The Audacity of Dopes Award for the Wackiest Analysis of the Year

“You know, I was trying to think about who he was tonight, and it’s interesting: He is post-racial by all appearances. You know, I forgot he was black tonight for an hour.”

“I call NPR ‘National Pentagon Radio.’ They’re no more left wing than Fox News as far as I’m concerned. Look at the commentators they have on there, right? They’re all right-wing commentators. I couldn’t get in the door of NPR. I’m sure you don’t appear on their shows either, right? They lean so far right. The idea that they’re part of the liberal media, as if they were. Look, except for MSNBC, these guys control all the media as far as I’m concerned.”

“There was part of me that was hoping this was not going to be anybody with ties to any kind of Islamic country, because there are a lot of people who want to use this terrorist intent to justify writing off people who believe in a certain way, or come from certain countries, or whose skin color is a certain way. I mean, they use it as justification for really outdated bigotry.”

“Well, we’re almost here, aren’t we? The end of a long, arduous, four-month campaign for a Senate seat that you have approximately the same chance of filling as you did the pilot’s chair of the Starship Enterprise....The notion that Massachusetts would elect a Republican to fill the seat left vacant by Edward Kennedy was the property of people who buy interesting mushrooms in interesting places. You might as well expect the House of Windsor to be succeeded on the British throne by the Kardashian sisters.”

“If communists have a reputation for anything, it is seriousness. (And if you have seen old photos of Karl Marx, you know that he did not smile much.) But at the Brecht Forum, a community center on West Street where revolutionaries and radicals gather daily to ponder and to pontificate, they also play. (Smiles abound.)...[There is] the monthly Game Night, when regulars put down their copies of Das Kapital and immerse themselves in table tennis, foosball and a complicated Marxist version of Monopoly called, appropriately, Class Struggle. In a city known for cynicism, the Brecht, which survives on donations, is a surprisingly open and idealistic place.”

“Cuba’s communist leaders mapped out a brave new world of free enterprise on Friday, approving a laundry list of small-time businesses, allowing islanders to take on employees and even promising credit to burgeoning entrepreneurs. The reforms — laid out in a three-page spread in the Communist Party-daily Granma — seem sure to create a society of haves and have-nots in a land that has spent half a century striving for an egalitarian utopia.”

“Why did someone, with apparently so much to live for, simply decide to throw it all away? Faisal Shahzad seemed to be living the American dream. Wife, two kids, nice house in the suburbs, an immigrant from Pakistan bettering himself through education and hard work....Even his signature seems to suggest optimism — it appears a heart is dotting the ‘i’ in Faisal....”