The Most Timely Image Award went to... the President. For the last several years, the administration has been justifying its torture policies, in part, based on the "ticking-bomb" argument. (What if a... and he knew about a nuclear weapon ready to go off under your... in X minutes... and you could...) Okay, so there haven't actually been any ticking-bomb suspects? Who cares? Let's move on, as our judges did, because -- to explain the illegal spying the National Security Agency does not do -- the ticking-bomb has just been replaced by the "two-minute phone conversation." (You can almost hear that cell phone ticking.) As the President put it: "We know that a two-minute phone conversation between somebody linked to al Qaeda here and an operative overseas could lead directly to the loss of thousands of lives. To save American lives, we must be able to act fast and to detect these conversations so we can prevent new attacks."

The Political Nostalgia Award went to... the Vice President, giving him his third Folly of the season for teaching us, in the manner of Martin Luther King, that we can have all have a dream -- in his case, of a time when men could be men, torturers torturers, and Presidents felonious. Imagine a heaven of unwarranted wiretaps and spying; then think of Richard Nixon or, as the Veep put it to reporters in the cabin of Air Force Two somewhere over the Middle East, "Watergate and Vietnam served... to erode the authority I think the president needs to be effective, especially in the national security area." Like Superman faced with kryptonite, somebody needed to get rid of the evil elements so that our President could regain the unwarranted lost powers of Richard Nixon. (Of course, one lovely dream invariably leads to another; and so, with the return of the power to do unwarranted surveillance on American citizens, the mind wanders to... Articles of Impeachment.)

Every year the corps of Folly judges offer two awards aimed at the year to come (based, of course, on performance the previous year):

The Terminator Award was given not to the governor of California (who showed every sign of being terminated this year) but to... lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Our panel believed him the year's most likely candidate to make a deal with federal prosecutors and terminate a significant part of the Republican Congress. Back before he took up his cowboy-and-Indian line of work (shuffling casino money largely into Republican coffers and taking members of Congress on golfing jaunts in Scotland), he actually produced two Hollywood movies: Red Scorpion (1989) and Red Scorpion II (1994) with the following, potentially prescient tagline: "He's a human killing machine. Taught to stalk. Trained to kill. Programmed to destroy. He's played by their rules... Until now. They think they control him. Think again."

The No-Matter-How-Bad-It-Is, It's-Worse-Than-You-Think Award was bestowed collectively on the American Intelligence Community for its valiant efforts in over- (under, around, below, beyond, and second) sight. This year, when any aspect of illegal governmental surveillance was revealed, it always proved both worse than expected -- and, not long after, worse again. On that basis, the judges believe there is a 99.99999% certainly that, bad as it looks today, it's far worse than we know. (Just keep in mind John Yoo's twelve or more still-unrevealed memos.)

When an administration proves capable of turning a secret FISA court into a bulwark of our liberties, you know that they're doing something right. So, congrats, Dick and George for another award-winning twelve months of Folly, and welcome to the New Year, where if peace isn't war, privacy isn't snooping, and the price of freedom isn't freedom, then all's not wrong with the world.

Thank you for attending this year's Political Folly Awards. As you leave the ceremony and enter 2006, just smile, you're on CIA/ CIFA/FBI/DIA/NSA camera!

==============

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War.

Read other columns by Tom Engelhardt  

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