Male Jerk of the Year

The 2009 Male Jerk of the Year award goes to Richard Heene, aka the father of balloon boy. His wife wins a supporting role nod.

Richard concocted the scheme in an effort to score a reality show. Now he faces a different reality—jail.

According to a Huffington Post write-up, the prosecutor “portrayed the Heenes as increasingly desperate as their pitches for a reality TV show kept getting turned down by the networks…”

The runner-up is Tiger Woods.

Richard Heene nips Tiger by two strokes because he abused a child—his own—using him as a pawn both for the charade and the charade that followed under the glare of the national media. As such, he is even more unfit as a father than Tiger, whose children are as yet too young to have a clue about what he was doing.