U.S. – Daniel Schorr’s commentaries on NPR are consistently trivial platitudes whatever his former journalistic prowess.

Canada – I’d vote for Rex Murphy. He’s a pompous windbag who uses a rococo vocabulary that he doesn’t understand to state opinions that are usually daft, obvious, or indiscernable. His commentaries on the national public television news show, weekly call-in show and his columns in the Globe and Mail should all be abolished.

And despite the fact that he is spectacularly wrong about so much these days, he still hits his old stride now and then (Falwell takedown, recent short article on the death of Bohemia).

Why are they bothering? Why are they alternating between distancing themselves from Bush (who was never a real conservative anyway) and cheer-leading for his most transparently venal policy?… Surely there is some way they could ignore this ANWR fiasco-in-the-making, and so look less like nimrods, but still retain their credentials.

Simple partisanship is always a big motivation. Oil companies are allied with their side and environmentalists are generally allied with the other side, so conservative pundits defend oil companies and attack environmentalists as a matter of course. Money’s a factor – some pundits are likely getting paid by think tanks or other institutions that are partly funded by oil company donations.

And they have no reason not to cheerlead for the oil companies. I don’t think many of them are concerned about their credentials. Their rightwing audience judges pundits’ reputations on the basis of their loyalty to the party line, not on their integrity or expertise, and so long as they maintain that loyalty they don’t have much to worry about. The press is still afraid of the far right and even major papers like the New York Times or the Washington Post would be very reluctant to can a conservative commentator unless they really had to. Looking sleazy is just not a problem for these guys.

I like Snorhagen’s idea, of an overall award with categories.

Thanks – but I wasn’t really proposing anything. I just had a hard time picking a single uber-jerk, so I made a list of some of the more prominent obnoxious commentators and divided them into groups because they disgusted me for different reasons.

Maybe it could be called the Golden Winger Awards.

That said, personally, NO ONE gets under my skin like Brooks does. Just the tapioca-pudding writing style of his pleasantries, the *awful* logic, the blatant manipulativeness of smarmy reasonable-guy tone – it makes me angry like nothing since seeing Poison top the charts while Anthrax struggled with their label.

My subjective impression is that Krauthammer pisses me off more than any of them.

That’s why I say get rid of them both–I suspect this is just the same model, only with a few minor surface changes to fool the unsuspecting.

Like the old GEO Prism and Toyota Corolla. Only evil.