Time Magazine selected Vladimir Putin as its Person of the Year and yet managed in its fawning interview with him to get his birth year wrong by six years. Inspired by Time’s crack staff and more generally by the spirit of silly end-of-the-year lists and meaningless nominations, I propose semi-presidential candidate Chris Dodd as the first-ever P+P Person of the Last Month of the Year. The man took a singular inspirational stance this month against the unabashed broad-based movement in Washington to (1) extend the Bush administration’s anti-Constitutional warrantless spying program and (2) grant amnesty to the dirty rotten collaborating telcoms, which for years have been exchanging our privacy for a continued invitation to the smoke-filled rooms of profit-making policy creation. For details, read Glenn Greenwald’s account of how Mr Dodd went to Washington and fought the good fight only to be doubted, villified and condemned for it by his peers, a sure sign if ever there was one that he had done something right.

Time magazine columnist Joe Klein appears to be the latest Judith Miller— ie, a careerist journalist and damned shoddy reporter who has been manipulated by the “well-placed sources” he depends on for advancement and whom he will protect at all cost. A column he wrote last week has been dissected by Glen Greenwald at Salon and many others and shown to be—in addition to completely muddled—shot through with planted misinterpretations by Republican sources who, through Klein, decried recent Democratic federal eavesdropping legislation as weak on terror for proposing to prevent the U.S. government from eavesdropping on calls made outside the U.S. by non-citizens— or as Rush Limbaugh might put it, “for providing lilly-livered protections for those who mean to do us harm.”

Klein made some half-assed excuses for this blatantly false interpretation of the legislation that culminated in him saying that, in effect, the House bill he had been so stridently writing about was in fact too complicated for him to unravel, that he had “neither the time nor the legal background to figure out” who was interpreting its provisions correctly. The comment thread following this craven backpedaling is priceless.

Best, and the reason for this post, is that after dodging for days, Time finally gave up Priscilla Painton as the editor of the column. Greenwald and journalist Jane Hamsher called Painton to ask about Klein’s sources and to find out what Time was going to do about the errors in the column. After ten seconds, that’s right, Time Deputy Managing Editor Priscilla Painton hung up the phone! That’s how much Time magazine (circulation 4 million) thinks about investigative journalism! You can leave a polite message for Priscilla, asking her to come clean about the sources behind Joe Klein’s misinformation, at: 212-522-2022, or you can email Priscilla’s boss, Rick Stengel at: richard_stengel@timemagazine.com. Please do!

Glenn Greenwald at Salon wrote a post this week dissecting some of Dubbya’s recent speeches. He argues that the president’s speech writers have turned a corner, moving from merely absurd hypocrisy to taking advantage of the president by having him deliver hilariously winking self satire. Given that Hollywood writers aren’t writing anything these days, Bush’s speeches are the best public comedy going. Recent material, for example, sees the man lauding government separation of powers and detailing earnestly how his main task as president is to defend the law of the land. Serious. In delivering these sentiments, his writers bring him to dizzying, nearly slap-stick, rhetorical heights that frankly put Colbert to shame. This is a sample from a speech this week to the Federalist Society:

The President’s oath of office commits him to do his best to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” I take these words seriously. I believe these words mean what they say… Others take a different view. They forgot that our Constitution lives because we respect it enough to adhere to its words. (Applause.) Ours is the oldest written Constitution in the world. It is the foundation of America’s experiment in self-government. And it will continue to live only so long as we continue to recognize its wisdom and division of authority.

Too much!