Time Magazine Promotes, We Surmise
The Time Magazine Man of the Year roadshow rolled into D.C. this morning at an ungodly hour despite the snow to get D.C. opinion leaders' opinions on who Time should've chosen (since they've probably already decided) besides You, you narcissistic bastard. To help not decide, they invited Senator Sam Brownback, Representative Ellen Tauscher and Time Magazine employees Mark Halperin and Karen Tumulty. We don't know why that group of people, really, but they fed us coffee and miniature pastries so that we couldn't ask because our mouths were full.
Time Washington Bureau Chief Jay Carney led off the morning with the most hilariously inappropriate introduction ever of a panelist when he introduced Brownback as a failed Presidential candidate whose obvious supporters in the right deserted him for no good reason. Brownback then copped to being, well, Brownback-y, saying he'd wanted to nominate The Unborn as person of the year (goddamn anti-abortionists will take anything defining fetuses as people these days) but settled on The Immigrant, and not just because he got a zillion Kansans calling his office to bitch that he didn't hate brown people enough. Tauscher liked the idea, but went with the iPhone instead because of the way technology is re-shaping our lives (and maybe because her staff forgot to check the archives and note that Time did that with The Computer in 1982).
Halperin went with virtually unknown Defense Secretary Robert Gates (wonder who he's trying to score an exclusive interview with?) and Tumulty went with China because they want our energy, they're screwing up our foreign policy and their adventures in toothpaste production have made Americans envy British teeth. But, in the end, Carney might have given it away by getting them all to talk about why they didn't talk about Al Gore, he of the Oscar, the Nobel Peace Prize and the reinvention that makes people forget what a shitty candidate he was in 2000. Oops. Way to go Dan. Guess I don't have to buy the magazine again this year.