The stupidest, most contemptible "pundit" is...

The BBQ Pit
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Michael Savage

No one else, right or left, even comes close.
Truly, listening to his show (which I admit that I frequently do, purely for the entertainment value) is a surreal experience. For those of you who haven’t heard him for yourself, it’s quite easy to construct his opinions. Here’s what you do: Take a reasonably-far-right conservative and a reasonably-far-left liberal. Then get them both extraordinarily pissed off, uncomfortable, itchy, grouchy, sleep-deprived, etc. Then, put them in a room and let them argue. After that, ask the liberal what the conservative said, and you’ll no doubt get some extraordinarily hyperbolic exaggeration. Something which, even if he at some level agreed with it, no sane or rational person would ever literally say.

We’ve all seen things like that happen, even right here on the dope… where someone says something, and someone else shrieks back “You’re saying XXXXXX? How dare you?”, where XXXXXX is some gross mutated overstatement of whatever the first was saying.
Anyhow, those hilarious overstatements are the bread and butter of Michael Savage. It’s actually kind of funny. You can’t parody him. Anything hilarious and clever that you’d come up with is something which he would actually say, in complete seriousness.

His most recent gem: The PC lobby is promoting the term “HIV-Positive” in an effort to make having AIDS (which is of course associated with liberalism) a “positive” thing. It’s a feel-good term!
That’s in addition to his normal rants:
-Liberals are trying to destroy America. (Seriously, he literally says precisely that).

-A Kerry administration would destroy America

-Jesse Jackson should be executed for treason

-Liberals are all communists

I’m actually glad that I can’t remember more than that off the top of my head… it’s not worth wasting brain cells on.

Anyhow, can anyone propose any public figure/political commentator, on either side of the aisle, who even approaches him?

(The scary thing about Michael Savage, by the way, is the people who call in and lavish praise upon him…)

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This story, for example, is completely unbelievable…

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You forgot his rant about how GWBush is a commie liberal.

I’ve heard about working the refs, but Savage is ridiculous. NOTHING is far right enough for him before he’s even willing to call it “moderately liberal.”

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Still, for my money, you just can’t get more vile, more despicable, more misleading, lying piece of garbage as Ann Coulter. She sits high on the throne of contemptible pundits, with the rotting flesh of Rush and Dornan and the bones of Hannity, and, yes Savage, strewn around her.

Ann Coulter is Queen.

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I agree. Her status was confirmed when Picard saw that machine reattach her torso to her legs.

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Back when I worked in New York, I was priviledged to share space with some of the cruelest human beings since the Inquisition.

When the boss pissed these guys off, they’d send away for catalgues for butt plugs, and weird bondage stuff and have it delivered to the boss’ work mail.

They used to call 900 sex numbers and then transfer the call into meetings that were expecting conference calls. There’d be 10 investment bankers sitting in a room with a client, and the conference call would come in, and it would be some woman talking about how she could suck like a Typhoon.

They’d get gay postcards and send them to the guy’s wife, with notes referencing dates carefully matched to coincide with when the guy was away on a business trip.

These guys would do anything.

Well, down in Georgia there’s apparently this pundit for the KKK. He has an answering machine and every week he records a message on the answering machine. It’s like ten minutes along and the guy would go on for ten minutes straight making racial slur after racial slur with never a pause and never repeating himself. This guy hated Blacks, Jews, Catholics, you name it.

This guy was so horrible that we used to call once a week just to listen. He was absolutely pure unadulterated evil.

Now these guys would do anything, any phone joke or prank no matter how obscene or offensive. Nothing phased them.

But nobody ever used that one for a prank. It was like a nuclear bomb. I can still remember some of the things this guy would say. It would make you sweat and shiver to listen to him.

I forget his name. Maybe somebody else knows about this. The guy was supposedly quite famous.
But he was the stupidest, most contemptible, most evil pundit ever.

No question.

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I used to like George Will.

Now, he just kind of creeps me out.

STUPID people don’t generally scare me. STUPID people generally self-destruct.

But George Will isn’t stupid. I’ve never known him to actually LIE, but he has a hell of a knack for distorting the facts without actually violating them.

He makes whatever his hobby horse of the moment is sound perfectly reasonable, the only logical choice of the semi-intelligent human being.

THAT creeps me out.

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Is it Daniel Carver? He’s been on Howard Stern many times and, yes, he’s absolutely, unbelievably hateful.

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I’m with Wang-Ka on this one.

Coulter and Savage are just idiots, and the sort of people who listen to them will swallow everything. It’s the smart ones like Will who are scarier.

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There are plenty of partisan blowhards who know they are partisan blowhards, and they know you know they are partisan blowhards, and they don’t care.

The type that bugs me is the “middlebrow” pundit who thinks he is smart enough to pass for an intellectual by disguising his rantings in fancy rhetoric. Safire and the execrable David Brooks spring to mind. Or does that make me anti-Semitic?

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If you hate 'em because they’re Jews, that’s anti-Semitism.

If you hate 'em because they’re assholes, well… I’m not sure what that’s called, but it ain’t anti-Semitism.

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Isn’t that what a good debater is supposed to do?

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Actually, it was a reference to a recent Brooks column in which he claims that “neoconservative” is a code word for “Jew”. So I’m really just an anti-assholitarian