Kozmos Part Deux (or something like that)

And now we wrap up the annual Kozmo Awards, where we honor those special contributions to our nation’s history by those who believe they should direct it.
I don’t recall if a single year has gone by when the senior senator from Massachusetts did not reap a rich harvest of Kozmos. This year is no exception. With the Hero of Chappaquiddick, the difficulty is in sifting through Kennedy’s utterances and separating the chaff from the other chaff to find the most deserving chaff. Ted Kennedy wins the Don’t-Know-Much-About History Kozmo for his recollections about the 1964 presidential election. When Samuel Alito was nominated to the United States Supreme Court, Ted Kennedy declared that: "This nominee was influenced by the Goldwater presidency. The Goldwater battles of those times were the battles against the civil rights laws."
Not only did Kennedy forget that Lyndon Johnson won the election that year, but his math was bad too. Samuel Alito was 14 years old in 1964. No wonder Teddy had to cheat in college.
Nancy Pelosi is now claiming a mandate to do whatever she wants after her party won the mid-term elections. But, before the vote, she wouldn’t even go on the record with an agenda for her party. "I'm even hard put to say what our agenda will be when we win," she told The Hill, a monthly magazine of national politics.
Interesting now isn’t it, that she claims that the voters endorsed views she lacked the courage to articulate before the election. And so, Nancy Pelosi wins, The Vision Thing Kozmo.
The Chutzpah Kozmo goes to the New York Times. After a year when the Times undermined the war on terror through its leaks, in one instance exposing a program it had previously advocated, the Time lectured President Bush on the correct pre-conditions for declassifying secrets. After the Times published selectively leaked fragments of a National Intelligence Estimate, Bush released it all and exposed how dishonest was the Times’ cherry picked partial leak. The Times didn’t like that and scolded the president in an editorial.
“To declassify an intelligence document, officials have to decide whether disclosing the information would jeopardize the sources that provided it or the methods used to gather it.”
If only the Times would adhere to that standard.
Saint Jimmy Carter grows more sanctimonious by the minute. The worst president in my lifetime is neck and neck with Cindy Sheehan in the no-blood-for-oil sweepstakes. And so, it’s worth looking back at the words of the only president who in my lifetime expressly threatened to shed blood for oil.
In his 1980 State of the Union address, speaking to the Soviet Union, he saber rattled, “Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”
And so, for the body of work he has assembled again this year, Jimmy Carter earns the Sanctimony Kozmo, and it wasn’t even close. Jimmy’s in a class all his own.
And finally, we cannot call it a year without recognizing the Grand Supremo Kozmo, reserved for the most nonsensical effort of the year. And this year, it’s hard to find anything dumber than Duke University. Duke is notorious for its political correctness and is well known for scouring the country looking for the next Ward Churchill or Stanley Fish. As such, Duke reacted quite reflexively against the privileged white males who were accused of rape by a black stripper at a lacrosse team party. The university condemned the team, suspended the season and expelled the accused. They were found guilty, not just of rape, but of being white boys.
Unfortunately for Duke, there are two huge problems here. The first is the well-documented problems with the accuser’s credibility. But also troublesome is the fact that without spoiled rich white kids, there would be no Duke University. It costs parents about $40,000 per year to send their kids to Duke. And after seeing Duke’s institutionalized hostility toward their children, many parents have chosen to send their children elsewhere. And now, Duke is begging for applicants and has even asked forgiveness of the students Duke threw under the bus. Just desserts.