TheBakersfieldCalifornian.com

What America really needs is more end-of-year awards and retrospectives. That's how our media-driven, 24-7 culture processes the change of calendars. It's how we put the past 12 months to bed: We remember, categorize, rank and move on. It's like a mental health exercise.

I am here to help in that area.

Elsewhere in this and other newspapers, you can find salutes to the courageous and the promising, the talented and astute. All well and good, but the opportunity to be reminded of the foolish and the feckless also serves a useful purpose, in a petty sort of way.

With that, I give you the 2011 Audacity Awards -- featuring individuals who, for the most part, are far more successful and accomplished than you or I (well, I, anyway) in almost every way, but, thanks to their stunning arrogance, managed to make a mess of things in a newsworthy way. Our honorees span the breadth of this great nation:

* In Chicago, we have former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who'd probably be getting out of prison about now if, three years ago, he'd simply confessed, cooperated and plea-bargained his charges, which involved the nifty little side business he ran out of the governor's mansion -- political appointments for sale. Instead, he assumed his God-given charisma would be his saving grace in court. Now, having been convicted on 18 corruption charges, he's looking at a brutal 14-year prison sentence. Top that!

* Well, OK. In New York, Donald Trump continues to flip-flop between two roles -- kingmaker and king-in-waiting, suited for neither. When he dropped out of the presidential race last May, he actually said this: "This decision does not come easily ... especially when my potential candidacy continues to be validated by ranking at the top of the Republican contenders in polls across the country." At the time, Trump was polling at 8 percent. Earlier this month he decided not to moderate an Iowa presidential debate he'd been attempting to organize because all of the GOP candidates had declined to participate, except for Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum. The semi-official reason for the cancellation, however, was that Trump had decided, again, to run for president himself. Is there a man less self-aware on the planet?

* Possibly. Sacramento has Assembly Speaker John A. Perez, who not only guided the Democratic majority to a budgetary stalemate of epic proportions, but also set new standards for secrecy and sneakiness -- refusing to release internal Assembly financial records, most or all of it subject to state open records laws, until he was shamed into it. Guess Pérez didn't learn much about accountability after he was busted in May for having failed to correct the widespread impression that he had graduated from UC Berkeley. He didn't, but that was his little secret. For a while.

* In Los Angeles, the standard for world-class audacity is high, given that fact that the city of Bell, a suburb, set new standards for institutional corruption in 2010. But L.A. Dodgers owner Frank McCourt comes close, thanks to his near-ruination of the once-proud franchise. It started with McCourt's running divorce battle with wife, Jamie, and culminated with baseball Commissioner Bud Selig's appointment of a representative to oversee the team's operations. McCourt eventually won ownership of the team from his ex-wife and got permission from Selig to sell. Larry King, Magic Johnson and Mark Cuban are all said to be interested. We'll take any of them over McCourt.

So who wins the 2011 award? Call it a tie. An Audacity trophy would have to be audacious, and my account has gone the way of the McCourt family fortune.

Email Editorial Page Editor Robert Price at rprice@bakersfield.com.