The 2004 Kozmo Awards

My goodness! Has there ever been a more challenging year for the Kozmo judges? The Kozmos, you will recall, recognize the dumbest, weirdest, most pompous and altogether most ridiculous pontifications and deeds of those who imagine themselves worthy of telling us what to think and how to live.
We all knew that 2004 would shape up as a lively year when the tin foil beanie wing of the Democratic Party seized total control and jerked the Democrats into the Middle Earth of make believe.
The year started with Howard Dean, then the Democratic frontrunner for the presidential nomination (yeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaggghhh!!!!!!!!!), hinting darkly that the Bush Administration may have had a hand in, or at the very least, prior knowledge of the September 11, 2001 attacks. Soon thereafter, every Democrat of consequence genuflected before Michael Moore’s movie Fahrenheit 9/11. Not since “Triumph of the Will,” has a movie so defined a political party. Shortly thereafter, Moore compared Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his band of merry beheaders to the Minutemen of the American Revolution. Further, Moore predicted they would triumph.
For all this, Michael Moore was awarded a seat in the VIP section at the Democratic National Convention, where he parked his prodigious posterior next to former president Jimmy Carter.
My gosh! When one realizes that an entire political party has lost its mind and there are only so many Kozmos to award, what’s one to do? Well, for one thing, one stops wasting precious column space. And, away we go with the 2004 Kozmo awards.
The Excellence in Jurnalizm Kozmo goes to the recently fired (oops, I mean voluntarily retired) CBS Evening News Anchor Dan Rather. The ever-vigilant-and-unbiased Rather broke a story proving that ,as a young lieutenant in the Air National Guard, President George Bush was derelict in his duty, and received special treatment due to family connections.
And to get the maximum mileage out of this “story,” Dan Rather’s producer coordinated with the Kerry campaign and the Democratic Party, which cooperated by producing a campaign commercial for release after the “story” aired.
The story fell to pieces when it was proven that the documents Rather used to buttress his story were obviously composed using Microsoft Word®, which was not even a gleam in Bill Gates’ eye in the early 1970’s.
Perhaps Dan should have gotten the Exploding Cigar Kozmo.
Instead, that prize had to be shared by two even more deserving recipients. One half goes to the United Kingdom’s newspaper, “The Guardian.” A hero of the Left, former Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantissi got what he wished for in 2004, a retirement package in the form of a hellfire missile fired from an Israeli Apache helicopter.
"We will all die one day," he philosophized just weeks before receiving his own gold watch. "Nothing will change. If by Apache or by cardiac arrest, I prefer Apache."
In his obituary, the Guardian described Rantissi, a pediatrician, as a "man who loved the Palestinian children so much that he admitted openly that he was prepared to slaughter Israeli infants to guarantee the future of their Palestinian counterparts."
Such a compassionate man. I’m sure Francois Mitterand shed a tear at his passing.
Considering the Arafat precedent, I’m surprised Rantissi wasn’t nominated for a Nobel Prize.
And speaking of the Nobel Prize Committee, they earned the other half of the Exploding Cigar. One year removed from embarrassing itself by awarding a Peace Prize to Jimmy Carter (I’m still waiting for someone to name one square inch of the earth made more peaceful by his pontifications), and about a decade removed from the indignity of giving the award to Yasir Arafat, the committee saw fit to recognize the efforts of Wangari Maathai, for her role as administrator of a tree planting program meant to combat deforestation. But, she earned considerable notice earlier by blaming western scientists for AIDS.
Kenya’s East Africa Standard newspaper quoted her as saying, "Do not be naive. AIDS is not a curse from God to Africans or the black people. It is a tool to control them designed by some evil-minded scientists, but we may not know who particularly did [it].
Nothing serves the cause of peace more than inflaming antiwestern passions, does it?

The Dr. Jack Kervokian Democracy Kozmo goes to the New York Times. According to the Times, the Spanish elections last year were “ a healthy exercise in democracy.”
An interesting perspective, considering that the outcome turned at the last moment on a terrorist attack that killed over two hundred Spaniards. The bombing was blamed on Muslim terrorists who openly declared their intention to drive Spain out of Iraq – a goal they achieved when enough Spaniards were frightened into voting for the anti-war Socialists.
Fortunately, our democracy is not yet as healthy as Spain’s.
The Mostly Honest Kozmo goes to the United Nations’ Oil-For-Food administrator Benon Sevan. When the scandal first broke, he casually admitted "that as much as 10 percent" of Iraq’s oil revenue had been, “ripped off.”
No big deal: "Even if 10 percent of the revenue was stolen, 90 percent got to the people it was intended for. Why does nobody report that?"
The Gratuitous “Vietnam Veteran” Reference Kozmo goes to John Kerry. Fearful that Americans might forget that he served in Vietnam, John Kerry managed to slip reminders into just about every speech early in his campaign.
Perhaps his most absurd reference occurred on a campaign swing through the Bayou State. While inspecting coastal erosion (a big issue last fall, as you surely recall) from the bow of a fishing boat, he remarked, "I looked out at the shoreline and I commented that parts of it looked a lot like the rivers and coastline that I went through in Vietnam," and that he had, spent a lot of time, "in a habitat that looked a little like this."
Of course, he’s spent a lot more time in habitat that looks like Beacon Hill, Massachusetts and Sun Valley, Idaho. But somehow, that never made it into a speech.
CBS news anchor Dan Rather is a double winner this year, taking home the Head-in-the-Sand Kozmo. After it had been proved to everyone else in the world that Rather had used forged documents in his “fortunate son” attack on President Bush, Rather declared his open-mindedness on the subject.
"If the documents are not what we were led to believe, I'd like to break that story. Any time I'm wrong, I want to be right out front and say, 'Folks, this is what went wrong and how it went wrong.'" Earth to Dan. That story was broken. And you were the last one to understand it.
The New York Times wins itself a second Kozmo, with a Why Pay Attention To Us, We Don’t Kozmo. On consecutive days, the Times published quite contradictory statements. On the editorial page on October 7, the Times opined that: "Sanctions worked. Weapons inspectors worked. That is the bottom line of the long-awaited report on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, written by President Bush's handpicked investigator. . . . As the war continues to bog down, the power of nonviolent international sanctions looks more muscular every day."
In a news story on October 8, readers found this line: "The report suggests that Mr. Hussein was justified when, speaking at a gathering of leaders of the Iraqi armed forces in January 2000, he boasted that despite efforts by the United States and the United Nations to isolate Iraq, he would still be able to buy just about whatever he wanted."
Darn it! Somehow, the Times is going to have to find a way to force the facts to conform with its opinions.
Which, in fact, the Times made a rather respectable stab at during the Dan Rather-Memogate affair. The Times was clearly in sympathy with the thrust of Dan Rather’s fairy tale, but there was that problem with those forged documents. With John Kerry behind in the polls, this story seemed like the last best chance to beat Bush. But those darned memos were so obviously forged that only Dan Rather couldn’t figure it out.
So, the Times interviewed the secretary of Bush’s commanding officer and came up with this memorable headline, “Memos on Bush Are Fake But Accurate, Typist Says.”
My gosh! Does it get any better than that?