Category: Awards

Yglesias Award Nominee

"I am endorsing Amendment 64 not despite my conservative beliefs, but because of them. Throughout my career in public policy and in public office, I have fought to reform or eliminate wasteful and ineffective government programs. There is no government program or policy I can think of that has failed in such a unique way as marijuana prohibition," – former congressman Tom Tancredo (R-CO)

Yglesias Award Nominee

“This week I called [the Romney campaign] incompetent, but only because I was being polite. I really meant “rolling calamity.” A lot of people weighed in, in I suppose expected ways: “Glad you said this,” “Mad you said this.” But, some surprises. No one that I know of defended the campaign or argued “you’re missing some of its quiet excellence,” – Peggy Noonan.

Yglesias Award Nominee

"The logic of Romney’s fundraising has seemed, for some time, slightly crazy. He’s raising money so he can pile it in at the end, with ads. But at the end will they make much difference? Obama is said to have used a lot of his money early on, to paint a portrait of Romney as Thurston Howell III, as David Brooks put it. That was a gamble on Obama’s part: spend it now, pull ahead in the battlegrounds, once we pull ahead more money will come in because money follows winners, not losers.

If I’m seeing things right, that strategy is paying off. Romney’s staff used to brag they had a lower burn rate, they were saving it up. For what? For the moment when Americans would rather poke out their eyeballs and stomp on the goo than listen to another ad?" – Peggy Noonan.

Malkin Award Nominee

"It's like the judge telling the woman who got raped, 'You asked for it because of the way you dressed.' OK? That's the same thing. 'Well America, you should be the ones to apologize, you should have known this would happen, you should have done — what I don't know — but it's your fault that it happened.' You know, for a member of our State Department to put out a statement like that, it had to be cleared by somebody. They don't just do that in the spur of the moment," – Republican Senator Jon Kyl.

The Dick Morris Award

Scores of readers are echoing this one:

You wrote, regarding Dick Morris’ latest nomination:

He should really be ineligible for this award; the competition doesn’t stand a chance. No pundit is as relentlessly wrong as Morris.

This begs the question, why not rename the award “The Dick Morris” award? I’m a well-read political junkie and a 10-times-a-day Dish reader, and I still have no clue who Von Hoffman is.

Another points to a 2009 post from Ben Carlson:

New York Observer columnist Nicholas von Hoffman notoriously predicted American failure in Afghanistan in 2001, just as troops were marching into Kabul. Has the swing in fortunes in Afghanistan proven Nicholas von Hoffman right, warping the award’s original meaning?

Below are excerpts from von Hoffman’s 2001 piece, cited by Jonah Goldberg when the award was inaugurated:

“The war in Afghanistan, the one (Bush) should never have declared, has run into trouble. Just a few weeks into it and it’s obvious that the United States is fighting blind. The enemy is unknown, and the enemy’s country is terra incognita. We have virtually no one we can trust who can speak the languages of the people involved. With all our firepower and our technical assets and our spy satellites, it looks like we don’t know if we’re coming or going. … “We are mapless, we are lost, and we are distracted by gusts of wishful thinking. That our high command could believe the Afghani peasantry or even the Taliban would change sides after a few weeks of bombing! This is fantasizing in high places. … “Moreover, as hellish as the Taliban are, it appears that the ordinary people of Afghanistan prefer them to the brigands and bandits with whom we’ve been trying to make common cause … .”

Another cites a precedent for renaming the award:

Pollstar, the trade association for the concert industry, gives out annual awards for the top concert venues in the US. For years, every year, the winner of Best Outdoor Concert Venue was Red Rocks Amphitheater. Pollstar finally conceded that all things equal that Red Rocks would always win. It’s a fan and artist favorite … if you’ve been there you understand why. Now, the group splits the award into two: Best Small Outdoor and Best Major Outdoor. Except that the former is called the Red Rocks Award and the venue from which it gets its name is ineligible to win.

Change the name to the Dick Morris Award.

Another:

He is a contrarian indicator.  The more he is convinced about something, the more I am inclined to believe the exact opposite.

As further evidence, another points to Dick’s piece from Friday titled “It’s advantage Romney after Obama fails to move the needle [in Charlotte]”. Another:

On today’s lunchtime video Morris shrugs it off: “I was hoping that Obama wouldn’t get a bounce but he did.” But don’t worry, he reassures us, because Obama’s re-election is doomed! Making this a choice election will “absolutely destroy him” in the debates, ads and messaging.

One more:

Do you remember in 2008 when he thought that Obama was going to win Arkansas and Tennessee? The dude is a hack, and a stunningly bad one at that. He embodies the award. He is the award. The award should be him.

I’ve had an increasingly guilty conscience about keeping that award named after someone who in may ways got the future right – at least righter than I did. So fine. Let’s re-name the award for really bad predictions after this lardacious blowhard. You talked me into it.

Von Hoffman Award Nominee

He should really be ineligible for this award; the competition doesn’t stand a chance. No pundit is as relentlessly wrong as Morris. Glossary here.

Yglesias Award Nominee

“[I]t is possible that conservatives only retroactively realized that Bill Clinton wasn’t the boogeyman they thought he was. This also doesn’t ring true, but let’s assume that it is the case. Supposing these conservatives were wrong about Clinton in the 1990s — isn’t it  fair to wonder if it they might also be wrong about Obama today? (Will this pattern continue? Is it absurd to think we might live to see the day when we are talking about how moderate President Obama was — and how this President Julian Castro is the real socialist?)

As I implied on “Reliable Sources,” the more likely scenario is that, while Bill Clinton was a liberal, many conservatives also engaged in demagoguery when Clinton was president. That sort of conservative prestidigitation may work on people who have no memory of the 1990s. But it also raises some questions about the intellectual honesty of some conservative pundits,” – Matt Lewis.