Annie Duke Wins Celebrity Apprentice

Last night, the awful Celebrity Apprentice ground to a halt to wrongly “choose” Joan Rivers as Donald Trump’s newest lapdog. The tragedy in the wrongful dubbing is that the real winner, the true winner, was poker champ Annie Duke.

Annie Duke was untouchable to the end and that’s why she’s the honest winner of Celebrity Apprentice.  On the final task she raised more than three times as much money for charity as Joan Rivers and yet Trump somehow chose the ancient Joan over the wild and sprightly Duke.

The problem with Celebrity Apprentice is Trump doesn’t watch his own show.  There is no way any cogent person could watch the entire season of The Apprentice and come away thinking Joan Rivers — or her monstrous offspring, Melissa — should win anything, and a win for Joan is a win for Melissa.  They unfairly played the entire season as a pair.

From the start, the Rivers Sisters were intimidated by Duke’s cool under fire.  They could not break her, they did not understand her, they denigrated her and they repeatedly tag-teamed to emotionally spit on her.

Throughout the harassment, Annie Duke remained calm, classy and fiercely good.  If Duke made one mistake, it was perhaps not jumping ahead of the predictable attacks before they could set in on her.  Too often Duke offered up her leg for the Rivers Sisters to chew — and munched her bloody they did — yet Duke never blinked.  Sometimes rabid dogs deserved to be kicked back in the teeth.

Over the arc of the season, Joan and Melissa repeatedly proved they were nothing more than vicious and mean spirited.  They walked off the show.  They were bad losers.  They complained about every single person on the show and were shocked when anyone thought they weren’t the perfect Trumpettes.

It is difficult to understand The Donald’s strange and inexcusable firing of women over the season for reasons he made up in his mind.  He fired Tionne Watkins of TLC for standing up for her friend.  He fired Khole Kardashian for paying her debt to society for her drunk driving charge.  He fired Natalie Gulbis for not taking advantage of her deep-pocket connections even though she did.  None of those women showed up for the final live show and I don’t blame them for refusing to be humiliated again on television for no good reason.

The entire season of The Apprentice felt static and set up — and that’s never a good thing in an entertainment show posing as a gameshow.  Picking Joan Rivers over Annie Duke only confirmed our failure of faith in Donald Trump as a father of honor, a leader with prescience and a man with people smarts.

Last night, The Donald met the beginning of his end in the denigration of Annie Duke.  We’ll see how quickly he grows to regret his terrible taste in rejecting the winning abilities of a good woman while kowtowing to celebrity hags.