Why you should still read Rolling Stone

The all-time, all-media pinnacle of year-end journalism, outside of the New Year's Eve column I used to do before Authority decided it was insufficiently deferential, was Esquire Magazine's Dubious Achievement Awards.
That went away several years ago, and nothing has come close to it since. When I see "The year in review" features elsewhere, I barely glance up.
Fly with us now to last week, when another issue of Rolling Stone showed up in my mailbox.
I let my subscription lapse long ago, around the time Hunter Thompson left, but the magazine still shows up regularly, sits around the house for a week or so, then goes out with the trash.
This was the "Special Double Issue," though, with a cover blurb for "Hot Republican Gay Sex." Nothing cheers me up like Repubs in disgrace--the dance of the hypocrites never gets old--so I kept it around.
You need to find a copy. I didn't keep close track this year of the kind of dumb-assery that makes a good year-end list, but Rolling Stone did. With full credit to the magazine, let me just give a few highlights. There are pages upon pages of this stuff:

• A photo of Arizona Sen. John McCain in Iraq, with excerpts from a speech he gave citing how safe it was and how his visit was proof the war was just and necessary and Being Won. McCain wore a bulletproof vest, didn't leave the "green zone" compound and was escorted by 100 soldiers, two Apache helicopters and three Blackhawk helicopters.
• A reminder that when recent intelligence reports revealed that Iran shut down its nuclear weapons program more than four years ago, President Bush insisted the news validated his repeated (and continuing) claims that Iran had an active nuclear weapons program.
• Further reminders of ways the Bush administration has honored veterans this year. Among other things:
• Iit required that soldiers discharged before the end of their term of enlistment because of battlefield injuries repay their enlistment bonuses.
• It sent the most experienced National Guard unit in Iraq home after 729 days when 730 days would have qualified the soldiers for education benefits.
• It forgot, oops, to include 20,000 cases of brain trauma from the official list of troops injured in Iraq.
• As the cover promised, the magazine listed five Republican officials who have been outspoken gay-bashers, but who have been charged with or found guilty of various types of homosexual behavior in public or involving minors. One, the national chairman of the Young Republicans, admitted he'd performed oral sex on another man, but claimed, "I wasn't in my right mind. I wasn't thinking." All records of his tenure at the top have disappeared from the Young Repubs' Web site.
• Recalled that in an Associated Press survey taken in late 2006, 25 percent of respondents said they expected Jesus Christ to return in 2007. As of this writing, he has 27 hours to make his move.

Makes me wish I'd done a year-end piece of my own. I even tried to start one today, but all I could get down was, "Rudy Giuliani . . . ."