TPM is pleased to announce the winners of the Third Annual Golden Dukes! The Golden Dukes are given in recognition of great accomplishments in muckiness including acts of venal corruption, outstanding self-inflicted losses of dignity, crimes against the republic, bribery, exposed hypocrisy and generally malevolent governance.
The awards are named in honor of Congressman-turned-inmate Randy “Duke” Cunningham. It’s been a heady few years for Muckraking, from Allen Stanford to Mark Sanford. But here at TPM we still believe that Duke is the iconic modern scandal. Few so well combine outlandish corruption, national security, sex, and sheer cartoonish ridiculousness.
First, we asked you to help us choose categories. Then we awaited your nominations. Finally, we turned your choices over to our distinguished panel of judges and waited with bated breath.
And the winners are…
For Meritorious Achievement in The Crazy: Orly Taitz!
Susie Bright: Orly Taitz
John Dean: Orly Taitz
Jack Shafer: Joe Arpaio
Paul Kiel: Orly Taitz
Dahlia Lithwick: Mark Sanford
For Best Public-Policy Based Fib: Sarah Palin and the Death Panels!
Susie Bright: Sarah Palin and death panels
John Dean: Sarah Palin and death panels
Jack Shafer: Obama and “I didn’t campaign on the public option”
Paul Kiel: Sarah Palin/Betsy McCaughey/death panels
Dahlia Lithwick: Sarah Palin, Betsy McCaughey and death panels
For Outstanding Achievement in Corruption-based Chutzpah: Joe Arpaio!
Susie Bright: Joe Arpaio
John Dean: Allen Stanford
Jack Shafer: Joe Arpaio
Paul Kiel: Joe Arpaio
Dahlia Lithwick: Joe Arpaio
For Best Scandal — Sex and Generalized Carnality: John Ensign!
Susie Bright: Mark Sanford
John Dean: Tiger Woods
Jack Shafer: abstained (with reason)
Paul Kiel: John Ensign
Dahlia Lithwick: John Ensign
For Best Scandal — Local Venue: Judges Mark Ciavarella & Michael Conahan!
Susie Bright: Ciavarella & Conahan
John Dean: Ciavarella & Conahan
Jack Shafer: Ciavarella & Conahan
Paul Kiel: Ciavarella & Conahan
Dahlia Lithwick: Ciavarella & Conahan
For Best Scandal — General Interest: Mark Sanford!
Susie Bright: Jack Bonner
John Dean: Mark Sanford
Jack Shafer: Charlie Rangel
Paul Kiel: Mark Sanford
Dahlia Lithwick: Mark Sanford
Here are the e-mails we received from the judges, explaining the rationale behind their choices:
Susie Bright
Meritorious Achievement in The Crazy
Orly Taitz, Attorney at Loose
A litigious dentist who might rival Hunter Thompson in ether-delusions, Orly Taitz is the craziest birther of them all.
Her television presence is what really tilts the DSM manual. Every time Taitz opens her mouth, she sounds like Zza Zza Gabor bitching out a Beverly Hills cop. Is there an Orly Taitz bobble-head available, with subtitles?
Forget her contempt of court citations— Orly epitomizes the racial contempt that underlines the birthers’ demand for a birth certificate from a man they don’t even consider their human equal, let alone their President. This mob does nothing but come up with new ciphers for White Insecurity, and Orly is their Platinum Homecoming Queen.
Sarah Palin’s Death Panels
Most lies get one big chance. Their mendacity blooms, everyone takes a big sniff, and then it gets cut off or withers away.
Not Death Panels.
This notion, most passionately co-opted by Sarah Palin, was the Hydra-Headed Hysteria the VRWC always dreamed of. As soon as one head got cut off, another opened its yap.
Palin’s Death Panel posturing did more to screw “healthcare reform” (a phrase now forever captured in quotation marks) than any other effort the insurance industry poured into their venal lobbying.
Of course, Sarah didn’t originate the idea— she steals everything. But because she invoked the vision of her INFANT CHILD being sent off to Death Camp by Obama’s Public Option gas chamber, she wins the Crown of Skulls.
Outstanding Achievement in Corruption-based Chutzpah
Sheriff Joe Arpaio, Arizona
“America’s Worst Sheriff” wins it.
Joe doesn’t just steal, cheat, lie, ruin innocent lives, and boast about it— he also arrests you if you cross him and then he throws away the key.
In fact, the real threat to the Golden Dukes this year is that if Joe wins the Duke, every judge on the TPM panel may be wearing pink underwear and toting pick axes out on a chain gang in the Arizona desert by next week. Consider my choice: courageous.
Best Scandal — Sex and Generalized Carnality
Gov. Mark Sanford, South Carolina
Few scandals rise to the level of elevating the English vernacular. “Hiking the Appalachian Trail” is one of the best euphemisms of the decade, not just the year.
Sanford is a peculiar tragic figure because he wore his deluded heart on his sleeve, a trait his mistress in Argentina did not share. I’ve been waiting for the other hiking boot to drop on his story— not Jenny Sanford’s divorce proceedings, but Mark’s inevitable realization that Miss Argentina may not feel the same way about him that he feels about her.
Markie doesn’t see politics, sex work, and marriage for what they are. Instead, he lives in a boyish dream world cosseted with Divine Blessings from the C-Street Commune. Their entire fraternity should be getting this Dukey, but for now, Sanford can carry the Lubed Scepter.
Ciavarella & Conahan, Pennsylvania:
The Judges who Sent Kids to Jail for KickbacksDoes the phrase “beneath contempt” have any meaning to predators like these two?
I don’t care how much sex or cash the other nominees stuffed in their pie-holes— no one else thought it would be a great idea to poach thousands and thousands of kids— many of whom had done nothing whatsoever criminal— and throw them away in a prison with no release date, all so they could get a taxpayer check for each victim. $2.6 million, to be exact.
The Duke Statuette is too good for them— could crowns of fanged serpents be arranged?
Best Scandal — General Interest
Jack Bonner (& Associates!)
If someone ever finds the smoking speculum in the Palin Baby-Go-Round, which explains the implausible circuitry of Palin family pregnancies, illicit affairs, and gothic revenge schemes, THAT would indeed be the scandal of the year, given the Second Coming platform upon which Palin has nailed herself.
But Andrew Sullivan is not quite Sam Spade and we don’t have the Black Bird in our hands. Perhaps another year!
Instead, I’d like to nominate a dark horse who epitomizes the kind of people who think the voting booth is for suckers: Jack Bonner.
If you want to know how traction is gained by any of the “crazies on the right,” you need look no further than “Bonner and Associates.”
Through the use of “white collar sweatshops”— Jack’s own term for his underpaid temps— Bonner engineered “astroturf campaigns,” a concept he virtually invented.
His mouth-dropping machinations produced cover for Congressmen, be they GOP-kook or Moderate (Cough-Cough) Democrat, to vote foursquare against the interests of their constituents.
Health care, bank reform, labor law, consumer protection— what area of public good and welfare hasn’t been hatcheted by this man and his ilk? This is the kind of “lobbying” that puts democracy in a wood chipper.
John Dean
Meritorious Achievement in The Crazy
My hands-down winner is Orly Taitz. If only half of what has been written about her (see, for example, Wikipedia) she is certifiable. No less an observer than Bill O’Reilly has proclaimed her a “nut” but more importantly a federal judge (when fining Ms. Taitz $20,000 for persisting with her absurd lawsuit over Obama’s place of birth) declared her as “border[ing] on delusional.” For a federal judge to make such a statement is for all practical purposes an irrefutable finding of fact.
Second Place: Michele Bachmann (who no doubt believes everything Orly Taitz claims is true).
Sarah Palin’s Facebook claim that senior and disabled Americans would have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” bureaucrats who would decide if they were worthy of health care based on a their “level of productivity in society” is a big-time fib that has grown into a remarkable whopper. Since she insists on continuing to state it as fact after being awarded the Lie of the Year by the Pulitzer winning St. Petersburg’s Times, which based their conclusion on a public poll where Palin was pitted against seven other high-profile fibbing competitors which included no less than Orly Taitz, Michele Bachmann and even Joe Biden’s ” When one person sneezes it goes all the way through the aircraft,” Palin’s fabrication has grown into a vicious lie. In short, I believe that the 61% of the 4,864 people participating in the PolitiFact poll by the St. Petersburg’s Times who voted for Palin got it right.
Second Place: Bobby Jindal’s Katrina tale is close because of its outrageousness but unlike Palin, Bobby’s fib only hurt him.
Outstanding Achievement in Corruption-based Chutzpah
While clearly not in the league of a Bernie Madoff, Allen Stanford is no small-time operator for he pulled off a significant Ponzi scheme involving thousands of people over many years with his eight billion-dollars in fraudulent investments. Either an operator like Stanford has stupendous gall, herculean impudence, towering insolence, humongous temerity and monstrous nerve or a psychopath’s utter lack of conscience. But whichever or whatever if not all these things it is the stuff of a Duke Cunningham level chutzpah.
Second Place: Sheila Dixon’s is a Little Leaguer by comparison but the pettiness of her offense falls nicely in the spirit of Spiro Agnew’s on-the-take tradition that from time to time surfaces in Maryland politics.
Best Scandal — Sex and Generalized Carnality
Tiger Woods. Just as nobody is in Tiger’s record-setting class on the golf course today, similarly he has no contemporary competitors for his high-profile marital infidelity. (We have yet to learn of the full extent of Tigers extracurricular activity, and while it is not likely that he is anywhere close to Wilt Chamberlain who claimed to have had sex with 20,000 women, Tiger’s is more troubling. Chamberlain died at age 63. If he started having sex at age 15 the experts who have examined this say he had to have at least eight women per week from the age 15. However, Chamberlain remained a bachelor his entire life so he was not engaging in adultery nor was he engaging in unbridled sex at a time there was high risk from such activity.) On the other hand, Tiger’s widespread sexual doings and generalized carnality not only threatened (if it has not forever ruined) his marriage but in these times of widespread sexually transmittable diseases Tiger’s promiscuity may have threatened the health (if not the life) of his unsuspecting wife. This strikes me as the greatest sex scandal of my lifetime — and one of the more tragic. I have been following Tiger closely since he began playing junior golf tournaments in California and then collegiate golf at Stanford before turning professional. What makes this scandal so disquieting is that we all thought we knew Tiger Woods.
Second Place: Mark Sanford, who has newly and uniquely immortalized the Appalachian Trail.
Judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan not only took kick-backs for sending kids to a private juvenile prison facility where the state or local communities had to pay top dollar to house young delinquents but they sent kids to jail for the pettiest of offenses, good kids who had made minor mistakes, kids who had no business being sent to prison. A few examples make the point: as in their sentencing a 17-year-old for five months because he helped a friend shop lift a DVD from a Wal-Mart; sending a 15-year-old off for three months in their co-conspirators’ juvenile camp for mocking a school official on a MySpace page; sentencing a 13-year-old weekend confinement for trespassing in a vacant building - the list is long but you get the gist. These two judges earned not less that $2.6 million running this kickback racket while ruining young lives for their own illicit gain before they were caught red-handed. Now they are serving 87 month sentences in federal prison on a plea bargain deal, and needless to say they will not be sitting again on juvenile or any court cases. For me, this local scandal pales all others nominees.
Second Place: New York State Supreme Court Judge Ronald Tills of Buffalo who engaged in transporting women for prostitution as a judicial perk becoming a small-scale abuser of his power compared to Ciavarella and Conahan.
Best Scandal — General Interest
Mark Sanford. As I have noted in prior years of judging, the dimensions of any scandal are determined by the media and the public’s attention to the story. A scandal involves actions which are considered morally reprehensible by a wide segment of the public, and while nominee Sarah Palin is certainly scandalous, as are the birthers, many people applaud their actions. The other nominees have operated on a far smaller scale than Gov. Sanford, who attracted widespread attention because he was a highly considered prospect as a potential Republican presidential candidate. Without widespread and negative media/public attention there is no real scandal — or at least not a scandal that is recognized as such. Given the attention that Mark Sanford’s story garnered, from the moment he returned from Argentina rather than the Appalachian Trail, he among all the nominees drew the most general interest for his truly outrageous and hypocritical behavior. Because Tiger Woods is not included as a nominee in this category the Sanford story dominated the general interest coverage by the media and public attention.
Second Place: Charlie Rangel, who is not well known outside of New York and his scandal very much still in progress. It is likely we will hear more of Congressman Rangel in the future so he may be deserving of a Golden Duke Award next year. But his potential is sufficiently significant to give him a second-place standing.
Jack Shafer:
Meritorious Achievement in The Crazy
I think that Joe Arpaio saw The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean too many times thinking it was a documentary and decided to emulate the man’s story. When he starts hanging his prisoners, you’ll know what I mean.
Don’t bother me with op-ed page lies or the obfuscations of senators and governors. When the president of the United States is nominated for the Fibbie, you’ve got to give it to him.
Outstanding Achievement in Corruption-based Chutzpah
There’s a thin line between chutzpah and villainy, and Sheriff Joe Arpaio erases it.
Best Scandal — Sex and Generalized Carnality
I abstain. There are no sex scandals. Only prudes.
Judges Ciavarella and Conahan. Maybe they’ve been watching Judge Roy Bean, too.
Best Scandal — General Interest
Charlie Rangel in a walk. He epitomizes the “I’m due my payout” culture of the Capitol.
Paul Kiel
Meritorious Achievement in The Crazy
Taitz, DDS, Esq., packs a potent kind of crazy. Watch any interview of her, and the same pattern unfolds: she starts right out, all smiles, with her opening argument, the host disputes, and still all smiles, her voice starts to rise upward as she counterattacks. Then the spiral accelerates. If the host is foolish enough to attempt to counter her arguments with directly responsive documentary evidence, she has a response at the ready. She claims, through a convolution, that such evidence actually buffers her case, or she cites Hawaii Law 136-985, or she lays out, in a shrill voice, a confabulation whereby that evidence could be yet another forgery. Her imagination and head for arcana make it impossible to pin her down. The host is forced to revert to the root of logic, the element of human discourse, the basis of sanity. As the judge who fined her $20,000 put it, “Unlike in Alice in Wonderland, simply saying something is so does not make it so.” There is no other real response to Orly Taitz, DDS, Esq., than “You’re CRAZY!”
Sarah Palin/Betsy McCaughey/death panels
Even months later, it still takes my breath away: “The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.”
U.S. Senators endorsed the lie. The section was removed from the bill in order to avoid further controversy. And the President responded in an address to Congress.
Outstanding Achievement in Corruption-based Chutzpah
Arpaio’s chutzpah is bigger than the law. When some know-it-all judge gets in his way, he cuts him down to size. When a local prosecutor can’t be found to carry out his bidding, he goes and gets a couple of ringers. Neither Maricopa County nor Arizona could contain him. Now, with the FBI and the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division on his case, his chutzpah is being put to its sternest test yet. Early indications are that he won’t disappoint. And if he brings his all-out war against political and legal enemies to the national stage, Arpaio could threaten to repeat with a Golden Duke in 2010.
Best Scandal — Sex and Generalized Carnality
John Ensign
I’m a big fan of the Sanford scandal as you’ll see below, but Ensign takes this one for the scandal’s strong brew of carnalized messiness and seamy cravenness. Once upon a time, Ensign could cover up his affair with Cindy Hampton simply by labeling her number “Aunt Judy” in his cellphone. But things spun out of control: the Bible buddy interventions, the sorry-I-bagged-your-wife “consulting” gigs, and when conventional beltway sleaziness failed, daddy’s big check.
The villainy of Judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan deserves acknowledgment. The two took $2.8 million in kickbacks from a private juvenile prison company, and in exchange, they made sure the company got plenty of business. They cut financing for the competing county institution and Ciavarella, a juvenile court judge, shoveled inmates its way. But beyond the plain evil, there are touches to make this scandal worthy of a Golden Duke. In particular, you can’t ignore the fact that when the two corrupt judges visited the Florida condo they bought with their ill-gotten gains, they enjoyed the use of the prison company mogul’s yacht, named the Reel Justice. Duke Stir, anyone?
Best Scandal — General Interest
Mark Sanford
Rarely does a scandal intrigue, and then satisfy every single curiosity in so complete a fashion as the Sanford scandal. I feel like there’s very little I don’t know about the inner workings of Mark Sanford’s private life, his heart, and yes, his soul. In fact, I wish I knew less. I know all this because once Sanford’s self-importance, romantic longing, and Christian penitence combusted, it could not be contained. He would not shut up. In his quest to explain himself, there is not a public relations rule he did not flout. Sanford, then, should be a beacon for all scandalized pols seeking redemption: the truth shall set you free!… or at least get you a Golden Duke!
Dahlia Lithwick
Meritorious Achievement in The Crazy
Mark Sanford. Because Bachmann and Taitz represent career-enhancing craziness that may in fact be perfectly rational opportunism. Sanford could and should have been dissuaded from his actions by a nine year old.
Sarah Palin and Betsy McCaughey. It’s one thing to fib your way out of a blunder or a prior vote. Its quite something to lie your way into deceiving millions of people about the substance of a major piece of legislation. Big points too for terrifying the weak and elderly.
Outstanding Achievement in Corruption-based Chutzpah
Joe Arpaio. Good grief. Is there anything he won’t do to suppress opponents?
Best Scandal — Sex and Generalized Carnality
John Ensign. Most of the other nominees just make you sad. Ensign makes you want to peel off your own skin and send it to the drycleaners.
Judges Ciavarella and Conahan. Dirty judges profiting off the suffering of kids. What schmucks.
Best Scandal — General Interest
Mark Sanford. I tried to get excited about the others but Sanford really is epic. It goes beyond greed and stupidity into the realm of Byronic tragedy. The emails! The hypocrisy! The fact the no one will ever again hike the Appalachian trail with a straight face. This one is for the ages…