2005 Asshole of the Year Awards
It's an honor just to be nominated...
Mother Nature
Unfortunately, I wrote up last year's list before the Indian Ocean tsunami could wipe out nearly 265,000 people in Indonesia the day after Christmas. Ho, ho, ho.
Still, Mother Nature kept up her campaign against man all through 2005. This year, we saw the American Gulf Coast get hammered with so many hurricanes they had to start designating them using the Greek alphabet. Al Qaeda can blow up some sky scrapers and the Pentagon when they put their minds to it, but only Mother Nature can effectively destroy the entire city of New Orleans in a few days, killing over 1300.
And just when the Jihadists were high-fiving themselves that the "Great Satan" had gotten theirs, that's when Mamma smacked Pakistan with an earthquake in the middle of Ramadan, killing 84,000, proving once again that be it in war or disaster, casualties are always distributed unevenly between America vs. the rest of the world.
Perhaps the environmentalists are right and this is all due to global warming. Perhaps Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church are right and we're getting punished for being a "fag nation". However you see it, Mother Nature was definetely on the rag in 2005.
Judith Miller
This summer she was the hero of the journalism community, bravely going to jail instead of giving up her source in the turgid Plamegate drama to the grand jury. People rallied around her like she was a martyr for the Freedom of the Press. As the months wore on though, people slowly pulled their heads out of their collective asses and realized that the reasons Judith Miller went to jail had more to do with the Fifth Amendment than the First.
During the run-up to Operation Iraqi Freedom, Ms. Miller couldn't have been closer to the White House if she had had their collective dicks in her mouth (figuratively of course...letting that happen literally would be too Clintonesque.) Keeping a stable of "unnamed sources" such as the unfortunately named "Scooter" Libby and disavowed Iraqi-in-exile Ahmed Chalabi, Miller was the Bush Administration's conduit to the front page of the New York Times, printing the so-called "proof" of Saddam Hussein's Weapons of Mass Destruction programs so it could be quickly cited by Colin Powell, Condolezza Rice, and Dick Cheney during their cheerleading for the war.
Of course, the WMDs did not exist, and the efforts to silence those who refuted their claims resulted in the petty political backstabbing that we know and love as Plamegate. Ms. Miller might not have even had to go to jail, since Libby had given a blanket waiver to everyone he talked to, allowing them to cite him in their testimony. Why did Miller decide to go to jail instead? Could it be that *she* was the source who cited Plame all along?
Her editors at the New York Times, already having had to wipe egg off their face for the Jayson Blair scandal, turned on her and published editorials critical of her reporting. After spending 85 days in the jail (and after receiving a bizarre and possibly cryptic note from the aforementioned Libby) Miller decided to testify, and announced the retirement of her "stenographic journalism" from the New York Times on November 9th.
She is no longer unemployed though. Judy has just been signed to (of course) Fox News where she will join respected correspondents such as Geraldo Rivera and Oliver North in their quest to bring balance to the liberal media. Who saw that one coming?
Tom Cruise
2005 is the year that Tom Cruise's "exuberance" slid into pure and irrational pathos.
Apparently, ascending to OTVII (the highest level of "Operating Thetan" in the Scientologist *ahem* religion) makes one so happy you jump up and down on Oprah's couch like an retarded kid who ate too much sugar. It also cures dyslexia, and imparts instant knowledge on "The History of Psychiatry", which can be used for the grand purpose of dissing Brooke Shields on the Today Show for using Paxil. It all came to head with his creepy engagement to Katie Holmes, who he immediately made the carrier of his crotch fruit to head off rumors that he was gay. One can easily imagine Steven Spielberg praying heavily this summer that Cruise's antics would not fuck up the opening weekend receipts on War of the Worlds.
Prior to this year, Cruise was a bankable star with a knack for choosing good projects and directors. Now, he's just an asshole.
The person who killed Natalee Holloway
You suck because you took a person's life. You also suck for giving the media and excuse to cover her case non-stop and long after we stopped caring. Without you (and the incompetence of the Aruban police and the increasingly shrill bleating of Natalee's mother) we might be without this particularly noxious case of "missing-cave-bitch-of-the-week" journalism.
Or, maybe not.
The "Culture of Life"
Go and Google "asshole of the year" and the first entry is, of course, the 2004 version of this article. Entry four (at least, as of this writing) is a blog link to that same story, but the commentators were uniformly upset that I excluded Michael Schiavo from the list. "Can we nominate him Asshole of the Century?" one of them stated.
Sorry to turn this around on ya, but I'd like to nominate all of you "culture of lifers" (and especially the ones in government...I'm talking to YOU Jeb Bush) to be Assholes of the Year.
This sick, sad case brought out all wingbats...especially the religious ones who think that having a feeding tube crammed down your esophagus is "God's Will" and how He intended us to live. Face it folks...Terri was more of a vegetable than the spinach gathering frost in the back of my freezer, and even that spinach hasn't been around for FIFTEEN YEARS.
I've got an autopsy report to back me up. What do you have? Some hack-job book by the respected and esteemed Mark Fuhrman? Fuck you and all your media and Capitol Hill hacks for injecting yourself into this family's tragedy.
"Brownie"
Blame for the tragedy in New Orleans can be laid all over the place. You can blame the state for allowing the natural barriers such as the wetlands to be eliminated for shipping, or for allowing the levees to deteriorate over the years. You can blame the mayor for not evacuating people from the city as Hurricane Katrina loomed. You can blame the cops for joining the looters instead of stopping them. Hell, you can be Kanye West and blame George W. Bush for "not caring about black people" (which is something I think he gets from his mother, the ever tactful Barbara Bush)
But if there is an overarching symbol of the incompetence with which this disaster was handled, there are few more potent figures than FEMA Director Michael "doin' a heck of a job" Brown.
Brown, whose previous experience was being the director of the International Arabian Horse Association (a position he had to leave in disgrace), was truly Nero fiddling while Rome burned. According to e-mails released during the time, in the days before Katrina was due to make landfall, Brown was fussing about whether to dress up "tie or no tie?" As it made landfall, he bragged that he was a "fashion god." A fashion god that had to be told to roll up his sleeves, so he can look as hard working in the crisis as the President (har-de-har-har.)
Whether it was whining about how his Labor Day weekend was ruined ("I'm trapped now. Someone rescue me!") or responding to the SITUTATION CRITICAL messages from FEMA officials who were actually in New Orleans with "is there anything we need to tweak?" it is not hard to see why Brown was quickly replaced as head of FEMA. What is incredibly hard to digest is that his new job is running a disaster relief consulting firm.
Alas, he will probably get money from this, long after his name has faded from the public consciousness. After all, the neo-cons know how to take care of their own.
Harriet Miers
Liberals often accuse conservatives of being stupid. But the Bush White House acts like conservatives are stupid too. Having got his last Supreme Court nominee, John Roberts (who had a short, but impressive record) confirmed without too much trouble, when William Rehnquist died and freed up another spot, Bush decided to give O'Connor's spot to his personal White House counsel, Ms. Miers.
Her nomination was a disaster for the West Wing. Having credentials that were even more slight than Brownie's (she had never been a judge, nor had she ever tried a case before the Supreme Court) for a position that was even more important, the White House thought they could get Miers through the gauntlet without having to do much more than have Karl Rove give James Dobson a wink and nod regarding her views on abortion.
Surprisingly, the Right which had been riding Bush's cock for five years did an about face on Ms. Miers, whose only REAL qualification was "loyalty to the administration." And after the disgrace of Brownie, the public was in no mood for cronyism. You know you made a huge miscalculation when conservative harpy Ann Coulter and obese drug addict Rush Limbaugh turn on you.
Even though she eventually withdrew her nomination, I think we should reward her with a nomination for Asshole of the Year. Perhaps it's unfair, since this is the Bush administration's fuck up, more than hers. But I think the Bush administration is due for a Lifetime Achievement in Assholery about now.
The anti-war left
Public support for the Iraq War is at an all time low. For a majority of Americans, it is more of a question of when or how to withdraw than whether or not we should. However this change in public consciousness occured, we can be sure it happened in spite of the efforts of the anti-war left, instead of because of it.
Instead of attacking the right's position on the war, the activist left have been feeding it, and in the process turning off many of those who might be inclined to support their position. Getting the US to withdraw isn't the ultimate goal for many of them. Rather, it is a focal point to protest the worldwide American "hegemony" and "oligarchy" and a bunch of other words they aren't sure of the meaning of, but it sure sounded snappy in that Noam Chomsky soundbite...
I will once again remind all of you that THE SIXTIES ARE OVER. A protest isn't performance art, so keep the lesbian poets doing odes to their clitoris away from the podium. And if the Che-shirt wearing hippie waving a "Free Saddam" sign doesn't get the irony of what he's doing, then I'm not inclined to explain it to them.
Marguerite "God Warrior" Perrin
For our religious crazies spot, I nearly nominated Pat Robertson for his calling for the assassination of Hugo Chavez. Yep, a very Christian sentiment. But in the broad spectrum of stupid shit Pat Robertson says, it's not his greatest hit, and besides, our man in Virginia Beach is also deserving of a Lifetime Achievement in Assholery award for his previous accomplishments.
So instead I give a nod to the new blood, the rabid (but admittedly, much more benign) "God Warrior." On the strength of one otherwise crappy Fox reality-show, she has given us a slew of catchphrases ("Tainted!" "Dark-sided!") and secular America a big "told ya so" about fundamentalist Christians. We only wish that the other family had given the visibly embarrassed husband a good chunk of that money to go and hire a divorce attorney.
The Minuteman Project
The issue of illegal immigration has become the conservative "cause celebre" this past year. In April, about a thousand "Minutemen" took their lawn chairs and a few cases of Natural Light to positions along the Arizona-Mexico border to assist the Border Patrol in identifying illegal immigrants trying to cross over into the United States.
Never mind that the most Mexicans trying to cross the border can see their beer bellies a mile away and go around them, which calls into question their effectiveness, the Minuteman Project is pretty much just white males media whoring for news cameras and conservative politicians looking to gain a constituency. Their leader, Jim Wilcox, also goes around raising money for the Minuteman Project, which is funny since it is staffed with volunteers who bring their own resources to their patrols. Where does the money go, Jim?
The group is also supported by the neo-Nazi National Alliance, who passed out fliers at their events. Though the Minutemen deny association with them, the connection was enough to convince a similar citizens border patrol group, The California Border Watch, to split with the Minutemen, citing racism and fascism in their ranks.
Our porous borders and the creation of an entrenched social underclass in this country is an issue that will have to be faced sooner rather than later. Well, perhaps later if the issue is being forced by a bunch of pseudo-vigilante hillbilly yahoos.
Sony
"Most people don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
These "famous last words" were spoken by Sony BMG's president of global digital business, Thomas Hesse in a November 4th interview on NPR. Well, thanks to your company's paranoia over digital rights management, now *everybody* knows what a "rootkit" is...
See, if you happened to purchase one of the twenty titles Sony BMG placed it's XCP copy protection software on, regardless of whether or not you clicked the "I Agree" pop-up, the CD downloaded a program to your computer that cloaked itself using rootkit techniques. While this is sleazy in and of itself, it also opens your computer up to all sorts of viruses, eager to exploit this new backdoor.
Removing the rootkit would fuck with your box. The "patch" that Sony offered for infected PCs just made things worse. Finally, they agreed to stop shipping CDs with XCP copy protection, but only after thousands of computers had been compromised.
While I'm not intrinsically inclined to take up the cause of anyone who purchases a Ricky Martin or Celine Dion CD, this will hopefully be the scandal that makes mainstream America aware that (at least according to the corporate world,) *you don't own anything.*
The head office didn't cc you to memo, but you no longer buy your favorite band's CD, you buy a license for their music. According to the EFF, the EULA on the protected CDs was even more restrictive than the software, requiring you to delete all of their music if you move out of the country or if your house get's burglarized. This goes for DVDs and videogames too. Sony recently patented "lockware" which would tether a videogame to one particular console and prevent a person from loaning a game they purchased to a friend or reselling it.
Still gonna line up for a PS3 on launch day?
The oil companies
Wasn't this war in Iraq supposed to make oil cheaper?
The price of gasoline and a barrel of oil hit record highs this year. While economists are quick to remind us that it is still lower than the inflation-adjusted prices of 1981, we crept closer to that high everyday. The price of oil broke every psychological barrier analysts set for it. Filling up your tank was an increasingly painful experience. The usual suspects were cited: increased demand from China and India (really? Did their consumption jump that high in the space of four months?) environmentalists blocking the development of new refining capacity (why would the oil companies want to build new refineries, since this lack of capacity is what keeps their prices high?) and of course, taxes. Driving by a gas station in 2005 was a depressing chore. Even more filling it up when you'd run your engine on fumes for too long.
And that was before Hurricane Katrina hit and shut down the rest of our refining capacity that the environmentalists were unable to. Prices rocketed to near crisis levels.
After selling 1.5 TRILLION dollars worth of oil since 2002 and pocketing 125 billion in after market profits, what do the energy companies do with the money? Are they trying to discover new oil fields or increase their refining capacity? (I'm sure after the oil shock of this past year, building new refineries would have enough public support to drown out the whines of a few Sierra Club members.) Are they investing money in alternative energy, as interest is high and I'm sure demand will follow...
Actually, what are they doing with that money? Lighting their cigars with hundred dollar bills? They certainly aren't making billions per quarter by just "passing the cost onto the consumer." It got so bad that Bush even took a short time out on his goal of filling the Strategic Reserve (aka. "the scheme to inflate the price of oil by keeping X amount of barrels off the market every day.") When their antics got even the Republicans to start talking about regulation, the price at the pump dropped about a dollar, and everyone's happy....right?
If there was a bright light to be found in any of this, it is knowing that while filling up is putting the pinch on your pocket, the guy driving the H2 with a Bush/Cheney '04 bumper sticker, and a "Support our Troops" magnet from his house in exburbs is getting anally raped.
Bono submitted by thankyougustad
Nelson Mandela has a few ideas on what might help the people of Africa . He says, "our peoples dream of an African Renaissance, as a consequence of which we will overcome a devastating past and ensure that ours also becomes a continent of democracy and peace, respect for human rights, development, prosperity and the restoration of the dignity of all Africans."
Apparently someone named Bono, who spends most of his time riding around in giant rubber duckies with someone named The Edge, wearing $1,800 sunglasses everywhere he goes, thinks the solution to African poverty is music. And not just any music, but his own brand of hypocritical and insipid pop music. Together with contemporary, Bob Geldof (who, on a daily basis, snorts up enough money to feed the entire Sudan), two incredibly rich assholes organized a group of white rock bands to play a series of massively expensive concerts in London to raise "awareness" of the problems in Africa. If that isn't bad enough, it seems to have worked: what does it say about our world when someone with only one name addresses the UN, is named one of Time Magazine's Men of the Year, is given awards by Portugal, and has the ear of the Pope? Actually, that makes more sense now that I think about it. Still, what does it take to make them realize that this choad is doing nothing but capitalizing on the plight of real people in order to sell records?
Maybe extremely wealthy rock stars have a place giving joint speeches with George W. Bush, and maybe Africa can be helped by patronizing white people, but let those people at least have a first and last name.
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