Is Time's 'Top Ten' way off-base?

It's always fun at year's end, or decade's end, to sum up the "top ten" in various categories.  Time Magazine is one of many publications that practice the annual ritual, and their 2009 top tens were released this week.  But, this year, many people believe Time made a huge blunder in one particular category.

The Top Ten Pariahs of 2009 should be one of the magazine's least subjective categories.  After all, a pariah is described by Random House as "any person or animal generally despised."  So, we can pretty much all agree that people like Bernie Madoff and Roman Polanski more than earned their spot on the list. 

But, the inductee raising eyebrows this year is UNM soccer player Elizabeth Lambert.  While the athlete certainly defines bad behavior on the soccer field and clearly needed to be reined in (a job that was taken care of by the over-the-top national coverage of her violent antics during games), does she really deserve to be named a Top Ten Pariah of 2009? 

On the Time list, Lambert also finds herself in the company of such criminals as Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi--the man responsible for the terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988.  Al Megrahi was freed from a Scottish prison this year because of terminal prostate cancer, a move that outraged victims' family members and governments the world over.  And then there's the pony-tail pulling Elizabeth Lambert, behaving badly on the soccer field.  Hmm.....

Sure, it's fun to review the top ten songs, ball games, movies, stupid criminal videos, etc. each year.  But, when we're talking about pariahs and getting into news events that had devastating effects on scores of innocent people, we should try to maintain some semblance of balance and sanity.  Elizabeth Lambert may have been a poor sport and underhanded soccer player, but she hardly deserves a place among the ranks of terrorists and child rapists.