Douche of the Decade, Round Two: Real Douches Only
Yesterday we offered you 15 exquisite choices in our quest to find who, pray tell, is the douchiest douchebag of the past decade. Today: Some are removed; one is honorarily honored; a Kade-style addition; and crucial second-round voting. Yes, crucial!
Here's how it is: Bill O'Reilly is winning so far, with 30% of the vote. The problem is that Bill O'Reilly is not a douchebag, in the classical "How We Mean It" sense of the word. Mea culpa! O'Reilly is a jerk, a windbag, an asshole, and a repellent media figure. But he's a little too nationally known, media savvy and unironically influential to be a "douchebag," per se.
And this award is simply too important to get wrong. So here's what we're going to do: We hereby award Bill O'Reilly an honorary "American Asshole of the Decade" award. We are removing him as a Douche of the Decade candidate. We are also removing Thomas Friedman, Carrie Prejean, and Andrea Peyser—who, like O'Reilly, do not quite fit the real definition of "douchebag." Simply being annoying, politically repulsive, dumb, and/or wrong does not a douchebag make.
None of this should be taken to mean that these are not bad people for their own reasons. But we want the Douche of the Decade to be a true, self-made, self-important, self-regarding, self-unaware, Gawker-style douchebag. This is important. So we are holding open the voting—those who voted for O'Reilly et al are encouraged to go in and make another choice.