The Paige Award

In the spirit of Andrew Sullivan's funny little awards for outrageous discourse, I would like to propose the Paige Award. This goes to that person in public life with the most outlandish and offensive comparison of domestic political opponents to terrorists. I name the award in honor of former Education Secretary Rod Paige's February 2004 labeling of the National Education Assocation a "terrorist organization." An early contestant was President Bush's advisor Karen Hughes, when she commented that pro-choice = terrorist:

"I think after September 11th the American people are valuing life more and realizing that we need policies to value the dignity and worth of every life. And President Bush has worked to say, let's be reasonable, let's work to value life, let's try to reduce the number of abortions, let's increase adoptions. The fundamental difference between us and the terror network we fight is that we value every life... Unfortunately our enemies in the terror network, as we're seeing repeatedly in the headlines these days, don't value any life, not even the innocent and not even their own."

And I have a new nominee, from this recent NYTimes article about Christian conservatives -- Missouri State Representative Cynthia Davis:

"It's like when the hijackers took over those four planes on Sept. 11 and took people to a place where they didn't want to go," she added. "I think a lot of people feel that liberals have taken our country somewhere we don't want to go. I think a lot more people realize this is our country and we're going to take it back."

I'm sure there are a few to be found on the left somewhere, but these ones made an impression on me at the time.