The Annual Kozmo Awards, Part One

As is the custom of this column, we celebrate the New Year with a look back at the old. There exists in this country a largely self-anointed class of people who firmly believe that they are qualified to tell the rest of us what to think and how to live. They are in Hollywood, the halls of government and on the editorial boards of newspapers, among other places. These elitists so completely believe in themselves that they rarely hesitate to pontificate at us, even when they would be far better served by a closed mouth. As someone wiser than myself once advised, it is better to keep silence and be thought a fool than to speak up and remove all doubt.
Fortunately, they find such advice thoroughly indigestible and do not possess even half that wisdom. We couldn’t be happier as we wouldn’t be able to have nearly so much fun mocking them. And so, we take a little time and column space to remove any last shreds of doubt you might still hold and recognize their utterances with the Zinc Kozmos.
The latest presidential shoe-in from the Democratic Party is the callow junior US senator from the state of Illinois. Barack Obama, or as Ted Kennedy once called him, “Osama Obama,” warned his fellow presidential aspirants to stay away from what he considers his home turf – the black church: "Nothing is more transparent than inauthentic expressions of faith: the politician who shows up at a black church around election time and claps off rhythm to the gospel choir."
And so, the White-Men-Can’t-Jump Kozmo goes to the fellow that I predict will in two years win the Howard Dean Flameout Kozmo.
The Kozmos are generally reserved for domestic recipients, but our brethren to the north so distinguished themselves in their blind political correctness that we had to go international this year. In fact we have a toss up in the Head-In-The-Sand Kozmo. After a terrorist cell was broken up in Toronto, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Toronto Star professed ignorance about what might have motivated the men.
“They represent the broad strata of our community,” said the RCMP. “Some are students, some are employed, some are unemployed.”
The Toronto Star had this to say: “Aside from the fact that virtually all are young men, it’s hard to find a common denominator.”
I’ll leave it up to you to guess at a motive. By the way, the names of the accused are, Fahim Ahmad, 21, Zakaria Amara, 20, Asad Ansari, 21, Shareef Abdelhaleen, Qayyum Abdul Jamal, 43, Mohammed Dirie, 22, Yasim Abdi Mohamed, 24, Amin Mohamed Durrani, 19, Abdul Shakur, 25, Ahmad Mustafa Ghany, 21, and Saad Khalid, 19. Oh, and one other thing they had in common – they all attended the same mosque, although I’m certain that’s a coincidence.
The Michael Richards Memorial Komedy Kozmo goes to the last man the Democrats deemed the best qualified to carry their party’s banner as a presidential candidate, John Kerry. Addressing a group of students Kerry cracked this knee slapper: “You know, education, if you make the most of it, if you study hard and you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.”
Man he is funny!
The Kerry Memorial Komedy Kozmo goes to U.S. Representative and military draft proponent, Charles Rangel D-NY who followed Kerry’s act with his own zinger: “If a young fellow has an option of having a decent career or joining the Army to fight in Iraq, you can bet your life that he would not be in Iraq. Those who have the least opportunities at this age find themselves in the military, as I did when I was 18 years old... No young, bright individual wants to fight just because of a bonus and just because of educational benefits. And most all of them come from communities of very, very high unemployment.”
That Charlie! He’s hilarious! What? You mean, he wasn’t joking?
And finally, for this week anyway, the Algore Hot Air Kozmo goes to the Polar Thin Ice Expedition to the North Pole to study global warming. They didn’t make it. According to Reuters they encountered, "unusually heavy snow and ice."
More next week! It was a busy year.