Biggest pat on the back award

Aside maybe from the staff of Lucky: The Magazine About Shopping, is there any magazine as consistently hare-brained as The Weekly Standard? Maybe that's a strong word to use. They're not stupid, they're just infinitely less clever than they think they are. Look at this cover. Can you imagine all the disgusting, sanctimonious self-congratulation that went into this cover? Oh, we are so noble, we chose a good true-blood American unlike that socialist Time Magazine that dared to choose a non-American as person of the year. How patriotic we must be. A few things need to be brought up here:

-Time's choice of Vladimir Putin as Person of the Year, besides being a completely worthless award to bestow upon anyone (remember last year?), furthermore does not necessarily constitute an endorsement of that individual. The award goes to those who have done more to "influence the events of the year," as they say. The award has previously gone to Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin. I invite any contributor to the Weekly Standard to try to prove that Time had a pro-Hitler or pro-Stalin agenda.
-Putin, arguably, did influence the world more than any other individual. He already has a leg up on the competition in that he is president of the 9th most populous country in the world. The fact that he managed for the most part to put it in order (at the expense to some degree of individuals' specific rights, specifically journalists--back me up on this, Vitaly) is a mind-boggling achievement.
-Just because they didn't give the award to Petraeus doesn't mean they don't like Petraeus. Obviously, it is highly selective. I'm sure Petraeus would have been fourth or fifth, at least.
-Just because you give an army general your own bullshit award doesn't mean you suddenly win the patriotic award, Bill Kristol. It's still a badly mismanaged war, and bestowing Petraeus, a basically decent and noncontroversial figure, with the title of "American of the year" is basically a ploy to simultaneously undercut any criticism of the war while deflecting any criticism of your own views. Imagine declaring, say, Paul Wolfowitz or Dick Cheney as American of the year. You couldn't do that unless we were actually winning.

I was about to say something like I feel bad for Bill Kristol these days, being such a shill for the administration that he hardly counts as a journalist, let alone a decent human being. Then I found out he is now a columnist for The New York Times.

Ick, I can't believe I just defended Time Magazine.