Susie Bright is a feminist sex writer and Editor at Large at Audible.com
Best Scandal General Interest
Rob Ford
The Golden Dukes competition, so proud in its diversity, a rainbow spectrum of pig slop, is faced with an unprecedented challenge this year: Can one chutspenik, a single inchoate slob, sweep it all?
Mayor Rob Ford, white courtesy telephone. Your crack dealer wants his dignity back.
The metropolis of Toronto, until 2013 best known for circumspection rather than corruption — has entered the world stage “in a drunken stupor” that sums up everything degrading about the affluenza society.
Rob Ford, poor little rich boy. Poor little sexist homophobic racist labor-hating city-plundering toadying fool. Why can’t Bobby get any respect?
No one asked the right question, as Rob expertly pointed out to reporters. The question isn’t how many crimes or how many times — it’s how did Robbie’s now-mortified corporate sponsors ever pick this man-child to represent them, a global village idiot who has rewritten the book on cognitive dissonance?
I’m a former loving resident of Canada, so it’s not misguided patriotism on my behalf. What’s so weird about Ford, is that he’s the Macy’s Parade balloon of everything cringeworthy about American Tea Party exceptionalism, of deep-fried bigotry and prickery that we see so commonly inside U.S. borders.
When we found out Ford’s favorite place to pull a DUI was Florida, it all made sense, didn’t it? This one man makes “Girls Gone Wild” look like a nunnery.
Best Scandal — Sex and Generalized Carnality
Rob Ford
Rob Ford committed one mistake among his peers: they were quite willing to accept any manner of intoxication. Just like British MPs asked if they’re drunk on power or just plain drunk — Ford is a proud product of the Commonwealth.
But cunnilingus? That isn’t cricket.
By bragging on TV that he had all the pussy he could eat at home, Ford scored some unintentional clit points, at his peril. In denying corruption and harassment charges, he essentially admitted he likes to go down on women, that he understands what gets women off, and sexualized his First Lady. With such a decidedly un-macho declaration, he made staid, stiff, sodden Toronto blue bloods sit up and say: “NOW HE’S GONE TOO FAR.”
I’m perversely glad that vagina dentate is what brought the Etobicoke Palace to its knees.
Best Scandal — Local Venue
Rob Ford
Sorry, as we say south of Detroit. So sorry.
There is no other municipality in the world this year whose very name, “Toronto,” (derived from the Mohawk, “where there is mendacity standing in the water”) has become synonymous with scandal.
Meritorious Achievement in The Crazy
Rep. Steve Stockman (R-TX)
Steve Stockman for saying, “If babies had guns they wouldn’t be aborted.”
The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things:
Of guns- and babes- and birth control-
Of Congressional lynchings
And why the sea is boiling hot-
And Whether Steve Stockman Should Drown In It.
The Year In Derp
Rick Santorum
Rick Santorum for pointing out that the fight against Obamacare is exactly like Nelson Mandela’s fight against apartheid.
In summer, when Mandela was gravely ill, he left the hospital to spend his final days at home. I had a private memorial in my mind. I cried in my bed and didn’t post one word about it. I had an awful premonition, Cassandra-like, that when Madiba did pass, all his living enemies — those who’d battled and belittled him, fought the anti-apartheid movement with every gun and law at their disposal — would emerge in black lace, with crocodile tears, to pretend his struggle had been theirs.
And when this nightmare came true — and we witnessed a conga line of racists and ignoramuses cling to Mandela’s memory as if they were civil rights champions — the one thing I didn’t foresee was this: Rick Santorum creating an Upper Class Twit Award all by himself.
Outstanding Achievement In Corruption-based Chutzpah
Rob Ford
I want to say that in a normal year, I would’ve been torn between Evil Clown Christie and the Mingo County Keystone Kops. They’ve given it their all.
But Rob Ford looks down on you, amateurs. He looks down upon you from way, way up high, on Delusion Mountain.
Best Scandal By A Non-Politician
TPM’s story by Hunter Walker, “When Paula Tried to Cook a Sambo Burger,” revealed the memoir of a woman whose Miss Anne life of plantation privilege would curdle anyone’s cream. Every bigoted thing Deen has done is based on a childhood steeped in the traditions of American slavery.
Paula freely admits she “still feels bad” about the retribution she once exacted in the 1950s on her black nanny, a woman she had her grandfather send to jail for giving Paula Princess a spanking.
And why did she get a spanking? — Because PD beat a little black girl’s hands with a bolo bat so hard the girl’s playground blisters popped and bled.
Jesus Christ on a cross. What is the matter with these people?
Paula, along with Fox News et al, is the poster girl for 21st Century Naked Racism. It’s the ugliest and least funny part of the Golden Dukes dartboard.
All year long they’ve regaled us: “Feel sorry for the Klan Wizard; no one understands his pain. Stand your ground, as long as it’s as white as the driven slush. Mean black people are humiliating God’s chosen crackers. Paula Deen is really a nice lady.”
No. She. Isn’t.
Read the full list of nominations here.
