For those of you who find it hard to sift through the density of USA Today, you have asylum in the glossy pages and sidebars of Time Magazine, whom this week have unveiled their annual “Person of the Year” recipient, George W. Bush. Before you take this title and the man it was bestowed upon seriously, it is necessary to understand that (a) the winner doesn’t actually win prizes and (b) previous winners have included Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and Charles Nelson Reilly. Additionally, the guidelines of “Person of the Year” have been bent to include multiple people (Mr. & Mrs. Chiang Kai Shek, 1937), rather vague groups (Young People, 1966), or even hulking nonhumans (Our Endangered Earth, 1988).

Despite the fact that I really don’t care, it’s universally important to consider who else should be nominated for this terrible, terrible prize:

• Paris Hilton (Heiress)
We’ve seen her vagina, we’ve seen her transform from a spoiled, Chihuahua-toting enfant-terrible into a televised spoiled, Chihuahua-toting enfant-terrible, and most importantly we’ve seen her do absolutely nothing. Never before in recorded history has a human being lacked more drive, talent or ambition, yet a recent study at John Hopkins University has revealed that an average four-month-old baby will respond to her image more intensely than it will its own parents. It should be noted, however, that the study is aimed at deciphering brain-wave changes and oral indicators into plain language. The babies were essentially saying “I’m cold, I shit myself, this world really blows, I just want to go back to the place I was before,” and the picture of Paris Hilton was a picture of her vagina, hence “not that way, the way you came in.”

• Karl Rove (Bush Administration/Campaign’s Cheif Strategist)
If Bill Clinton, John F. Kennedy, or even Ronald Reagan had perpetrated such a total mangling of words as “Fool me once, shame on me; fool me twice….mafuba won’t get fooled again..” it probably would have been followed with “wow, I just fucked up, let me start again” or “Did I just recite Who lyrics for no other reason that my mind just exploded trying to remember something that the last time I probably said I was wandering around downtown New Haven coked out of my mind looking for more coke?!” Not our current president; he just kept on going as if nothing had happened. Despite that his heart is clearly as black as moonless night and his meals are constituted of the limbs (and hopes) of orphans, one really has to hand it to Karl Rove for being able to wrangle the Bush animal into appearing to have his shit together (that is, until he makes a fuck up like the aforementioned and has no exit plan). For the most part, Rove’s rather ingenious method of coating Bush’s speeches with peanut butter has successfully given the illusion that Bush can, in fact, speak, and enlisting the services of Yankees pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre to invent a series of hand gestures helped immensely during the debates. Rove managed to turn a small town Texas suburban Connecticutite cowboy trust-fund kid who was voted “most likely to crash a car into a strip-mall Blockbuster Video” into a two-term president.

• Michael Jackson (King of “Pop”)
It’s your year, Michael Jackson! Having squandered your talent on an exponential level since 1979, substituting crazy for quality, it’s finally time to come back to the real world that created you, because you’re going to be living in a small room with a man who wants to love you in the butt on a regular basis! Living in an amusement park for twenty years and squeezing out five million for that sarcophagus replica you’ve wanted all day will certainly make an artist such as yourself too comfortable to want to work, not to mention have them painted as a fucking lunatic. Regular cavity searches, streams of burning toilet paper, and crystal meth will awaken you to new heights of creativity. You’ll come back to us all gangsta and the possibilities are limitless! Start a feud with Jay-Z. Put spinning rims on your fly-yellow stretched Nissan Xterra limousine. Cap some bitches. Whether you want to go all-out rap or just hard R&B, you can drop some science like “chronic gets me high like Rudolph and Prancer/I got bitches on my dick/hot like kids with cancer.” So regardless of whether you are culpable or not, plead guilty and get back to us.

• The People of Afghanistan (Population)
Remember in 2001 when we “brung freedom” to the people of Afghanistan? Also remember how cool they were about it? They’re having elections, Karzai is probably the best dressed world leader since Winston Churchill, and on top of all that they’re into all the same bands we’re into! All that even after the Soviets and Taliban turned a robust agricultural economy into a tumbling tumbleweed. Now take a look at Iraq - we “brang” those guys freedom, and they’re totally being dicks about it!

• Fanta (Carbonated Beverage)
Whilst waiting for a movie to begin at the local cinema, a largely innocent audience was unfairly treated to the garish audiovisual torture of a Fanta commercial featuring five surgically enhanced she beasts offering soft drinks to downtrodden (and sexually frustrated) men who had been in car crashes, mechanical bull mishaps, and combat in Fallujah, only to find that - by God - it was the soft drink that was missing from the equation in the road to recovery for these men. For those of you not in the know, the German branch of Coca Cola was a major proponent of the Third Reich prior to America’s entry into World War II. Max Keith, the CEO of Coca Cola GmbH, was a member of the Nazi party, and he made sure that the Coke logo was associated with Hitler and his regime. When Hitler annexed the Sudetenland, a bottling plant was built there shortly thereafter. After America halted all exports to Axis nations, the syrup required for the Coke formula was in very short supply, so Keith needed to invent an alternative beverage that would serve as “the official soft drink of the Third Reich.” That beverage was the orange soda, Fanta. Following the war, Coca Cola retained the patent on the Fanta formula and continued its production in Europe. So now, Coke seems to have stepped up their American advertising campaign to promote Fanta (and its fruity permutations) here using these singing, dancing, bikini-clad South American babes to make sure that we drink for the fatherland. South American babes? Surgically enhanced? Brazil, you say? No extradition treaty? This is all starting to make sense. It goes without saying that at the end of World War II, to avoid prosecution for war crimes, a lot of Nazis fled to South America, to countries that would not give them up to the Allied powers. If the movies have taught us anything, Nazis like to fuck, so it’s safe to say that they had some kids, and those kids had some kids. Therefore, these “Fanta Bitches” are daughters or granddaughters of former Nazi officers and officials, surgically altered to eliminate Aryan features, and they have come to try to fuck everything up! And the Coca Cola company is probably in the dark about the whole thing; they were likely approached by a shadowy figure in wire-rim glasses who encouraged them to promote Fanta again, lest Coke executives lose their first born in some mysterious mishap. It’s all part of a devious plan by the last remaining Nazi superman to gain the obedience of the American people via soft drink, and force the higher ups to reveal the location of the seven Jew bankers in the vault! After having taken the seven Jew bankers as prisoners and forcing them to reconstitute the monetary system of the world, this shadowy figure, who we’ll call Tod Mörder, will use these funds to create the most devastating weapon even known to man, and threatens to destroy one major city a week until the United Nations cede to his demands. But in 2024, the Remaining States of America have a plan! Steve Rogers! CAPTAIN AMERICA! He’s been in the Untouched Zone in central Montana, training for two years after being rescued from Space Prison on Tentar 7 by Tunnelman and the New Heroes. Captain America will face Möder (now known as Swastikor) in the flaming ruins of Shea Stadium for a final battle that Cybernetically-Enhanced Peter Travers of Rolling Stone will call “the roller coaster thrill ride of the summer!”

Technorati Tags: adolf hitler, afghanistan, bill clinton, blockbuster video, brazil, captain america, charles nelson reilly, chiang kai shek, coca-cola, fanta, george w. bush, hip hop, iraq, jay-z, john hopkins university, josef stalin, karl rove, michael jackson, nazi, paris hilton, peter travers, plastic surgery, rolling stone, ronald regan, the who, time magazine, usa today, world war ii