God's Green Earth Pretty Much A Lock For <em>Time's</em> Person Of The Year

YOU! Should recycle, but you probably already do — because lovin' Mother Earth has never been more front-and-center in the national — nay, global — consciousness...and you heard it from Time's annual "Person of the Year" panel first.

Today's panel consisted of MySpace co-founder and CEO Chris DeWolfe, "NBC Nightly News" anchor and POY-panel stalwart Brian Williams, utterly winning author and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, "View" moderator and former cinematic singing nun Whoopi Goldberg and — wild card! — former Virginia Senator George Allen. Yes, that George Allen. Let the games begin!

Time managing editor Rick Stengel kicked things off by assuring the crowd of assorted media types — like "Morning" Joe Scarborough, Time Inc. big boss Jeff Bewkes, NBC News Pres Steve Capus, Liz Smith, NYT newser Brian Stelter, Portfolio's Jeff Bercovici, Gawker's Maggie Shnayerson, our own Arianna Huffington, and Time's Lev Grossman, who wrote last year's "YOU" cover story, and Ana Marie Cox, in jeans, just 'cause she can — that this year's choice "will not be a pronoun."

Ah, but will it be a person? Here's how the panel voted: After praising his boss Rupert Murdoch to the skies for "reinventing" social networking and offline media, DeWolfe voted for Al Gore — always a safe choice to vote with the Norwegians! — because he's "the guy who's had the biggest effect on the world in the past few years." Williams said he'd gone "round and round" on the topic, except no one heard him because his mic didn't work, so he was given a handheld (BriWi hi-fi!)("I'll be at Chuckles on Route 3," he deadpanned). Williams' final choice: a woman who had been "abused" at the hands of us all, and yet a woman who sustains us: Mother Earth. "It is the compelling issue of our time," intoned Williams, who said putting Mama Earth's face on it would "depoliticize" the issue and that "that choice would lift this fine masthead" up above partisan squabbling. Very moving — Whoopi said so herself — but also familiar: Williams seemed to be borrowing from himself two years ago, when he nominated Mother Nature, like so: "My nomination is a woman, a mom, who has been assaulted on a near-constant basis going back many years and yet she routinely finds ways to prove how strong and resilient she is. Mother Nature." (It's okay, BriWi, we forgive you. Hell, you were on The Leap!).

Whoopi Goldberg picked up the ball next, choosing as her nominee the least-person-like pick ever: "Green," citing its ubiquity as a concept and, now, a lifestyle choice. "The word 'Green' is now on the lips of little bitty babies just coming from their mother's wombs," said Whoopi, noting that her 9 year old grandson was "into absolute basketball — and recycling." Three for three! Next up was
George Allen who segued from "green is also saving money" to the importance of having affordable, reliable, energy....to his nominee: General David Petraeus. Oooh, he went there! Said Allen: "Every year could be Mother Earth" (yes, tell that to the polar bears) but for Allen, it was all about Petraeus and the troops. Which I'm not sure he realized, but was basically him saying that the Iraq war was all about oil.

Finally was Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who came to her decision via her core concern of women's issues, saying that there could be no preserving and protecting Mother Earth without preserving and protecting women: "As long as women across the world have no access to eduction, as long as they're not financially independent, and as long as you see large parts of the world who do not own their own sexuality, the wolrd will not be greener, will not be more peaceful and will not have any of the things that we aspire to." To that end, her pick was...Nicholas Sarkozy. Ali's choice was based specifically on Sarkozy's support of women: "Just after he was elected, the first thing he said was, 'Every oppressed woman is a French woman,'" she said. "I think we should hold him to that." Then Rick Stengel made a joke about Sarkozy's wife.

• Chris de Wolfe had a problem with David Petraeus: He wasn't reaaaally sure who he was. "I'm not super-familiar with what he's done," said deWolfe (which maybe says something about the level of discourse during the planned MySpace primary for January 2008). DeWolfe blamed that on the media, whose left-right partisan spinning left him confused about just what Petraeus was all about. Here's where BriWi's head almost exploded: "Is it like there's a spigot being held back and the Petraues information is in a vault?" he asked indignantly. "It's confusing to the average person," insisted DeWolfe who said that maybe "a very mainstream journalist" like Williams didn't obfuscate but everything else was, well, confusing. Williams then launched into a primer on Petraeus' life (Princeton PhD, body reconstructed after grievous injury, 4 stars and, yes, "op-ed words that came off his keyboard") and also somewhere in there reiterated last year's lament that the focus on "You" was distracting from More Important Things. (In other news, the YouTube video of BriWi as Bond has been viewed 61,221 times.)