^{The Smirkies: Giving Dumb Conservatives Their Due!}

There should be a contest: How dumb can you be and still get paid to be a conservative pundit? We could give away awards. I'm picturing little statues featuring George W. Bush's famous smirk in gold. Something that says, "I am so underqualified. Can you believe I'm even here?" We could get sponsors and put it on TV with a bunch of invented categories to fill time. Dumbest conservative in print. Dumbest ad-lib. And the annual George Will Award for the conservative you'd most like to see beaten with sticks.

Would this be worse than anything on UPN?

I think we'd have to handicap the women conservatives a bit. A few years back conservatives noticed they and their spinmeisters were all white men so they recruited a bunch of white women to speak for them in carefully controlled situations. At first, they just got their wives. Hello, Lynne Cheney and Barbara Olson. Later, someone sent out what I imagine was a very carefully worded memo pointing out that the wives of conservatives tend to be less than telegenic. So the republicans recruited special lobotomized blondes to be their shills. It's going to be years before the playing field is level. The newbie women have been far outperforming their male counterparts in the sport of dumb commentary.

So we'll have to do it like the Oscars. One Smirkie for women and one for men. To win a Smirkie, you'd have to be employed as a pundit. I'd like to see future nominees really work for a Smirkie. I'd like to see nominees really push the envelope and see just how dumb you can be and not lose work. I've already drawn up some nominees for the women:

Ann Coulter. Shortly after September 11th, Coulter wrote of unspecified Arab nations, "[W]e should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them all to Christianity." This makes me think we might need separate Smirkies for print and TV. Print seems more audacious. Presumably, she reviewed this advice and discussed it with editors.

Mona Charen. The vaguely reptilian Mona Charen has been appearing on the pages of The Hartford Courant regularly. The Courant has been fighting their reputation as a liberal paper for so long and with such vehemence about three quarters of the columnists are currently conservatives and yet people still complain about this "liberal" paper. Molly Ivins appears once a month or so. Mona Charen, Kathleen Parker, and Michelle Malkin appear more often than car ads. Mona gets the nod for this column, in which she blames John Walker Lindh on liberal homes and liberal schools. (I'm trying to restrain myself from ripping apart these ideas with each nominee. I really want to, but it would be like boxing children.)

Ann Coulter. Coulter and Charen (see below) make the argument that you can be nominated twice for the same category. Coulter recently said in a speech, "We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed too. Otherwise they will turn out to be outright traitors." You may have heard of this one. It became the subject of a This Modern World cartoon and was hilariously ripped to shreds in a hig hly recommended column by Jay Bookman. Why do liberals have to apologize for right-wing religious fanatic John Walker? What's the difference between John Walker and Gary Bauer? Five pounds of dirt and a gun.

Barbara Olson. Olson gets the nod for her book The Final Days. This is a tough choice. Olson died on a 9/11 plane and this book was published posthumously. By the time the book was published, many of its accusations -the Bush-spread "trashing of the White House" myth, the "illegal" gifts - were already proven false. Of course, when reporting is interchangeable with vindictive bile, it doesn't really matter. Olson never cared about the truth. She wanted to make you believe the Clintons killed Vince Foster because he wouldn't worship Satan. Charen and Coulter wonÕt be happy about this nominee. Dead people always win the award. It winds up being more about their whole careers. In that spirit, Olson has earned it.

Mona Charen. Mona gets her second nod for this column, Hooray for Men, in which she expresses her hope that 9/11 will make us rediscover our respect and dependence on men. You can read the column if you want, or you could just re-play that Monty Python skit, substituting "Men" for "Spam." "Men, men, men, men, men-ity men!" This is a real stinker. Mona writes about the men who subdued Richard Reid, the terrorist with the shoe bomb on Flight 63. We need men, she writes, to save us in these situations. She doesn't point out that men were needed to subdue the bomber because the bomber was also a man. You could just as easily use the gender of the terrorist to say "Goddamn Men" as you could use the gender of the guys who jumped on him to say "Hooray for Men!" But of course that's not Charen's job.

I imagine Charen is aware of the fact that one of the heroes of Flight 93 who rose up against the hijackers to save lives on the ground was a man named Mark Bingham. Bingham was a rugby player and an out gay man. He sacrificed his life to save others. Do you expect to see a "Hooray for Big Gay Men" column out of Charen any time soon? Me neither.

Maggie Gallagher. Never heard of Maggie Gallagher? No reason you should have really. But that will be a mission of the Smirkies, highlighting work that might otherwise go unappreciated in the field of dumb conservative punditry. Gallagher gets the nod for t his column calling for the federal government to ban states from legalizing gay marriage. More accurately, she reiterates the position of a male activist against gay marriage. This parroting technique epitomizes the work of the female conservative and deserves recognition. Much of Gallagher's writing relies on this guy who says this and that guy who did that.

Gallagher writes that any state recognizing gay marriage is a way of "ripping marriage out of its sexual roots," and serves to "announce that procreation is not any part of the public purpose of marriage, that children do not need mothers and fathers, and that men and women do not need each other." But if only marriages for procreation are legal, then … Easy, Bone Daddy, easy, it's boxing children.

Would the Smirkies be a fun night of television or what? I think it should end with a dance. The only thing funnier than listening to conservatives try to make sense is watching them try to dance.