This is it: After March 24, I am officially out of here. So without further ado, here is the final batch of assorted morons for the Baka Awards.
First up is the “Shooting Themselves in the Head” award for the best display of verbal ineptitude leading to a political suicide. This time, I couldn’t decide on just one, so from both sides of the aisle, we have Trent Lott for the Republicans and the sons of Paul Wellstone for the Democrats.
Sen. Paul Wellstone, D-Minn., died tragically in a plane crash in late October, 10 days before the midterm elections. Quite naturally, the campaign went looking for a suitable replacement, and picked former Vice President Walter Mondale. So far, so good. They also, about a week later, held a memorial service for the late senator.
However, instead of a low-key non-political service that could have been a quiet remembrance of Wellstone and his accomplishments, the service became a rally. Republicans who came to pay their respects were excoriated from the stage, and his sons led the crowd in a boisterous chant of “We will win! We will win!”
News reports later gave at least some of the credit for Norm Coleman’s (R-Minn) win against Mondale to voters’ disgust at the overtly political tone of the memorial. Congratulations. All they had to do was wait one day to start the usual sniping. One day… sigh…
Of course, where it took an arena full of people to politically do in Fritz Mondale, Trent Lott, R-Miss., committed inadvertent political hara-kiri all by his lonesome. How, you ask? He praised the 1948 run of Strom Thurmond on C-SPAN. Thurmond ran on the “Dixiecrat” platform, which was opposed to the civil rights policies of then-President Harry Truman. In simpler language, he praised, in our more PC times, a man who ran on a platform not too far removed from the Ku Klux Klan. Oh yeah. That’s the way to make friends and influence people. Influenced him all the way out of the Senate Majority Leader’s position, and out of any real leadership in the Republican Party.
Perhaps other politicians will take these two cases of self-immolation as an object lesson that just because you can say something, it doesn’t mean you should. Naaaaaah — then I’d be mostly out of a job!
There’s only one clear choice for the “Too Much Information” Award, which this year is a gold statuette in the shape of the club we’re going to use if anyone brings this story up again. Around Thanksgiving, The Washington Post published a story about one of our illustrious weapons inspectors in Iraq. It could have been interesting if the story had anything to do with his job. But nooooo. Apparently, it’s just so important for the world to know that weapons specialist Dr. Jack McGeorge is, along with his other credentials (a wealth of knowledge of biochem weapons and long experience with the Secret Service), a visiting faculty member at the S&M Web site “Leather University,” where he teaches a 500-level course in using ropes and knives in foreplay. The TV networks dutifully spread it all over the airwaves the next morning, playing up the angle as much as possible.
This brings up three points:
1) Eeeeeeeeeew. I don’t like to pry into anyone’s private life, but come on … that’s not sex, it’s a mugging. All of you reading out there: Do you feel aroused when someone presses cold steel in your face? For anyone who answered “yes,” you can find help on pages 569-570 of the Yellow Pages, under “psychologists.”
2) TV news has hit a new low. The man is überqualified to be on the team. Letting his affiliation with his alma mistress out of the bag only serves to titillate. Is it sweeps century already?
3) Eeeeeeeeeew again.
Whoever of the three parties named would like to claim the award, just take it. And please, if you guys at the Post hear of Saddam’s foot fetish, keep it to yourself, OK?