Andrew Sullivan - Friday, December 26, 2003
DRUM-ROLL, PLEASE: Each year, dozens of eager contestants vie to win the prestigious andrewsullivan.com awards for left-wing, right-wing, Sontagian, pretentious and generally clueless utterances throughout the previous year. Our distinguished panel has now reviewed all the entries this year and come up with some winners. They'll be announced in two stages, to allow the judges to, er, celebrate the Christmas season with all appropriate loving kindness and spiritual ecstasy. Here they are ...
VON HOFFMAN AWARD WINNER 2003 (for egregiously bad predictions): "In Baghdad the coalition forces confront a city apparently determined on resistance. They should remember Napoleon in Moscow, Hitler in Stalingrad, the Americans in Mogadishu and the Russians at Grozny. Hostile cities have ways of making life ghastly for aggressors. They are not like countryside. They seldom capitulate, least of all when their backs are to the wall. It took two years after the American withdrawal from Vietnam for Saigon to fall to the Vietcong. Kabul was ceded to the warlords only when the Taleban drove out of town. In the desert, armies fight armies. In cities, armies fight cities. The Iraqis were not stupid. They listened to Western strategists musing about how a desert battle would be a pushover. Things would get 'difficult' only if Saddam played the cad and drew the Americans into Baghdad. Why should he do otherwise?" - Simon Jenkins, the Times of London, in an article called - yes! - "Baghdad Will Be Near Impossible to Conquer," March 28.
VON HOFFMAN AWARD RUNNER UP 2003: "Every so often in life you have to go out on a limb. So here goes: Arnold Schwarzenegger will not be the next governor of California. What's more, his loss will represent an important moment in a shift in American politics that has been in gestation for some time now -- toward a politics in which voters make decisions more on the basis of their cultural affinities than in response to a candidate's charisma or fame... And in the week he's been a candidate, Schwarzenegger's numbers sure haven't gone up. His first round of morning talk-show appearances was judged pretty awful. More recently, as the Los Angeles Times reported Wednesday, there's been enough grumpiness in the Arnold camp that a fairly major shake-up has already taken place, with people like George Gorton, Schwarzenegger's chief adviser over the last couple of years, relegated to the second tier. When campaigns do that, leaks to the press from the disgruntled faction are the inevitable byproduct. And once a campaign gets a reputation as disorganized or divided, that becomes the scent the media decide to track, and the reputation becomes a difficult one to shake." - Michael Tomasky, August 13, relying on the L.A. Times for news, in the American Prospect.
BEGALA AWARD WINNER 2003 (for extreme liberal hyperbole): "I think this is a deliberate, intentional destruction of the United States of America," - Bill Moyers on the Bush administration, as quoted in the Nation.
BEGALA AWARD RUNNER UP 2003: "I feel far more vulnerable and frightened than I ever have in my 50 years on the planet. It is the United States government I am afraid of. Meanwhile, here in our great democracy, Americans go along with the program or remain silent, too afraid of the Muslim bogeymen thousands of miles away to recognize the Christian ones in our midst. Fearful that we will be verbally attacked, or shunned, or lose our livelihoods if we dare question the meanness that characterizes our government and, increasingly, defines our national character. I do not feel safer now than I did six, or 12, or 24 months ago. In fact, I feel far more vulnerable and frightened than I ever have in my 50 years on the planet. It is the United States government I am af raid of. In less than two years the Bush administration has used the attacks of 9/11 to manipulate our fear of terrorism and desire for revenge into a blank check to blatantly pursue imperialist objectives internationally and to begin the rollback of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and most of the advances of the 20th century." - Jill Nelson, MSNBC. |
