Here are the top ten most moronic stories of 2007 as chosen by you, our readers, by your votes and comments. This year I'm feeling lazy, and maybe a bit hung-over, so I'm grouping several stories together into broader categories.

10: Right-wing hypocrites keep getting caught with their pants down. Especially entertaining is the ongoing "DC Madam" scandal, which snared "family values" Republican Senator David Vitter. Vitter once complained loudly about how gays were a huge threat to the "sanctity of marriage"... but apparently prostitutes are not.

9: Harry Reid and Congressional Democrats. Despite promises to hold up President Bush's crony nominations and to get tough on Iraq, Reid repeatedly caved to Republicans, allowing confirmation of Michael Mukasey and sending telecom immunity to the Senate floor. Democrats continually cave to the President's demands.

8: Secret surveillance. The real losers here are the American people. Efforts to find out the extent of the program were blocked by the courts, and NSA head Michael McConnell expects us to believe that the Constitution is deadly.

7: Schools continue to stifle student speech. In one example, an overzealous Christian is forced to apologize for proselytizing during a speech. In another case, a Tennessee school principal suspended a student for participating in the national Day of Silence.

6: Attorneygate. This eventually resulted in Alberto Gonzales's resignation, which seems only natural since he had developed dementia so severe that he couldn't seem to remember anything at all about anything that had ever happened during his entire tenure.

5: Larry Craig. The saga of his "wide stance" continues to this day. He had initially said he would resign after being caught in a police sting in the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport soliciting sex from an officer. Later, he reconsidered and decided to fight the charge. During this time he also voted against adding homosexual people to those protected by the federal hate crime laws.

4: Iraq.

3: Bush vetoed federal funding for Stem Cell research, even though it was carefully crafted to make use only of embryos that were already slated for destruction. He'd rather see them destroyed than used for prolonging and improving human life. That's the Republican "culture of life" in a nutshell.

2: Bush continues to demand blank checks for the enormous money toilet of his Iraq war, and Congress keeps giving them to him. He vetoes any bill which includes any kind of accountability for results whatsoever.

1: Abortion. Notably, hand-winging hysterics over the permit process for a proposed Planned Parenthood clinic in Aurora, Illinois by anti-choice extremists eventually are revealed to be completely in vain: there was no evidence of any wrongdoing.

Don't look now, but here comes another year...

---Nick

vote FOR this article vote AGAINST this article flag as spam/abuse
Log in if you are spatula for more options. 
Find similar articles