Every night at 8 p.m. on MSNBC, Keith Olbermann awards his daily pick for "Worst Person in the World." Some contenders are lucky — or unlucky —enough to be nominated more than once.
The bronze, and this is a Worst’s first, President Bush. That snide exchange with Senator elect Jim Webb of Virginia, in which Webb and Bush both looked kind of bad. Mr. Bush looks kind of worse. Congressman Jim Moran of Virginia says the president had been warned by aides to be, "extra sensitive about talking to Webb about his son," since Webb’s son had had a recent brush with death in Iraq.
Our runner up tonight, the departing chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Joe Barton of Texas. He will lose the chairmanship shortly, but he will not give up his fight to keep the world safe for global warming. He told the American Petroleum Institute that to say we have to do all these global things to prevent the earth from getting warmer, in my opinion, is absolute nonsense. Congressman, on the day that your constituents in Corsicana can go to the brand new Gulf Coast Beach on Old Navarro Road, remember you said this.
But our winners tonight, we’re not sure where to pin the blame here. How about the whole unnamed family from South Carolina. Great Grandma got the 12-year-old boy a Nintendo Gameboy Advance for Christmas, but she wrapped it up, put it under the Christmas tree and told him not to open it. Hadn’t he punched a police officer last month, it was perhaps no surprise that the boy opened it anyway, whereupon his mother called the cops and had her 12-year-old son arrested for unwrapping the expensive Christmas present that you got him anyway too early.
A not very functional family in South Carolina, Tuesday’s Worst Persons in the World.