Thanks to the Internet, our generation usually thinks of “badass” as synonymous with kung-fu cowboy Chuck Norris, whose legacy has been aggrandized through endless “facts” about men obliterated by solitary roundhouse kicks and tears that would cure cancer if he ever cried. Thanks to the Internet, our generation usually thinks of “bad*ss” as synonymous with kung-fu cowboy Chuck Norris, whose legacy has been aggrandized through endless “facts” about men obliterated by solitary roundhouse kicks and tears that would cure cancer if he ever cried.

But if you’re like me, you need a different sort of hero — one who never campaigned for ultraconservative Governor-turned-pundit Mike Huckabee. In that spirit, I submit the most illustrious American bad*ss of the past year, or at least my favorite: Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

In case you lived in a soundproof cave for most of 2011, here’s the scoop on Giffords: She was elected as a Democrat in 2006 to serve in Arizona’s eighth congressional district. Pro-choice, aggressive in advocating for energy independence and dedicated to the expansion of health care access in one of the nation’s most conservative states, Giffords faced threats throughout her term; hers was one of many congressional offices vandalized after Obama’s health care reform act was signed into law. Despite being a known hardliner on immigration, consistently calling for stronger border security, Giffords publicly opposed SB 1070, the 2010 civil rights nightmare which gives Arizona police the right to randomly stop anyone walking down the street and detain him for failing to show proper identification papers. She also supports the DREAM Act, which allows undocumented immigrants brought to America as children to serve in the armed forces or pursue higher education in the United States.

A true policy expert, Giffords was respected even by her peers on the other side of the fence. Ed Honea, the mayor of a town in Giffords’ district and a self-identified conservative Republican, described Giffords’ work on behalf of his town when FEMA wanted to designate it a flood plain as “the best service [he] ever had from a federal official.”

Despite vandalism and threats, Giffords was committed to being accessible to her constituents, and on Jan. 8, 2011, she held a town hall meeting in a Tucson, Ariz., supermarket.

To the shock of the nation, the meeting was crashed by a gunman wielding a Glock 19. The alleged shooter, Jared Loughner, apparently fixated on Giffords after a 2007 town hall meeting at which he asked her, “How do you know words mean anything?” With a bad*ss’s trademark intolerance for nonsense, Giffords paused for a moment, then answered Loughner in Spanish and moved on with the meeting. Years later at the 2011 meeting, Loughner allegedly shot Giffords in the forehead at close range, then fired into the crowd, killing six people including a federal judge and a 9-year-old.

What makes Giffords a consummate badass is not that she survived the attack — that, it’s safe to say, was pure luck. The astonishing thing in Giffords’ case is that taking a bullet to the face not only didn’t end her life, but failed to conclude her career in the United States Congress.

You read that right. Although she has been largely absent from Capitol Hill since her shooting, she notably interrupted her hiatus in August to fly to Washington and participate in a critical vote to raise the debt ceiling, because who is Gabrielle Giffords to let being shot in the forehead prevent her from doing her job? She has spent the past year undergoing about two hours of speech and movement therapy per day. The Boston Globe reports that her therapists say she is regaining function on an incredible learning curve, sometimes grasping in two sessions what ordinarily takes weeks to teach, and that despite struggling with speech and communication, she seems to have retained all intellectual function. And in a November interview with Diane Sawyer, Giffords admitted that she’s undertaken this therapy with an end in mind besides the mere satisfaction of flipping severe head trauma the bird. She wants to be speaking well enough by May to enter the race for re-election in 2012.

If you think Giffords might still be too fragile to re-enter the political fray in the spring, here’s something worth noting: The Republicans in her district don’t seem to think so. Far from tiptoeing around Giffords and such evocative subjects in the wake of her January shooting, Republicans held a fundraiser this September in which they raffled off a Glock 23. The fundraiser calls to mind Matt Taibbi’s quote in a Rolling Stone story on bankers: “What they have, in the place where most of us have shame, are extra sets of balls.” But apparently the only people not offended were Giffords and her husband, who never complained or even gave comment. No doubt Giffords has more important things to do, like moving from near-fatal head trauma to full electability in 18 months.

Hold all the tasteless fundraisers you like, Arizona Republicans. Your balls will never be bigger than Rep. Giffords’.

Write Tracey at [email protected].