Laughing At The Hypocrites and Mediocrities Who Rule Us

I inaugurate each new year with a column recognizing the most idiotic utterances from the politicians and media types who have anointed themselves our superiors. In truth I could write a Kozmo Awards column every week with all the barnyard effluvia that typically finds its way into the news. It requires a great deal of discipline to limit myself to just two such columns per year as we wave goodbye to the old year and greet the new. The year just past easily presented me with the juiciest selection of targets of opportunity in the 18 years that I've been doing this. Obama worship and environmental alarmism reached levels that deserve their own chapters in abnormal psychology texts.

Unfortunately, this psychopathology has so gained the upper hand in our popular culture that I've begun to feel like the man in the fable about the village whose grain bins were tainted with ergot, a natural source of the hallucinogen LSD. He was selected to receive the village's single portion of clean grain so that somebody would remember that everyone else was crazy.

And so in awarding the 2008 Kozmos, I hope to remind you of what is sane and what is not.
Nancy Pelosi is the Speaker of the House of Representatives. As such, she was easily the most powerful Democrat in the country last year. Wouldn't you find it comforting to learn that she grasped the essentials of the critical issues facing the nation? I'm sorry to disappoint you. On NBC's Meet the Press last August, Speaker Pelosi explained her opposition to oil drilling: "I believe in natural gas as a clean, cheap alternative to fossil fuels," she explained. Later in the interview she extolled natural gas as, "cheap, abundant and clean compared to fossil fuels."

Notice to Pelosi acolytes: Natural gas is every bit the fossil fuel that oil and coal are. And burning natural gas releases carbon dioxide just as burning oil and coal does.

Nancy Pelosi fails on alternative fuels, but wins big with the Alternative Reality Kozmo.

Only one man could win the Al Gore Memorial Kozmo for carbon footprint hypocrisy, and that's Al Gore. Last year, Al Gore won for hosting a Nobel Prize celebration in Scottsdale, Arizona to which he and Tipper arrived in a private jet, as did his guests. He served exotic delicacies flown in from around the world.

Well, during the year just passed, Al Gore spent his winnings on a new carbon-belching toy - a 100-foot long houseboat complete with high performance personal watercraft. The irony proof Al Gore christened his carbon belching yacht, "Biosolar One."

For most of the last year, the mainstream media had to dig deep to stoke the alarmism that sells papers. It was USA Today that won the prize for the most Ridiculous Fear-Mongering Kozmo of 2008 with its prediction that, because of global warming, 20 foot long giant snakes would slither into the southern one-third of the United States, swallowing pets and children.

"As climate change warms the nation, giant Burmese pythons could colonize one-third of the USA, from San Francisco across the Southwest, Texas and the South and up north along the Virginia coast, according to U.S. Geological Survey maps released Wednesday.
The pythons can be 20 feet long and 250 pounds. They are highly adaptable to new environments," America's News McPaper predicted.

There is no reason to believe that either Al Gore or Nancy Pelosi is willing to give up their jets, so hide your children. Snakes are going to eat us all.

But, there is a bright light in the global warming darkness. Not all environmentalist wackos simply stoke fear. Some seek out novel solutions and they deserve recognition. The Live Like Ed Begley Environmentalist Kozmo of the year award goes to Al Gore and Brad Pitt admirer, Beverly Hills plastic surgeon Craig Alan Bittner. Perhaps inspired by the movie "Fight Club," Dr. Bittner is accused of using his patients' liposuctioned blubber to fuel his and his girlfriend's SUVs. As Bittner himself boasted on his website: ""Not only do they get to lose their love handles or chubby belly but they get to take part in saving the Earth."

While this might appeal to the biofuel crowd, the California Department of Public Health and the California Board of Registration in Medicine, among others, have some issues with Dr. Bittner.

At last report, Dr. Bittner had fled to Columbia. It's too bad that California authorities can't recognize true genius when it manifests itself. Hopefully Dr. Bittner will win this year's Nobel Peace Prize.