free ubiquity.

JLo goes on the winner's list for two things: according to a coworker, she's made it okay to have a healthy-sized badonkadonk; and for falling in love with a Republican politician, thus serving as a role model for the Hispanic electorate.

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