It seems so long ago now, after a summer and fall of town hall healthcare rage and Birther conspiracies and South Carolina GOP politician kookiness. But back in the spring, for a few weeks in March, CNBC's "Mad Money" investment advice dispenser Jim Cramer solidified his own nomination for the Year in Crazy by running amok in a distraught state of fear and trembling spawned by a downward-spiraling stock market. Of course, Jim Cramer's shtick is crazy -- his show isn't named "Mad Money" for nothing. His gimmick is to froth and gesticulate and gibber, spewing out buy and sell recommendations like a nuclear-powered popcorn popper. But on March 3, when the stock market was testing the 7,000 barrier, he appeared on the "Today" show in a state of anger that did not appear feigned. Nearly shaking with rage, eyes bulging, he laid into the new president.

In ensuing days, Cramer opened up the heavy artillery. In a pitch for his show, he declared that "Government of, by, and for the corporation is perishing from the Earth [and that] our country is now run by a president and a Bolshevik-leaning Democratic Party that are unfavorable to stocks and the people who own them." He compared Obama's cap-and-trade plan to limit greenhouse gas emissions to Joe McCarthy's House Un-American Activities Committee.

In the weeks that followed, Cramer was called out by White House press secretary Robert Gibbs and then humiliated by Jon Stewart with a series of clips and a riveting half-hour one-on-one interview. But then, suddenly, he disappeared from the headlines, for a very simple reason. He had been utterly, incredibly, irredeemably wrong. Because almost immediately after his crazy outbursts, the U.S. stock market went on a sustained bull run that has continued more or less right up until the present day. Lenin need not worry. If Obama had any aspirations at radical Bolshevik wealth-destruction, he failed miserably.

It is both hilarious and disturbing to go back and review Cramer's "Today" show appearance. "I think this is a bad market and I don't think people should count on it for anything positive," he said. He was wrong. "I see no reason to own any bank stocks," he said. He was wrong. He declared that "the stock market is the country right now." He was wrong.

Today, Obama's critics on the left savage the president because they hunger for a little more in the way of Bolshevik wealth redistribution than they have been getting, while his opponents on the right have picked up Cramer's socialism critique in a bizarre reality-distortion field that ignores everything that has actually been done to stabilize the country in as market-friendly a way as possible, with a second Great Depression looming right around the corner. Cramer doesn't seem too crazy anymore, now that a far more berserk contingent rampages across the media landscape every day. But the important thing to remember about Cramer is not only that he had his moment in the crazy sun last March. It's that he was just plain wrong. And yet he's still handsomely rewarded for spewing stock market tips and political commentary. That's what's really crazy.

http://www.salon.com/news/the_year_in_c ... jim_cramer

Kanye West has always marched to the beat of his own Auto-Tune. The hip-hop artist is the closest thing this decade has to a true rock star, fabled for temper tantrums, genre busting and fearlessly speaking truth to power -- whether that be rap's homophobia or George Bush's appalling absence during Katrina. But in 2009, West was drinking his own Kool-Aid, and that Kool-Aid was apparently made of straight Courvoisier.

It's one thing to pitch a fit about losing a music award to another artist -- which West has done, many times -- but it's another thing entirely to protest someone else's award loss, stealing the spotlight from a perfectly adorable 19-year-old singer-songwriter in what was -- for, oh, about 15 seconds -- the greatest moment of her life. West's leap of shame at the 2009 MTV VMAs was arrogant, tone-deaf and, ultimately, a sign that the one-time hero had cracked. Even the president of the United States knew this guy was a jackass.

If West had suffered a minor meltdown, it was hard to blame him: He lost his mother and mentor, Donda West, to tragic (and needless) plastic surgery complications in 2007. Though West later told Jay Leno he never properly mourned his mother's death, throwing himself into his work, the cracks had started showing -- in 2008, he was arrested following an altercation with paparazzi. Then he released the synth-pop/R&B hybrid "808s & Heartbreak," a musical experiment that could perhaps be best described as part genius, part folly, part WTF.

But we never saw the extent of the damage done to West's soul until that fateful moment at the MTV VMAs when he so foolishly bum-rushed the stage to defend Beyoncé's (admittedly brilliant) "Single Ladies" video. The gaffe had its upside: It's the best awards show moment since Bono dropped the f-bomb back at the 2003 Golden Globes, Taylor Swift saw her already robust profile skyrocket, and Twitter wordsmiths had a fun new line to pun around with. (After Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, one typical crack was: "Barack, I'm really happy for you, and I'ma let you finish, but Morgan Tsvangirai is one of the best opposition leaders of ALL TIME!")

Kanye West's greatest songs have often been about a man caught on the wrong side of redemption. Much of his career has been about fighting the forces inside him, struggling back from beyond. In 2010, he's got his work cut out for him.

http://www.salon.com/news/the_year_in_c ... kanye_west

When it came to medicine and science, crazy spread faster than a pandemic flu in 2009. First we saw some previously healthy individuals get infected, as when Bill Maher told America to avoid the H1N1 vaccine. But then we saw those infected with a slight dose of crazy slide into critical condition.

Salon took a few to task this year: Oprah Winfrey, long a purveyor or dubious medical advice, brought none other than Jenny "Measles" McCarthy under her wing, and is developing a talk show for the face of the anti-vaccine movement. Polio, anyone?

Then there's Arianna Huffington and the Living section of her eponymous media juggernaut. The Huffington Post remains ground zero for pseudoscience: enemas to cure swine flu, and anti-vaccine propaganda by the likes of funnyman (and Measles McCarthy beau) Jim Carrey, David Kirby and others. PBS also gets a shout-out for another odd medical infomercial: Dr. Mark Hyman, the mind behind the dubious "UltraMind Solution" (who gets additional points for being a HuffPuff blogger).

But despite such stiff competition, Suzanne Somers is our winner. The former sitcom actress-cum-thighmaster had a Year in Crazy like no other. First, she appeared on "The Oprah Winfrey Show," where she continued her campaign for women to use "bioidentical" hormone replacement therapy as a cure-all or performance-enhancing drug. Never mind that the term "bioidentical" is medically meaningless, and the compounding pharmacies Somers urged her audience to get it from have no quality control. Never mind that many of the experts Somers relied on in her book about hormone therapy had never been near a laboratory (one only has a high school diploma). Despite all of that, Winfrey ate it up, suggesting Somers was a pioneer rather than a quackadoo.

It didn't end there for Somers, however. Last fall, she scored a New York Times bestseller with her latest book, "Knockout: Interviews With Doctors Who Are Curing Cancer -- And How to Prevent Getting It in the First Place." Somers' thesis -- that chemotherapy doesn't work and doctors and drugmakers want to keep cancer around to make money -- preys on cynicism against the medical establishment and the hopes of people suffering from a serious disease, rather than credible medical research. It's also insincere. When Somers had breast cancer and precancerous changes of her uterus (both possibly the result of her feverish devotion to hormone replacement), she turned to doctors, undergoing a lumpectomy and radiation for breast cancer and a hysterectomy to escape uterine cancer.

Regardless of whether she's a quackadoo, a pioneer or just a plain hypocrite, with her coronation by Oprah and the success of "Knockout," Somers tops our list of medical crazy for 2009.

http://www.salon.com/news/the_year_in_c ... nne_somers

Actor Charlie Sheen isn't just a 9/11 Truther, one of those people who think that the Bush administration somehow organized the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as pretext for war. No, in some ways, the scandal-dogged star of "Two and a Half Men" is a metaphor for the movement. The Truthers have gone on long past the point when they should have just given up, long past the era when they were even a little bit relevant, and, well, you see where we're going with this, right?

But Sheen has a prime-time show, and the Truthers did get another moment in the sun in 2009. Or, at least, they tried to.

The ploy that Sheen used to bring back the Truther movement, with the help of conspiracy-minded radio host Alex Jones, was the kind of thing that only a Hollywood veteran -- someone imbued with a wildly overinflated sense of importance -- could come up with. Sheen simply imagined himself into a 20-minute meeting with President Obama about 9/11, in which Obama actually (if reluctantly) asks Sheen to brief him about his off-the-wall theory (excerpt below). Then Sheen and Jones used the imaginary conversation to formally ask for a meeting with Obama.

This wasn't the first collaboration between Sheen and Jones; the actor came out as a Truther on Jones' show in March of 2006. At the time, Sheen revealed that -- relying on his own extensive expertise, gleaned from having flown on commercial jets -- he'd doubted the official story from the day of the attacks. "There was a feeling, it just didn't look like any commercial jetliner I've flown on any time in my life and then when the buildings came down later on that day I said to my brother, 'Call me insane, but did it sorta look like those buildings came down in a controlled demolition?'" Sheen said.

The imaginary discussion between Obama and Sheen was arguably worse. An actual excerpt from the "transcript":

Clearly, years of reading scripts haven't done much for Sheen's ear for dialogue.

This wasn't the most arrogant part of the whole thing, though: Having written this account of a meeting between himself and the president, Sheen used it to ask for a sitdown with Obama. Jones told his listeners that the whole thing was big, dramatic, breaking news.

Sheen will probably be waiting for a while to hear just how much the president likes his show. Only a couple of days before Sheen "revealed" the fictional conversation, Van Jones resigned from his White House position as a special advisor on green jobs in large part because of revelations that he'd signed on to a 9/11 investigation petition circulated by Truthers. Sadly, Truthers have consequences.

http://www.salon.com/news/the_year_in_c ... index.html

No, Gov. Mark Sanford, R-S.C., doesn't make our Crazy List because of that press conference, the political apologia to end all apologias. Of course, it was great theater: the admission of an extramarital affair by a conservative politician who, while in Congress, voted for the impeachment of Bill Clinton because of the president's "reprehensible" relationship with Monica Lewinsky. The Faulkner-cum-Fellini spectacle of this Southern presidential aspirant, flailing wildly on national TV without a script about his Argentine tryst, as curiously jubilant-looking young women beam in the background. The endearing performance by a tearful man who blamed it on "that whole sparking thing."

Look, we're suckers for love. The drama -- Sanford recklessly taking off to see his true love, causing a brief nationwide panic about his whereabouts, concocting a lame cover about being off the grid along the Appalachian trail before being caught at an airport by a reporter flying in from Buenos Aires -- was the stuff of Harlequin. Sanford made us recall Woody Allen's 17-year-old koan, "The heart wants what it wants." Our calloused hearts melted a tad more when his e-mails to his Argentine lover leaked to the press, in which he pleaded that "despite the best efforts of my head my heart cries out for you, your voice, your body, the touch of your lips, the touch of your finger tips and an even deeper connection to your soul."

Had it just ended there. But Sanford continued to talk. And talk. "This was a whole lot more than a simple affair, this was a love story," he told the AP. "A forbidden one, a tragic one, but a love story at the end of the day." It was like reliving the worst part about teenage love -- listening to your self-involved friend yammer endlessly about a stupid crush. Was he 4 rilz?

Maybe not. Wife Jenny Sanford released a statement that the couple had agreed to a trial separation two weeks before the whole spectacle. She knew about the affair, and he had some tough decisions to make. Later, Sanford had to repay the state for his travel to Argentina. His trip began to seem less like hopeless infatuation than selfish acting-out. And it recalled an earlier, more important lapse in Sanford's judgment this year: his cynical attempt to reject federal stimulus funds owed his beleaguered state. South Carolina's corridor of shame be damned -- for Sanford, it was an opportunity to shimmy for the GOP's tea-party right, and lay an early claim to the 2012 presidential nomination. Luckily, it didn't work.

Sanford has not yet avoided his own impeachment. But the good people of South Carolina seem to be willing to stand by their man, to give him another shot. Romantic fools. They can't say they haven't been warned.

http://www.salon.com/news/the_year_in_c ... index.html

If 2009 goes down in history as the year when ideology finally pinned fact-based politics to the floor and dribbled a loogie over its face, then the people of Minnesota's 6th Congressional District will have proven themselves ahead of the curve. After all, they first elected Michele Bachmann to Congress back in 2006. And get this: They reelected her in 2008. Take that, evolution.

Evidence that Michele Bachmann stepped in a bucket of crazy? Take your pick. Calling Barack Obama un-American? Check. Death panels? Check. Encouraging armed revolt? Check. Calls for mass self-mutilation and/or suicide to protest the Obama regime? Check.

Forget truth. Hell, forget truthiness. The era of the Birthers is Bachmann's epoch, because the bar is so low. Indeed, there is no bar. Just as Glenn Beck can portray President Obama as a follower of Mao Zedong simply by connecting the two on a blackboard with chalk, Bachmann can go onto the House floor, spout out any odd claptrap that comes to mind, and still get reelected.

Bachmann thinks more carbon dioxide is a good thing, since it is a "natural byproduct of nature," just like syphilis, I suppose. She has warned that AmeriCorps could lead to "re-education camps" for young people; she suggested armed revolt to stop climate change legislation (urging her supporters to be sure they're "armed and dangerous on this issue of the energy tax because we need to fight back"). She keeps hinting that there is some creepy, sinister plot behind the 2010 Census.

Bachmann isn't just crazy, she's crazy's frothy-mouthed cheerleader. Take her speech on healthcare reform last August in Colorado, at a time when some Americans had lost perspective, composure and in some cases all grip on the facts during town hall-style meetings across the country. Bachmann happily stirred the big pot of lunacy. "This cannot pass!" she shouted at her Colorado audience. "What we have to do today is make a covenant, to slit our wrists, be blood brothers on this thing. This will not pass. We will do whatever it takes to make sure this doesn't pass."

Bachmann, of course, came to national attention just before the 2008 presidential election, when she declared on MSNBC's "Hardball" that she was "very concerned that [Obama] may have anti-American views." She went on to encourage a media and congressional investigation into the anti-American views of all of her enemies. Although her opponent, Elwyn Tinklenberg, began to surge in the polls, that November she clung to her seat. The people of Minnesota's 6th District will get to have a third referendum on crazy in 2010, when Bachmann will face one of two Democrats: physician Maureen Reed or state Sen. Tarryl Clark. Unbelievably to the rest of the world, Bachmann's two-year jag of crazy seems to have strengthened her hold on her seat, but it's still possible she'll step beyond the realm of orthodox, increasingly acceptable right-wing crazy into a new crazy frontier that could cost her politically.

Possible, but not likely.

http://www.salon.com/news/the_year_in_c ... e_bachmann

There's no way to talk about all the crazy that was 2009 without talking about Orly Taitz. The sad part is, by the end of the year, her Birther movement (the hodgepodge of crazy glued to the idea that somehow Barack Obama isn't eligible to be president) wasn't even all that far out on the fringe.

A majority of Republicans now think in some way like Taitz, saying either that they're sure that President Obama isn't a citizen, or that they have doubts about his citizenship. (Twenty-eight percent say Obama's not a citizen, 30 percent aren't sure.) By December, even former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was saying that she thinks the Birthers have a "fair question" about Obama and his birth certificate. (Although Palin later walked her assertion back on her Facebook page, the maintenance of which seems to be her new full-time job.)

It's sad that so many people have come to believe this because, of course, the evidence is indisputable: Obama was born in Hawaii. And no matter how hard the Birthers might try, no matter how many lawsuits Taitz and others bring, the courts are going to leave the man in his rightful place as president.

But Taitz doesn't just believe Obama is ineligible to serve as president, no: She also believes that he's hired goons to try to kill her, that he has killed others, that he's gotten Google in on his plot against her, that he's overseeing a plan to put untold numbers into camps run by FEMA, that he and others have conspired to use the swine flu vaccine for god knows what sorts of malicious mischief. In August, Taitz claimed she'd found Obama's "real" Kenyan birth certificate, which was easily proved to be fake. Next, the guy she claimed found it for her charged that Taitz had put him up to the forgery, and the ensuing tangle of lurid charges and countercharges is even too crazy for this post.

Taitz is indefatigable. No matter how many losses she suffers (and she's racked up more than her share), she presses on. Maybe it has to do with growing up behind the Iron Curtain; she came to the U.S. by way of Israel, but is originally from Moldavia. Or maybe it's the same sort of spirit that has propelled her to a unique but impressive array of professional titles: lawyer, dentist and real estate agent.

Come 2010, though, Taitz is likely to be a leader without any followers. Other Birthers have been slowly but steadily abandoning her, some for personal reasons, some because they've realized just how little knowledge of law and legal procedure is at Taitz's command. By the end of one case, which also saw the Birther attorney slapped with a $20,000 sanction, Taitz's own client had abandoned her.

None of that matters to Taitz. The judge is just acting under orders from the Department of Justice, the letter in which her former client disavows her could be a forgery, the Birthers with whom she's feuding are all just Obama plants who've been working to destroy the movement from the inside. In Taitz's world, the setbacks simply prove the global conspiracy behind Obama.

http://www.salon.com/news/the_year_in_c ... orly_taitz

The staff and readers of Salon had a big debate over choosing Glenn Beck our "Crazy Person of the Year." As we stated in the introduction to "The Year in Crazy," we disqualified certain media stars -- Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly -- and some GOP leaders -- Sarah Palin and Liz Cheney -- whose crazy behavior was purely opportunistic. We rejected prominent people who had a crazy belief or two -- Whoopi Goldberg casting doubt on the moon landing -- but didn't seem driven by crazy.

Only one man was crazy enough to possibly trick us. Only one man stood on a media platform comparable to O'Reilly's and Limbaugh's, and delivered a crazy shtick that was so over the top that sometimes you'd say: He doesn't believe any of this, right? The tears, the shaking, the hysteria -- it's all an act, right? And sometimes you'd say, "Get the nets, Fox News!"

Yes, that man is Glenn Beck, and we come down on the side of "Get the nets!" An overview of Beck's career shows that his success is equal parts talent, timing, cruelty and crazy.

The man who would be King of the Crazies emerged when nut-job America really needed a leader. Since he started his career as a prank-and-smear shock jock with a bad perm, one who once called a rival DJ's wife on the air live to ask her about her miscarriage, it's clear Beck will do anything for attention. But, somehow, the anything always involves a big helping of crazy.

The kinds of statements and behaviors that got folks on our crazy list -- they're Beck's daily bread. On one recent Monday alone (thanks, Media Matters!) he claimed that on climate change, "America is now an Axis country ... on the wrong side of history" (for the young folks: Nazi Germany was an Axis power); that Democrats will "retain power ... in a way that Americans" won't "recognize" after their policies fail; that he was readying a healthcare exposé for his Monday Fox News show that would be a Van Jones-size coup. (It turned out to be that the husband of a congresswoman who supports healthcare reform went to jail for fraud -- and Beck claims he wrote the Democrats' healthcare reform from jail.) Of course, the Democrats actually don't have a healthcare reform bill (and they should probably collectively go to jail for their failure to produce one by now).

Of course, the mention of Van Jones, the White House green jobs czar toppled by Beck's combination of sensationalistic reporting and bullying (Jones signed a 9/11 Truth petition and flirted with extreme leftism in his youth), is a reminder that crazy has consequences. Beck's crazy has intersected with a broader social paranoia on the right, and it's clearly something to worry about, not merely mock. We also don't want to make light of mental illness, and given Beck's own confessions about his drug addictions and his mother's suicide, it's clear he deserves some sympathy.

But not much. There are great therapists, therapies and even some legal drugs out there that could help Beck, but instead he's chosen to funnel his crazy into stirring dangerous hatreds. Glenn, if you decide you need psychological help, we'll help you get it, but until then all we have for you is this ignoble award, the craziest person in this crazy year of 2009. Congratulations!

http://www.salon.com/news/the_year_in_c ... glenn_beck