Scott Spiegel

If there’s an 80% chance President Michele Bachmann would repeal ObamaCare, enact entitlement reform, and prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons, I’m sold.

Whatever trivial misstatements she’s made in her political career, this three-term Minnesota Representative is the strongest nominee the GOP has seen so far this campaign season.

Fox News host Chris Wallace recently demonstrated his journalistic integrity and respect for women in politics by asking Bachmann, “Are you a flake?”

There’s more evidence that Barack Obama isn’t a capitalist than that Bachmann isn’t a serious candidate, though I don’t recall any journalist asking candidate Obama, “Are you a socialist?”  If this is how Fox treats Bachmann, one can only imagine how the mainstream media will treat her.

Fortunately, Bachmann appears quite capable of defending her record.

Unlike candidate Obama, Bachmann has a real work history, with actual responsibilities, including five years’ tenure as a tax attorney, and experience running two mental health clinics, a charter school, and a family farm.

Unlike Senator Obama, Bachmann productively used her time in Congress, taking leadership roles on allowing drilling in ANWR, repealing the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, and replacing ObamaCare with free market reforms.

Bachmann has labeled herself a “constitutional conservative”—precisely the correct label to use in this bizarre era of pay czars, light bulb bans, and trillion-dollar deficits.

Bachmann is a more seasoned version of Sarah Palin and an excellent substitute for Palin fans who believe the former governor unelectable.  (And if depicting Bachmann staring off-camera is the best Saturday Night Live can do to mock her, the 2012 election is going to be no career-booster for Kristen Wiig.)

Bachmann may not have extensive foreign policy experience, but she’s clearly capable of fighting the United States’ gravest enemies, as evidenced by her having survived growing up in a Democratic household.

America’s favorite Tea Party hostess stands up to powerful RINOs in the House who refuse to get serious on spending.  She organized and chairs the vital Congressional Tea Party Caucus.

To top it all off, she’s electable, as evidenced by her recent dead heat showing with Mitt Romney in Iowa, her first-place finish in a national Zogby poll, and her winning performance in the New Hampshire GOP primary debate this month.

Naturally, liberals have temporarily recovered from their Sarah Palin hysteria and are developing a creeping case of Bachmann Derangement Syndrome.

Steve Benen at Washington Monthly, for example, branded Bachmann a conspiracy theorist for her claim that Obama wants Medicare to go broke so seniors will be forced to rely on ObamaCare.  Bachmann was in fact mistaken: She failed to note that Obama also wants all private insurers to go broke so the whole country will be forced to rely on ObamaCare.

Benen called Bachmann’s concern that federal voluntary “community service” might lead to mandatory service “obvious madness.”  Apparently Benen was unaware that the original version of the GIVE Act authorized a “Congressional Commission on Civic Service” to address “whether a workable, fair, and reasonable mandatory service requirement for all able young people could be developed, and how such a requirement could be implemented…” (p. 267 in a 275-page bill).  No mandatory service here—move along!  The Commission was eliminated from the bill after conservative uproar, but this incident highlights Democrats’ modus operandi for sneaking unpopular provisions into legislation: First they tuck something objectionable deep into a bill where few will read it; then Republicans find it and raise objections; and finally Democrats remove it, deny it was ever there, and scoff at Republicans for “fear-mongering.”

As another example, Washington Post “Fact Checker” and partisan hack Glenn Kessler derided Bachmann’s claim of $105 billion in implementation funds being “hidden” in the ObamaCare bill as “ridiculous,” giving it a maximum rating of “four Pinocchios” on his truthfulness scale.  In fact, former Appropriations Committee member Ernest Istook confirmed that the authors’ act of authorizing so many new programs and funding them in the same bill was highly unusual.  The legislation isn’t clear on what the money will be spent on, and Obama-appointed bureaucrats are unlikely to be held accountable for it.  Neither the Washington Post nor any other major news outlet reported on the $105 billion implementation sum—probably because, as Bachmann noted, it was broken into small pieces and scattered throughout the 2,000-page bill.  But because the provisions weren’t written in invisible ink, Kessler claimed Bachmann was lying through her teeth.

The liberal site Think Progress blasted Bachmann as being crassly calculating for observing that Democrats hope to transform American society into one that’s more dependent on government, thereby securing a permanent “power base.”  In liberals’ projection of their own vile behavior, Republicans preventing Democrats from buying votes via taxpayer-funded entitlement programs is somehow the equivalent of Republicans buying votes.  This is like saying that Republicans’ efforts to prevent Democratic voter fraud is Republican voter fraud.

In Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi claimed that on Hardball, Bachmann had demanded McCarthy-style investigations of Congress to determine which of our leaders are anti-American.  In fact, Bachmann was merely responding to an endless, tiresome line of questioning from host Chris Matthews, who had introduced the label ‘anti-American’ and was trying to get Bachmann to pin it on her colleagues.  Matthews whined, “How many Congresspeople… There’s 435… How many are anti-American?… How many people in the Congress… How many do you suspect?”  After fending off his badgering for several minutes, Bachmann finally replied, “You’d have to ask them, Chris,” and added, “I wish the American media would take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out, are they pro-America or anti-America?”  Not exactly the Salem witch trials.

These are just a few threads in the tangled web of “conspiracy theories,” “lies,” and “gaffes” that supposedly disqualify Bachmann from office.

Bachmann may not be the perfect candidate—who is?—but she’s the best conservatives have among those currently in the race.  I’d rather have a president with 80% of the facts at her command than one who governs according to 100% discredited crackpot redistributionist economic theories.



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What do the following quotes have in common?

“If you get hit, we will punch back twice as hard.”

“If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.”

“I don’t want to quell anger.  I think people are right to be angry.  I’m angry.”

“I want you to argue with them and get in their faces.”

“I’m itching for a fight.”

“Fight for it!”

“We’re gonna punish our enemies.”

“Our job is, keep our boot on [their] neck.”

“We talk to these folks… so I know whose ass to kick.”

“[Republican victory would mean] hand-to-hand combat.”

That’s right—they were all shouted at Tea Party rallies by Sarah Palin supporters resentful over a black President!

Actually, they were all uttered by our Commander-in-Chief or members of his administration in reaction to electoral, ideological, and other political opponents.

All are also apparently examples of the “civility” Democrats keep demanding conservatives display when engaging in political discourse.  This command was most recently circulated after Jared Loughner attempted to assassinate Representative Gabrielle Giffords and killed six people at an event in Tucson, Arizona.

Liberals are up in arms because last year Sarah Palin’s website featured a map pinpointing the locations of Democrats in conservative districts who voted for Obamacare, with a crosshair symbol over each one.  Giffords was one of the Democrats Palin targeted.

The map was accompanied by a pep talk from Palin that included such violent, blood-soaked rhetoric as “Let’s not get discouraged.  Don’t get demoralized.  Get organized!”  (Palin considered putting Hello Kitty images over her targets, but her handlers decided crosshairs would better fit her brand.)

To make the case that Palin/Tea Party rhetoric inspired Giffords’ shooter, a thinking person would ask whether Loughner was a Palin/Tea Party follower, and thus whether he could possibly have been inspired by them.

Anyway, moving on to what Democrats did, they instinctively shrieked that the right wing was creating a “climate” of vitriol and hate that was erupting in spontaneous acts of violence.  (We know how good Democrats are at making climate predictions!)

In fact, what we learned about Loughner is that he “favorited” a creepy YouTube video showing a terrorist lookalike burning the American flag.  (Remind me: Is flag-burning one of the major planks of the Tea Party platform or just a minor recommendation?)

Former classmate Caitie Parker wrote of Loughner, “As I knew him he was left wing, quite liberal. & oddly obsessed with the 2012 prophecy.”

Loughner’s favorite works of literature include The Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf.

Some commentators have argued that Loughner was not consistently right-wing or left-wing, since the Manifesto is left-wing but Kampf is right-wing.

In fact, Kampf’s author—Adolf Hitler—and his party were dyed-in-the-wool socialists, as in Nazism = Nationalsozialismus = National Socialism.

Closer to today’s liberals than today’s conservatives, the Nazis believed in an all-powerful government with centralized power held by smarter-than-everyone-else elites, not a limited government distributed among many sources and concentrated on the local level.

Chapter 12 of Volume One of Kampf is called “The First Period of Development of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.”  Volume Two is titled “The National Socialist Movement.”  The Nazi platform included such gems as “That all unearned income, and all income that does not arise from work, be abolished,” “We demand a generous increase in old-age pensions,” and “The abolition of ground rents, and the prohibition of all speculation in land.”  I think it’s safe to classify Kampf as a left-wing publication.

Maybe Loughner’s mental illness led him to embrace such extremist works.  But I notice that paranoid schizophrenia somehow never induces people to become feverishly obsessed with The Road to Serfdom or the collected works of Milton Friedman.

Unlike what the more honest elements of the mainstream media have been telling us, Loughner isn’t a random crazy—and he’s not even a random crazy leftist.

Just during Obama’s time in office, we’ve been subjected to:

•    A leftist anti-Semite opening fire in D.C.’s Holocaust Museum

•    A posse of union thugs beating up a black Tea Party supporter at a town hall meeting

•    A liberal biting off a conservative’s finger at a health care protest

•    A left-wing Obama supporter and biology professor shooting three fellow professors in Alabama

•    An anti-corporate Obama voter crashing his plane into an IRS building

•    A liberal Ground Zero Mosque supporter stabbing a Muslim cabdriver in lower Manhattan

•    An environmentalist trying to blow up the Discovery building in Maryland

•    A 9/11 Truther opening fire on policemen in the Pentagon

At this moment, spoiled leftist thugs are torching Greece, France, Great Britain, and half of Western Europe, upset that the socialist way of life their governments promised them is unsustainable and must be scaled back ever-so-slightly.

But according to liberals, we’re suffering from a deluge of conservative hate speech that’s derailing public discourse and sparking acts of violence.

Our own President’s dearest friends, mentors, and idols have called for violent overthrow of the government, and in some cases actually committed such acts, including: William Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Jeremiah Wright, Louis Farrakhan, Frank Marshall Davis, Mark Rudd, Van Jones, Andrew Cloward, Frances Fox Piven.

Meanwhile, the Tea Party’s most violent association is Sarah Palin clubbing fish with her children on “Sarah Palin’s Alaska.”

If Democrats wanted to claim that every act of political violence is committed by a disturbed, nonpartisan nut job, fine.  Republicans would be classy enough not to attribute the actions of an admittedly long string of psychotic lone wolves to the entire population of liberals.

But if Democrats keep trying to pin these acts on right-wingers, we will punch back twice as hard.

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• Left, right struggle to define Loughner (politico.com)
• “VFR readers comment on the left’s Big Lie and the truth about Jared Lee Loughner” and related posts (amnation.com)
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Saturday Night Live (SNL) is held up by “television historians” as a paragon of insightful, ruthless satire of the political scene.

Whatever merits SNL might have once had in that department, lately its level of political analysis has been about as deep as the shot glasses its writers undoubtedly empty before they pen each week’s program.

In its recent season opening skit—which was overlong and dolefully unfunny, like the rest of the show these days—SNL mocked Delaware Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell over—wait for it… her wacky background!  The tasteful, thoughtfully written sketch included an O’Donnell impersonator admitting that she masturbates constantly and an interlude in which the onanist pleasured herself off-set and returned to ask fellow performers for snacks.

Two years ago, during the 2008 presidential election, Tina Fey’s impression of Governor Sarah Palin was a hit, not because it was especially accurate, but because (1) it was amusing to watch the antics of this colorful, clueless, moose-hunting politician Fey had created out of whole cloth who bore no characterological resemblance to her real-life model, and (2) there was schadenfreude in seeing the snarky Fey gussy herself up and try but fail to imitate the classiness and charisma of the real Palin.

In a similar display of what passes for the evidentiary basis for Democratic public policy nowadays, comedian Stephen Colbert testified before the House last week on the plight of migrant workers.  Colbert cited as firsthand experience the publicity stunt whereby he recently spent a few hours in comfy upstate New York being photographed loading crates of vegetables for the United Farm Workers.  Colbert bored and abused committee members with his bottomless ego, then demonstrated his pro-gay credentials by telling a charming joke about Iowan “corn packers” that caused his audience to groan in revulsion.

Even Democrat John Conyers, Chair of the Judiciary Committee, had to ask Colbert to leave the hearing during the middle of his testimony, though his sponsor—nutty California Democrat Zoe Lofgren—urged him to stay.  House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer was later shamed into calling Colbert’s testimony “an embarrassment.”

And Jon Stewart, the number one hard news source for leftists under 40, is bringing his oh-so-clever Rally to Restore Sanity to the National Mall next month, where it will compete with Colbert’s isn’t-it-ironic March to Keep Fear Alive.  Both are supposed to be satires of Glenn Beck’s recent Restoring Honor rally and the massive Tea Party gatherings held in D.C. the past two Septembers.

So millions of sincere and patriotic Americans travel hundreds of miles to the nation’s capital on a heartfelt quest to show solidarity with fellow citizens who are disgusted with unprecedented government spending, regulations, and deficits—and the brightest and most influential minds on the left respond by pointing fingers and giggling at protestors’ clothes.  How about a Stewart rally defending the merits of the stimulus bill or ObamaCare instead of one poking fun at people for wearing tri-corner hats or dressing up like Benjamin Franklin?

Contemporary leftists have learned that one way to avoid sober analysis is to ridicule one’s opponents for personal quirks and fringe elements in their followings.  It’s true that laughter can be used to draw in an audience or emphasize a genuine point, but it can also be used to sidetrack discussion and win over sympathizers via a superficial, crowd-pleasing style rather than through probing facts and penetrating arguments.  As political communication expert and professor Lauren Feldman reports, “[P]olitical comedy suppresses argument scrutiny.  What this means is that when audiences are exposed to political humor or satire they are less likely to counter-argue the information contained in the message or question the fairness or accuracy of the message, relative to a non-humorous message.”

If comedy’s what the public wants, then a truly astute, non-PC SNL political satire would, say, chronicle the addle-headed trillion-dollar stimulus bill and its ludicrous, disproven Keynesian assumptions; the administration’s risible invention of the “jobs created or saved” metric; its snail-paced implementation of projects, tongue-tied lies about funded projects, and use of funds for ridiculous pork projects; and the bill’s predictably laughable failure to bring down the unemployment rate.

A series of hilarious sketches might skewer ObamaCare proponents’ side-splitting claim that the law will cover 30 million more Americans yet somehow bring down the cost of care; the preposterous Wile E. Coyote schemes Democrats plotted to pass the bill such as reconciliation, “deem and pass,” the Christmas Eve vote, and the Cornhusker Kickback; and Democrats’ kamikaze obduracy in passing the bill against the public’s wishes.

But no: having Kristen Wiig don a witch’s hat and fly away on a broomstick—now that’s getting to the heart of what’s wrong with the political system in America!

Since they’re so obsessed with the backgrounds of Tea Party candidates, let’s consider the history of various storied SNL actors’ fates: died from drug overdose (John Belushi), died from drug overdose and obesity (Chris Farley), murdered by drug-addicted wife (Phil Hartman), committed suicide (Weekend Update anchor and Reagan impersonator Charles Rocket), for starters.  These are part of the cadre of fine, upstanding thespians lecturing O’Donnell for having friends who dressed as goths in high school.

Republican politicians need SNL, Colbert, Stewart, Bill Maher, and other leftist chuckleheads like an elephant needs a flock of blue-footed boobies picking nits off its backside—less, actually, since the birds provide a useful function by keeping the elephant clean.  These “comedians” feed on the right-wing political class like parasites, then pass off their antics to rubes on the left as serious political discourse.



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Recently the mainstream media was howling with derision over the fact that Sarah Palin had written a few words on the inside of her hand to remind herself of the key themes she wanted to address in her speech at the Tea Party Convention in Nashville last week.

Admittedly, one would have expected subjects such as Energy, Tax Cuts, and Lift American Spirits to be top-of-mind for Palin, who has consistently and admirably embodied these stances throughout her career, including her 2008 vice-presidential run.

What the MSM did not explain was how Obama’s ubiquitous reliance on his TelePrompTer, including at a recent pep talk with sixth-graders in Falls Church, Virginia, somehow reflected a greater skill at extemporizing or a more masterful command of facts on his part.

The Associated Press chided Palin for relying on a memory aid after having mocked Obama’s use of his TelePrompTer.  It’s true: Palin did jot down a few notes to help her stay focused during her 40-minute Tea Party Convention keynote address, the second-most important speech of her career.  Was Obama’s five-minute chat with 11-year-olds at Graham Road Elementary School so important to his legacy that it required twin, six-foot-tall TelePrompTer monitors to help him get every word right?

Meanwhile, Joe “Gaffe-tastic” Biden has continued to demonstrate his propensity for committing more blunders in any given week than Palin has made in her entire life.  Appearing on Larry King last week, Biden stated that the Iraq War “could be one of the great achievements of this administration.”

This is the same Iraq War, you’ll recall: (a) that Obama voted against, (b) that Biden voted for but later turned against, and (c) whose troop surge Obama and Biden voted against and denounced throughout 2008, even after it had demonstrably worked.  In 2007, Biden condemned General David Petraeus as “dead flat wrong” for wanting to go through with the surge rather than immediately withdrawing our soldiers and partitioning Iraq into three ethnic regions.

It would be one thing if circumstances had improved dramatically in Iraq since Obama took office, and the administration had acted quickly to remove troops ahead of schedule, thus saving the U.S. time and money and improving relations with Iraqis.  But the drawdown of 90,000 troops currently taking place was spelled out in 2008, according to a George W. Bush-negotiated arrangement, the Status of Forces Agreement, and is unfolding exactly as written.  So Obama doesn’t even deserve credit for “ending” the war in Iraq.

Saying that Iraq could be one of the great successes of the Obama administration is like saying that the stagehand who pulled the curtain on the debut of Così Fan Tutte is responsible for one of the great successes of the Metropolitan Opera House.

Then there’s Biden’s nutty defense of the Justice Department’s decision to read Christmas Day bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab his Miranda rights after just 50 minutes of questioning.  Biden noted that the Bush administration gave the same treatment to shoe bomber Richard Reid in 2001.  Unfortunately, Biden is blissfully ignorant of the fact that the military commissions to detain Islamic terrorists had not even been set up by the time the shoe bomber had struck.  Reid attempted his attack three months after 9/11, whereas Abdulmutallab attempted his attack eight years and three months after 9/11.

Let’s not forget that Biden was one of the chief opponents of the Afghanistan surge Obama reluctantly ordered in late 2008.  Biden had argued behind the scenes for increasing drone attacks to pick off Al-Qaeda members, and against sending more troops to fight counterinsurgents.  Fortunately, Obama didn’t listen to Biden, and the surge is already demonstrating results, as in Tuesday’s apprehension of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the most significant Taliban capture in over eight years.

This has been the pattern for a year-and-a-half now: Palin makes true statements—that the Vice-President is the head of the Senate, that the health care bill would require panels of bureaucrats to ration care—that are denounced as “gaffes” and “lies,” while Biden regularly weaves twisted fantasies out of cotton candy and is heralded as the voice of wisdom and experience.

The clincher that the MSM held Palin to a higher standard than Biden throughout the 2008 presidential campaign is that they constantly compared her record to Obama’s, not Biden’s.  (“The Republicans’ #2 doesn’t have that much more executive and business experience than the Democrats’ #1!”)

It takes a serious degree of intellectual dishonesty for Democrats to claim we are safer with Biden as Vice President than we would have been with Palin.

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Lindsey Graham, Olympia Snowe, Dede Scozzafava… whoops—that’s the Huffington Post’s Top 10 Conservatives of 2009!

10. Hannah Giles, Conservative Activist and “Performing Artist” – Twenty-year-old Giles helped bust ACORN with her brilliantly direct scheme of walking right into their offices and asking their staff if they’d help her set up a prostitution ring with underage El Salvadoran girls, to which they responded by falling all over themselves to comply.  It’s so horrifying it’s like those classic psychology experiments in which researchers had no idea their subjects would actually carry out their instructions, like Stanley Milgram’s electric shock experiment.

9. Sarah Palin, Democratic Congressional Reelection Death Panelist – This summer Palin helped put Democrats’ health care “reform” initiative on indefinite life support by identifying the logical conclusion of their plans to expand health care coverage while slashing Medicare and not increasing the deficit—i.e., health care rationing, or “death panels.”  In addition to resigning in July and saving Alaskans millions by heading off costly and baseless ethics complaints against her, she released an autobiography that’s on track to become the best-selling political memoir ever.

8. Dick Cheney, Former Vice President and Current Presidential Superego – If there’s anything that can compensate for not having Dick Cheney as VP anymore, it’s getting to hear him expound on the pigheaded mistakes the new President is repeatedly making on foreign policy.  Cheney hammered Obama for promising to close Guantanamo Bay, for releasing the “torture” memos, for “dithering” over his decision on General Stanley McChrystal’s request for more troops in Afghanistan, and for bringing self-confessed 9/11 masterminds to Manhattan for civilian trials.

7. Rick Santelli, CNBC Editor and Ranteur Extraordinaire – On a wintry day in February, some prescient burst of fiery indignation took hold of this outspoken CNBC commentator, who railed on-air against the irresponsibility of Obama’s Homeowners Affordability and Stability Plan and got the CME Group futures traders on the floor around him up in arms.  His idea led to the grassroots Tea Party Movement, which spawned rallies on April 15, the July 4 weekend, and September 12 in thousands of cities across the country, with hundreds of thousands of attendees.

6. Doug Hoffman, RINO Party Crasher – Though he lost the special election for the open House seat in New York’s 23rd congressional district, he came remarkably close to winning, and he forced out a RINO who had backing from ACORN and was as bad as or worse than the Democratic candidate.  Hoffman reenergized the GOP on a national level, and an Obama visit or two to New York’s 23rd district, like the multiple stops he made for losing gubernatorial candidates in New Jersey and Virginia, would probably have pushed Hoffman over the top.

5. Liz Cheney, Accomplished Conservative Mother of Five Who Isn’t Palin or Bachmann – Cheney tirelessly fought off the fact-deficient ravings of Andrea Mitchell, Norah O’Donnell and others, demonstrating the temerity desperately needed by the GOP in defending its principles against an MSM stacked against us.  Cheney will indisputably be a figure on the national political scene in coming years, because she’s already said she’s “open” to running for public office—and in politics, “no” means “maybe” and “maybe” means “yes.”

4. John Boehner, House Minority Leader and Stimulus Bill Percussionist – Boehner played an unassuming but important role, out of the spotlight, visible mostly only to his colleagues on the House floor.  He consistently pushed for free market reforms to health care and denounced the Democrats’ plans to increase government involvement and spending in health care.  He also ably deconstructed Obama disasters like the stimulus bill and Cash for Clunkers.

3. Rush Limbaugh, Racist Attention-Seeker Who Hates Obama for Personal Reasons – Rush could have taken the year off and coasted into the top 10 with the cumulative influence he’s had on the conservative movement, but in 2009 he had a particularly effective year, one in which he dissected the Obama administration’s schemes and always kept his listeners one step ahead of the MSM.  Rush stated early on, “I hope Obama fails.”  Everyone, including Rush’s opponents, knew exactly what he meant—and Rush never backed down from his statement.

2. Michele Bachmann, America’s Favorite Tea Party Hostess – This was the year that Bachmann, like Liz Cheney, became a conservative rock star.  She rallied the troops at Tea Party gatherings, including the massive march in D.C. in September, proposed her own health care reform bill, and cosponsored others.  Gail Collins labeled her “Washington’s newest Famous Strange Person,” proving once again that liberals have no measure of the force of the reinvigorated conservative movement that is about to hit them.

1. Mark Levin, Best-selling Author Never Interviewed by ABC, CBS, or NBC or reviewed by the Times or the Post – Sarah Palin was photographed carrying it at rallies, Michele Bachmann called it “the book of all time,” and Rush Limbaugh predicted conservative college students would clandestinely pass it around in plain brown wrappers.  Levin’s Liberty and Tyranny was the best-selling nonfiction book of the year, spending three months at #1 on the New York Times bestsellers list; Levin also had the best year yet of his radio show, still the fastest-growing in the country.

Honorable Mention: Joe Wilson, Destroyer of Obamacare Illusions – Wilson refused to let Obama get away with lying about illegal immigrants’ not being covered under his health care reform bill; the Democratic denouncement of his “You lie!” outburst resulted in a heated, protracted debate over an issue that was supposedly already settled.

Ineligible, but Fought the Good Fight: Joe Lieberman, Obamacare Obstructionist – He’s not reliable—he marched three miles to the Capitol on the Sabbath to vote for a $2 trillion spending bill, after all—but this Independent Democrat stalled health care “reform” almost long enough to push the Senate’s deliberations into the no-man’s land of a midterm election year.

Special Award: Jake Tapper, Reporter So Ruthless in Investigating Obama You Couldn’t Tell What Party He Belonged To – From uncovering Tom Daschle’s unpaid taxes to investigating the President’s phony stimulus spending claims, Tapper deservedly ended the year at the top of Mediaite’s list of most influential journalists in the country.