The Society of Professional Journalists has just offered up their own nomination:

Helen Thomas Award Is No More

I'll second their nomination. In fact, better yet. Since they're not using the name any more, maybe we could give our own Helen Thomas Awards to things that we nominate in this thread. Once the thread has been going on long enough, I could start a poll with all the nominees. Anyone for whom a majority votes "Yes, it's over the top", wins a Helen Thomas Award!

Looks like Coulter has been nominated for the most Helens so far, but there are still very few nominations. And nothing at all for everybody's favorite targets, Palin and Obama. I'll do some digging...

I've come up with a few things for Obama, but nothing for Palin yet. This is distressing because I've tried to do this like The Missouri Compromise, nominating something liberal and something conservative at the same time. Problem is, I pay a lot more attention to Obama than I do to Palin. He's Pres, she's not. She's not Veep. She's not even a governor any more, just a celebrity that a lot of people love and hate out of proportion to her importance. In short: I don't follow her closely enough to know what to nominate, so hopefully someone else can jump in and do that job.


Here are some things for Obama, though. They're worse than some of the charges the Democrats have made against Palin (like that she uses the same targeting metaphors that they do), but less bad than what I personally would consider over the top. So I'm not going to go so far as nominate these, only to run them up the flagpole, to see who salutes them, and to provide perspective (i.e. if these are okay, then quotes equally bad or less bad must also be okay).

I consider Franken better than Coulter because he is trying to arouse a different emotion. He applies ridicule to arouse derision, while Coulter seems to want to inspire anger. She is definitely worse.

Both seem to be part of the problem rather than the solution, I don't really care which is worse (though again, the only actual nominations we have on the table are two book titles, and a poorly thought out anti-evolution article that doesn't seem to be exactly the kind of thing we're looking for here).

Michelle Malking has just chimed in with a blog entry entitled The Progressive Climate of Hate that has so many examples of things worse than anything we've talked about here, and worse than anything Palin ever said that the Democrats blamed the Tucson shooting on, that it's going to take some time to go through it all and see what to nominate from it (In Obama-speak, they brought a knife, she brought a gun).

In fact, there's so much here, that let's limit it a bit and say that our Helen Thomas Awards have to be given to a public figure or institution. Nominating Coulter and Franken is fine. Nominating Madonna, Sandra Bernhard, or the Getty Museum (from Malkin's missive) is also fine. But the one about profane racist tirade by unnamed Obama supporter is no good because it's an anonymous kook. There's no one to come up and accept the award if we actually gave it to him. The one about orchestrated mob violence against GOP convention is okay because there's an organization attached to it (Austin Affinity Group). And so on.

I'll say one last thing in defense of Franken: he actually ran for office, and he's gotta be taking a big pay cut as a senator. At least he puts money where his mouth is.

Maybe, but remember that Franken himself hasn't actually been nominated here, just the title of one of his books.

I've been trying to come up with something to balance out Malkin's tidal wave. Hopefully something about Palin, since she's the one the Democrats are so obsessed over. I've had a look at a few "Palinism" pages of her quotes. While there are indeed several quotes that look pretty silly, I couldn't find anything that really fit the spirit of the thread. Yet.

So I'm going to go ahead and toss out the one that the Democrats themselves offered, with another double. As with the Obama quotes, I'm not actually nominating them myself, only running them up the flagpole for comment. I plan to vote no on both of them when we get around to the vote.


SARAH PALIN: For using campaign ads with bullseyes on target districts.

DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMMITTEE: For using campaign ads with bullseyes on target districts.

The difference between Sarah Palin's and the DNC's use of bullseye imagery is that Palin has also said things like 'Don't retreat; reload'. Has the DNC, or any Democrat for that matter, used similar language?

You may find a host of such statements from President Obama up above.