AL KAMEN, WASHINGTON POST - And now, the Monty Python Dead Parrot Award for 2006. It's always best to wait till the very end of the year before declaring the winner of this prestigious spinmeister award -- given in honor of the iconic scene in which Michael Palin, as a pet-shop owner, insists that the obviously dead parrot he just sold John Cleese's character is merely napping.
And, sure enough, the winning entry came in on Dec. 28, when CNN's Ed Henry interviewed White House homeland security adviser Frances Fragos Townsend. Henry pressed her to admit that the administration's failure to kill or capture Osama bin Laden in the past five years was, well, a failure. She wouldn't. "Well, I'm not sure," Townsend said. "It's a success that hasn't occurred yet. I don't know that I view that as a failure."