Editors' Note: This wretched year is finally coming to an end and, like all other media companies, the Spy is running on fumes. So we're going to do what everyone else does: pump out one more issue, call it a double issue, and start ordering doubles until 2009. Think of it as one for the price of two. Time labels its version of this con Person of the Year, and this year it's the least surprising choice since 3500 B.C.E., when Moses was so, um, anointed. When it came time for the Spy's editors to choose the the individual who would be the 2008 Douchebag of the Year, the choice was equally obvious. Like the winner of Time's honor, the Spy's 2008 DOTY breaks new ground. For the first time in the 85-year history of the award, the Douchebag of the Year is someone who might actually be able to put such an object to its intended purpose. Please join in honoring the most adorable Douchebag of the Year ever: Sarah "Grandma" Palin.

2008 DOUCHEBAG OF THE YEAR

You betcha!

By Geoffrey Dawson
and the Board of Editors

Election years almost always generate a bevy of contenders for the Spy's highest honor, Douchebag of the Year.  Last year's co-winners, Rudolph "Family Guy" Giuliani and man from nowhere Wilfred M. Romney, made brief but disastrous forays into the Presidential race, while veteran douchebags like Fred "Ladies' Man" Thompson and Reb Joe Lieberman imposed their hideous visages on innocent television viewers all year long, or at least until Uncle Fred decided he had to take a nap.

But one stood heels and coiffure above all others: Governor, Mom, moose skinner and now Grandma at the ripe age of 44: Sarah Palin, Wasilla's gift to the American polity.

Whether it was her political views (wacky), her personal life (tacky), her blatant abuse of power (sleazy), or the effect she seemed to have on Republicans and reporters (sweaty), in every area in which one could excel as a douchebag, she led the field.

Let us start with some basic truths: she had been the mayor of a small town (and f**ked that up by wasting millions on a hockey rink for her daughter's boyfriends) for 10 years and Governor of the most primitive, backwards state in the nation [Aren't we forgetting Mississippi? – Ed.] for almost two.

Her achievements in that office including taxing the rest of the country (through taxes on oil shipped out of her state) so that she could drop big checks on every trailer and igloo from the North Slope to Ketchikan, and spending hundreds of millions pushing a far-fetched plan to build a $32 billion gas pipeline through Canada while ignoring the companies who own the gas when they vowed never to ship through said pipe dream [Surely, line? – Ed.].

It was this record of achievement that no doubt endeared her to fellow grandparent John McCain, who, piqued by the refusal of his wingnut supporters to accept 1999 DOTY Joe Lieberman, stuck her on the ticket to punish those same wingnuts by giving them just what they wanted.

But a mediocre political career hardly qualifies one to be the Douchebag of the Year. What first caused her to stand out from the mob was her ironclad belief that despite her lack of achievement, intelligence, judgment, expertise, character, or knowledge, she was qualified to serve as President of the United States. Perhaps in her defense she compared herself favorably to the incumbent.

She showed her douchebag colors when she wowed the Republican hatemongers in St. Paul by reading with gusto a sniveling attack on things she had never before heard of, like "community organizer." Then, like the coward and nitwit she proved to be, she hid out from a press corps eager to learn her views on matters she had previously never spoken to, such as war, peace, Iraq, Afghanistan, torture, Presidential power, and fiscal and economic policy. To cover her tracks, her handlers turned back media interview requests by snarling about the effrontery of those liberal elitists, who dared to demand an audience with someone just because she was running as Vice President on a ticket with a sick old man who looked like he would keel over at any moment.

She had expressed her view on small time [Surely, town? – Ed.][Use that one again and you're fired – Pub.] values, endorsing the entire wingnut creed of chastity until marriage, and uncontrolled fecundity thereafter. It therefore came as a bit of a shock when it turned out that her minor, unmarried daughter had been knocked up by a high-school dropout. In a moment that made her a contender for Douchebag of the Year, she defended both her and her daughter's bad choices, thereby consigning two more generations to the same pisspoor life endured for centuries by ignorant, oppressed women hidden away all across the country.  

(True to its core identity as the Party of Douchebags. the Republicans, both directly and through their in house media operation Schlox News, celebrated the decision by the senior Palins to compel an underage mother to give birth to an illegitimate child without the support of a loutish, uninterested father as the apotheosis of conservative family values. Anyone heard those wedding bells ting-a-linging yet?)

But there was more. She bombed two soft interviews, and later was heard to complain that her First Amendment rights were being violated by critical media, who in her view had no such rights, unless they were exercised to cover up her manifest ignorance.

While this was going on, she attained the heights of douchebaggosity that a winner must reach when it became clear she had blatantly abused her power as Governor to punish some lump state trooper who had divorced her sister.  Then, having promised to cooperate into a bipartisan legislative inquiry, she proceeded to stonewall it, on the advice of high-powered Republican mouthpieces airlifted to Anchorage. She abused her power, lied about it, and then obstructed justice. That kind of hat trick would have been sufficient to crown her Douchebag of the Year.

Yet, as with all truly great douchebags, there's always too much more. She prattled endlessly about how she and her family were just trailer trash [Surely, folks? – Ed.] while spending a cool quarter-million on fancy duds for her and her mouth-breathing husband. She sought to distract attention form her inability to answer Gwen Ifill's softballs by crudely changing the subject and winking at the audience.

We could go on. It was world-class douchebaggery to pimp the GOP talking point that Bill Ayers was somehow Obama's BFF, while at the same time avoiding all questions about her links to Alaskan extremists advocating the dismemberment of the United States. And how about lying about Katie Couric's question about what she read every day to make it seem as if Katie had insulted Alaskans rather than served up an innocent inquiry that generated an infamous deer-in-the-headlights non-response?

There's a lot left to cover, but we're getting too worked up to continue.  If only we could mellow with a few doses of what Bristol Palin's putative mother-in-law peddles from her kitchen door, but we heard she's temporarily (probably for two to four years) out of business. We'll just have to get our Oxycontin elsewhere, probably from 1995 DOTY Rush "Oh my achin' back" Limbaugh.