Who among this year's class of Pulitizer Prize winners has the guts, the class and the wisdom not to accept their award from Lee C. Bollinger, president of Columbia Unveristy, which administers the competition?

Will Walt Bogdanich, a New York Times investigative reporter and a three-time winner, have the moral clarity to say, "No. Not from Bollinger"?

How about Michael Ramirez of Investor's Business Daily, who won for editorial cartooning; or Steven Pearlstein of The Washington Post, cited for his newspaper commentary?

Maybe musical legend Bob Dylan, who received a special citation for his "lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power," will write a little ditty:  "No, no, no way.  Not ever, Not today?"

Don't hold your breath.

From David Umhoefer of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel -- winner for local reporting -- to Dylan, you can bet that none of these folks will permit the fact that Columbia University invited Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to campus last September to prevent them from basking in the glory of their well-earned prizes.

Which Olympic athlete, after all, is going to boycott this year's games rather than symbolically support the Chinese government and its oppression of Tibetans? 

Of course, no one of good conscience should attened the Beijing Olympics nor accept any honor from Columbia University.  Both China and Columbia have disgraced themselves.

Undoubtedly, however, that is exactly what the tyrants in China and the cowards at Columbia are counting on.  If Lee C. Bollinger thought he'd be shunned -- as he should be -- for allowing a genocidal, homophobic, women-stoning, American killing, holocaust denier an honored platform at Columbia, he never would have done it.

Instead, Bollinger will stand front and center at the 2008 Pulitzer Prize Awards dinner with the luminaries of the American news media and their credibility will rub off and him and reinforce his decision to invite Ahmadinejad.

Ahmadinejad, too, wins.  How horrible a tyrant could he be if all these great American journalists are willing to accept his Columbia Unversity host as worthy of sitting on the Pulitzer Board?

So who won this year's highest journalism honors?  Some folks at the Washington Post, several reporters at the New York Times, and Ahmadinejad-Bollinger.

We sure hope history will put all this in its proper perspective because our contemporaries haven't a clue.