L’s 2011 Doofus Awards

 

The Year of the Dumbass has almost ended, thank the Fates. 2011 has been a year of bountiful idiocy, served up in every category of life on Planet Earth.  Never in history has the list of laughable lunacy competed in length with the laudable and annually lauded achievements of homo sapiens.

Though it was extremely challenging to winnow this list of moronic behavior down to a manageable number, listed below are my picks for my First Annual Doofus Awards:

Although there were some high-profile criminals     such as Casey Anthony, Florida’s young mother who killed her three-year-old daughter (acquitted by a boneheaded jury), and Dr. Conrad Murray, Michael Jackson’s physician who administered the lethal dose of Propofol that took the pop star’s life (convicted and sentenced to four years), the Doofus Award for Crime must go to Tawander Simmons, the 35 year-old woman of Stone Mountain, Georgia who checked her 17 year-old son, Benny Brice and two other boys, out of Stephenson High School one Friday morning. The four then robbed a Wells Fargo bank in Lilburn, GA, 20 miles outside Atlanta.

There was no shortage of nominees from Hollywood, God knows.  Is there ever?  Kim Kardashian, of the Hollywood Kardashians, moguls of the famous-for-doing-nothing industry, was certainly top of mind at the time of these award considerations.  Public opinion has deemed her infamous 72-day marriage to NBA player Kris Humphries an $18 million publicity stunt, while she plays victim and he gets booed at the arena for nobody-knows-what.  But nothing holds a candle to the web-based meltdown of bad-boy Charlie Sheen.  What fool who stars in television’s number one show gets on the internet and brags about his live-in goddesses, his tiger blood and his “winning” ways?  All while looking like a drugged out mad man who is ultimately fired from his lucrative job and stages a poorly executed one-man show.  Charlie Sheen, the Doofus Award for Hollywood goes to you, Bubba.

The winner in this category is getting the award solely for being the media person who I find unbearably irritating.  You might be thinking Glen Beck or Bill O’Reilly or Howard Stern or even Piers Morgan – and each of them is surely a doofus.  But my choice is a person who is really known mostly for writing memorable lines like “Read my lips, no new taxes” and catch phrases like “a thousand points of light.”  I’m sure the Elder President Bush appreciated her admirable ability to turn a phrase, but the Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan is the worst political pundit on television.  Her patrician, over-enunciated whispery speaking style makes me want to slap her when she finally manages to get a sentence out.  Peggy, it gives me considerable pleasure to present the Doofus Award for Media. And yes, I know (or at least as FAR as I know) you haven’t done anything particularly stupid.  You are just irritating.

This category is a veritable cornucopia of possibilities.  Given my political leanings, one might expect this award to go to any one of the current crop of Republican Presidential hopefuls.  Rick Perry’s “oops” moment was unfortunate; Herman Cain…well, pick one, I suppose, but his brain blip on Libya made him look even stupider than his arrogant assumption that his 13-year “friendship” with Ginger White would escape undiscovered; Mitt Romney’s $10,000 wager… But no, this year’s award is going, with “certitude,” to the Peter Tweeter himself, Democrat Congressman Anthony Weiner.  Sending a snapshot of one’s junk into the perpetuity known as the internet is a boneheaded move that assures his presence on the list of all-time doofuses.

This one is no contest.  The biggest sports doofus in the land today has to be Kobe Bryant of the LA Lakers.  The affable NBA phenom has reinforced the “dumb” in “dumbass” as late as today, the day after Christmas, when he is reported to be trying to save his marriage to the beautiful Vanessa “for the sake of the kids.”  Since when did bank accounts count as kids?  We first learned that Kobe was a doofus when he was accused a few years back of assaulting a hotel employee on a road trip. A $4 million ring eventually patched things up with Vanessa, but nothing was done about the fact that Kobe had no pre-nuptial agreement to protect his hundreds of millions in the bank. And Kobe continued to drop his drawers with women apparently too numerous to count.  Now that Vanessa has not only had it up to here with his philandering, but has also allegedly found another strong shoulder to lean on which is attached to boxer Victor Ortiz, Kobe is scrambling to avoid losing half his fortune.  When are these numbnuts going to understand they will have to pay to play?  Kobe should have had a tête-à-tête with Tiger.