Mid-Michigan readers can hear Rick Cole every Tuesday at approximately 6:30 a.m. on Lansing radio station WILS 1320’s “am Lansing” program hosted by Walt Sorg.

by Richard Cole
January 16, 2009

Here’s my Top Ten list for 2008…

10. How about Alan Greenspan, an original member of Ayn Rand’s “collective,” telling Congress he had been wrong on the central tenet of his economic philosophy for more than 40 years? What, you say? Unchecked capitalism could be greedy enough to self-destruct? Go figure.

9. And from the Only Nixon Could Go to China Department, how about George W. Bush nationalizing the banks on his way out of office?

8. Or how about that 32-year-old Zen-master muscle man with the Pepsodent smile playing 90 holes of a U.S. Open with a “broken wheel” — and still beating the field of the world’s greatest golfers?

7. Then there is the crime-fighting Governor Spitzer, caught with a high-priced hooker in an act now known as a “Spitzer.” Next, he turns over his office to his trusty lieutenant, who, in his acceptance speech, blurts out that he has a zipper problem too. Not to be outdone, in a real man-…or should I say woman-… bites-dog twist, the new governor’s wife blurts out, “me too.” That has to be tops, right?

Well, not exactly.

6. How about the congressional committee insisting it has the wisdom to manage the auto companies, and then telling the presidents of those companies this: it makes better sense for you guys to take two winter days driving back and forth to Washington than it does to fly together, or to catch the 7AM from McNamara like the rest of us? Only in America.

5. How about an American auto company so tone deaf that it would spend millions of dollars branding a football stadium, and then letting the stadium be occupied by the biggest bunch of losers ever to wear a professional football uniform?

4. And then there is Sarah Palin. Here is the latest. In the same week that her pregnant daughter’s future mother-in-law gets busted on a drug charge, the governor’s daughter has the baby and — you cannot make this up — they name the kid “TRIPP.”

Three left, and I haven’t gotten to the governor trying to sell the Senate seat, or the senator tap dancing in the Minneapolis airport men’s room, or Kwame Kilpatrick?

3. Here is one that could easily get under the radar, but you have to think about it. How about comedian Chevy Chase admitting that he developed his “Gerald Ford stumbling buffoon” routine specifically to get Jimmy Carter elected president?

2. And just when you thought you had seen it all, leave it to OJ Simpson to give triskaidekaphobia a good name. For a 60-year-old, the “9 to 13” he got might as well have been “life” — for stealing his own stuff. The sentence came down exactly 13 years to the day that he got off after killing his wife and her friend. So, we get back to justice, or is that karma? And speaking of justice, or karma…

…here is the grand daddy of them.

1. These very same United States just elected a president who was born in a state that only became a state a year or two before he was born in it. He is a mixed-race American who is going to sit behind the same desk that another president used only a short time before this president was born to call in federal troops to protect the rights of Black kids to go to a public college. And then, in his first news conference as president-elect, this southpaw, south-side community organizer tells the American public that he’s looking to buy his kids a “mutt” — his words — “just like me.”

Is this a great country, or what?

Richard Cole is professor and chairperson of the Department of Advertising, Public Relations and Retailing at Michigan State University. The opinions expressed reflect his individual viewpoint and not that of the university.