Christmas greetings to all our readers. Though it has been a difficult year for many, may this day be merry and bright for all. Special blessings to those who are separated from loved ones this holiday, particularly those who have family members serving in the military.
Human Events, which considers itself the “headquarters of the conservative underground,” picked former Vice President Dick Cheney as the “conservative of the year.” It marveled that Cheney is achieving his new clout the old-fashioned way: talking about public policy. And it contended that Cheney gets under the skin of the Obama administration and the mainstream media because what Cheney says “makes sense to more and more American citizens.”
“As we say farewell to a dreadful year and decade, this much we can agree upon: The person of the year is not Ben Bernanke, no matter how insistently Time magazine tries to hype him into its pantheon,” wrote New York Times columnist Frank Rich. “The Fed chairman was just as big a schnook as every other magical thinker in Washington and on Wall Street who believed that housing prices would go up in perpetuity to support an economy leveraged past the hilt. Unlike most of the others, it was Bernanke’s job to be ahead of the curve. Yet as recently as June of last year he could be found minimizing the possibility of a substantial economic downturn. And now we’re supposed to applaud him for putting his finger in the dike after disaster struck? This is defining American leadership down.”
Rich’s pick for man of the year: Tiger Woods, whose “sham beatific image, questioned by almost no one until it collapsed, is nothing if not the farcical reductio ad absurdum of the decade’s flimflams, from the cancerous (the subprime mortgage) to the inane (balloon boy).”
