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

“The bigotry expressed against Muslims in this country has been one of the most disturbing stories to surface this year. Of course, a lot of noise was made about the Islamic Center, mosque, down near the World Trade Center, but I think there wasn’t enough sort of careful analysis and evaluation of where this bigotry toward 1.5 billion Muslims worldwide, and how this seething hatred many people feel for all Muslims, which I think is so misdirected, and so wrong, and so disappointing....Maybe we need a Muslim version of The Cosby Show....I know that sounds crazy. But The Cosby Show did so much to change attitudes about African-Americans in this country, and I think sometimes people are afraid of things they don’t understand.”

“One of Cuba’s greatest prides is its health care system. Cuba’s government promotes the country’s free and universal medical care from the moment a baby is born as the cornerstone of its communist state....How can one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere provide free care and achieve such impressive health outcomes?...There’s no doctor shortage in Cuba, which means the health care system here can push doctors and nurses down to the smallest rural communities, providing a kind of care that’s both personal and persistent....In an era when countries are struggling to do more for less with limited health care dollars, Cuba’s successes in prevention are likely to be closely watched.”

“Ms. Abramson said that as a born-and-raised New Yorker, she considered being named editor of the Times to be like ‘ascending to Valhalla.’ ‘In my house growing up, the Times substituted for religion,’ she said. ‘If the Times said it, it was the absolute truth.’”

“You also said at one point that you might want to back that [border] fence up with a moat and fill it with alligators. Was that a joke, too?”

“Your colleague in New York, Gary Ackerman, said the Republicans invited the President, quote, ‘to negotiate at a strip poker table, and he showed up half naked.’ And then liberal columnist Paul Krugman calls the deal an ‘abject surrender.’ Would the President be better off running as a conservative in 2012?”

“Well, in today’s ‘XYZ,’ I’d like confess my sins: I drive a Chevy Tahoe. It gets 15 miles to the gallon in the city....I buy 24 packs of bottled water at a time. Then I throw those bottles away without recycling. In the winter I crank the heat up to 75 or 76. All the light bulbs in my house are still the old school, less efficient incandescent bulbs. Those are my eco-sins. I’m confessing them to you because tomorrow is Earth Day.”