Catching up with an item from last week, on the Christmas weekend edition of the McLaughlin Group which featured the show’s annual “Year-End Awards,” Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift named Cindy Sheehan her “Person of the Year.” Clift championed Sheehan’s negative impact on President Bush: “I give it to Cindy Sheehan, the Gold Star mother who gave the President a vacation from Hell and brought the war home in a way that it hadn’t been before and set the stage for the deceleration in the President’s poll ratings.”

In other categories, Clift assigned the “Best Spin” to the “shameless spin” from the Bush White House of “allowing the terrorists to kill thousands of Americans in Iraq so that they won’t kill thousands of Americans here.” For “Fairest Rap,” Clift forwarded: “The Bush administration misled us into war. They exaggerated the evidence they believed was true and left out all the caveats.” And for “Best Photo-Op,” Clift picked “President Bush trying to get out of a locked door. Wonderful metaphor for the trap he’s in in Iraq.”