2007 Douchebag of the Year

IT'S A TIE! 

Editors' Note: This week, Time magazine makes a splash with its "Person of the Year" issue, designed to push a few copies out the door during a slow news period [Surely, commemorate the most newsworthy individual of the year? – Ed.]. They chose Vladimir Putin. Like, who cares? Anyone remember who the Person of the Year was last year? [Paris Hilton? – Copy Ed.][Sounds right to me – Ed.]

The award that America has breathlessly awaited each year since 1770 is of course the Spy's coveted Douchebag of the Year. This year, it went right down to the wire; at deadline, we had to declare a tie. Please welcome the Spy's 2007 Co-Douchebags of the Year. And thanks for the 37,000 nominations you sent us. 

By Geoffrey Dawson and W.R. Hearst
Of the Board of Editors

To assess the enduring significance of the Spy's coveted Douchebag of the Year Award, you had to look no further than the headlines, which were dominated by douchebags all year long.  

The political world gave us, in addition to our winners, virtually the entire Bush Administration and most senior members of Congress, including all 50 Republican Senators (don't forget closeted Republican Joe Lieberman) and 200 Republican Congressmen.

The world of entertainment was studded with douchebags, including the studio moguls who refused to cut in starving nerdy writers on even a tiny slice of the swag, Douchebag for Life Tom Cruise and anyone who was paid a salary or commission for uttering the words "Brittany Spears."

Sports as usual claimed its share of douchebags, including dog killer Michael Vick, the New York Yankees and their fans, and the NFL plutocrats content to let their brain-damaged alumni rot in Medicaid nursing homes.

And you couldn't open the financial page without running across overpaid douchebags, ranging from CEO's taking home eight figures to run their great institutions into the ground (hi, Stan O'Neal and Chucky Prince), and hedge fund tycoons, who claimed with a straight face (come on down, Bruce Rosenblum L'80!) that the world end if they had to pay taxes at the same rate as their janitors.

Of course, the plague of douchebags respects no international borders, as Pervez Musharraf, Hugo Chavez, Tony Blair and Thabo Mbeki demonstrated. In an alarming trend, foreign nations have boosted their exports of douchebags to the poor, suffering U.S. of A. What did we do to deserve underwear model David Beckham and his fetching frau, Botox Spice?

Despite their best efforts, however, no other country produces douchebags that can compete with the home-grown variety, as the winners of the 2007 Douchebag of the Year Award demonstrate.  

It takes more than repulsive political views. It takes more than a repellent personality. It takes more than a lack of moral integrity. While this year's winners have all those things in abundance, each brings a special something that elevates him above garden-variety schmucks.

Wilfred M. Romney earned his award not just by his remarkable ability to change his values and his principles to suit the fancy of the electorate to which he was pandering at any given time. It was his transcending moments of douchebaggery that attracted our judges, including

• continuing to employ illegal aliens as gardeners at his Belmont estate while advocating the immediate deportation of the 12,000,000 other illegals that were not at any given time raking leaves on his lawn


• remembering how his father, the perfectly reasonable George Romney, marched with Martin Luther King – perhaps in heaven, because it never happened on this mortal coil; and


• reminiscing how he cried when he heard that his nutty religion decided in 1978 that blacks were no longer inferior to whites, having done nothing to question that policy for the first 31 money-grubbing years of his life.

Hard to beat that record, you'd say. And yet co-winner Rudolph Giuliani could not be denied. Always a strong contender for the DOTY due to his public two-timing and humiliation of his then-wife Donna Hanover (which led his two children to forsake him publicly), he achieved Romney-like levels of douchbaggery when it was revealed that he billed obscure city agencies for hot weekends with his low-rent floozy (now the third Mrs. Giuliani) in the Hamptons. His evasive smirking non-apology ("I've made mistakes") can only be regarded as a classic of douchebag brazenness.

In their political lives, too, this year's winners have taken hypocritical bloviation in campaigning to new levels of douchebaggosity. Wilfred's promise to double the size of Bush's law-free Guantanamo concentration camp can be compared only to Rudi's fantastic claim that Ronald Reagan solved the Iranian hostage crisis in one hour after his inauguration, when in reality their release had been negotiated by Carter's Secretary of State Warren Christopher days before. Both bits of nonsense represent an effort to establish the wiener-candidate as a Pattonesque tough guy. This gassy tinhorn posturing itself merits awarding the coveted 2007 Douchebag of the Year Awards to – cue drum roll and volley of pop-guns – Wilfred M. Romney and Rudolph Giuliani.

And to Mitch McConnell, Joe Klein, Alan Greenspan, Ted Stevens, and Ann Coulter – all we can say is: wait 'til next year!