The 50 Most Loathsome Americans (of 2010)

[BrainGlutton]

As have these:

15. John Boehner
    Charges: Cries so often he embarrasses Glenn Beck’s family. An incorrigibly lazy corporate puppet who owes his emotional instability to legendary Merlot consumption and his radioactive Naugahyde complexion to innumerable special interest golf junkets. His first notable act in Congress was to hand out tobacco lobby checks on the House floor before a vote on anti-smoking legislation; his PAC received $30K from Abramoff-affiliated tribes; he lived in an apartment owned by lobbyist John Milne; he knew about Mark Foley’s page perversion and sat on it. More recently, he compared the financial crisis to an ant and the weak Dodd-Frank bill to a nuke—while concurrently trying to block unemployment benefits. And the most egregious aspect of his drunken weeping on “60 Minutes,” about kids having the same education opportunities he did, is that he’s scored hundreds of thousands from for-profit schools and the student loan industry—even sponsoring legislation that would slash public loan funding and redirect it to his golf buddy’s company Sallie Mae. He’s the kind of amoral opportunist who would campaign for Nazi reenactor Rich Iott in secret, not because there is any chance in hell of winning, but because Iott’s stinking rich and bound to repay the favor.
    Aggravating factor: “The only way we’re going to get our economy going again and solve our budget problems is to get the economy moving.”
    Sentence: Lung cancer.

<snip>

11. Roger Ailes
    Charges: His entire life is an object lesson in pernicious mendacity. Before being named Fox News President/Rupert Murdoch henchman, he was a consultant for Nixon, Reagan, Elder Bush and Rudy Giuliani. Party to News Corp.’s $1 million donation to the Republican Governors Association; ultimately responsible for Fox News Washington managing editor Bill Sammon’s fiendish email, which ordered Fox employees to use the term “government option” in place of “public option,” and more recently, responsible for Sammon’s missive requiring staff to challenge the “veracity of climate change data.” In granting the Tea Party media saturation, and employing demagogues like Beck, O’Reilly and Hannity, Ailes has absolutely destroyed the impartiality of the fourth estate and made a large segment of the population ever more stupider.
    Aggravating factor: “They [NPR] are, of course, Nazis. They have a kind of Nazi attitude. They are the left wing of Nazism. These guys don’t want any other point of view.”
    Sentence: Gassed by Garrison Keillor.

<snip>

9. Tea Partiers
   Charges: Openly racist and lying about it, uber-religious, hyper-hypocritical, usually-tetched old codgers who wheel around in their Medicare-provided Hoverounds® and rage against fiscally irresponsible social programs, like Medicare, because they’re too dumb to realize that they’re co-opted, Machiavellian mouthpieces of greedy billionaires.
   Aggravating factor: They elected some 40 candidates to Congress.
   Sentence: The consequences of their actions.

<snip>

2. David & Charles Koch
   Charges: In a land filthy with noxious liars, these two are the filthiest. Their dad founded the ridiculous John Birch Society which claimed fluoridated tap water was a Communist mind-control plot—while his company built oil refineries for Stalin. And they’ve not fallen far from the despicable hypocrite tree. Koch Industries, the second biggest privately-held company in the country, generates its annual $98 billion in profits from coal mining, stealing oil from Indian reservations, refining and piping Canadian tar sands oil, and every other clear-cut, mountaintop-removing environmental abomination under the sun. How they make money is dirty; how they spend it is dirtier. From free-market-humping think tanks CATO and Heartland to Tea Party-backing Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Works, they invest vulgar amounts of money in misappropriating populist rage and misinforming the ignorant masses on climate change, tax reform, environmental policy, health care, and any other issue that could cut into their fat bottom line.
   Aggravating factor: In a philanthropy-meets-disinformation masterstroke, the Smithsonian’s new $15 million David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins is a climate change whitewash, which teaches that destroying our environment is no big deal because we can just adapt and evolve.
   Sentence: Fed to the Kraken.

[Munch]

@Cicero

It was the 1960’s. Once. For twenty minutes.

And in this list, it was in the 20s. #24, to be exact.

[astorian]

I haven’t even looked at the list and I’m not going to, but let me test my psychic powers. Carnac says the top ten are…
Sarah Palin
Christine O’Donnell
Michelle Bachmann
Sarah Palin
Pope Benedict
Glenn Beck
Antonin Scalia
Bill O’Reilly
Sean Hannity
Sarah Palin

How’m I doing so far? (See? I saved you the trouble of reading it yourself!)

[Merneith]

Bachmann, Benedict, O’Reilly & Hannity didn’t make the cut. Palin & Beck were the only two of your suggestions in the top ten.

It’s been a bumper year for Loathsome.

[BigT]

I don’t think it was a good list, as people are obviously not in order, like they are supposed to be. It’s pretty clear by how severe the punishments are that several people were just spot fillers.

And while I could see Obama being on the list (if you actually think he’s doing a bad job) putting him so close to the top 10 list is really strange. And what an esoteric and weak punishment. (Crazy guy from crazy third party somehow beats him in the primaries. Better than when I thought it was a Rent reference.)

And, yes, I believe Benedict should have been on the list somewhere.

[williambaskerville]

@B.Serum

What list are you reading? For 2010, I saw a grand total of “maybe one” in which they refer to Tucker Carlson, “He’s the kind of guy who ties sweaters around his shoulders and snorts when he laughs. And he’s definitely not gay!” I’m assuming this is because he is known to have physically assaulted a gay guy. Combined with the current meme that gay-hatred is a red flag that someone is a closet case. Add that to the coiffed hair and preppy dressing and you get what some would call a gay stereotype.

I noticed one more, from Christine O’Donnell :-

“doesn’t understand that being a single, “chaste” thirty-something who obsessively evangelizes against masturbation and gay sex gives anyone with even a vague appreciation of human nature the likely correct impression that you’ve had your finger in more dykes than the Little Dutch Boy.”

[ElvisL1ves]

We’re Number One! We’re Number One! We’re Number One!

[astorian]

How can the Tear Partiers be “openly racist AND lying about it”? If they were openly racist, they’d be PROUD of it, not denying it. That’s as self-contradictory as saying someone is “openly gay AND in the closet.”

But then, people who make stupid lists like this* aren’t hindered by logic.

*Yes, right wing magazines and blogs make equally stupid lists like this all the time, and THEIR 50 most loathsome people would be just as predictable (Keith Olbermann, Michael Moore, yadda yadda…). Lists like this are a lazy writer or publisher’s way of getting some attention.

[EvilTOJ]

If you can stomach it, go browse Freerepublic for examples of being racist and lying about it. They do everything but use actual racial epithets to describe the president. They call him a Kenyan, socialist, Nazi, Muslim, socialist Nazi, Barrack HUSSEIN Obama, muslin terrist, “a threat to our way of life”. It’s all the same words racists use to talk about brown people.

[B.Serum]

@astorian

How can the Tear Partiers be “openly racist AND lying about it”? If they were openly racist, they’d be PROUD of it, not denying it. That’s as self-contradictory as saying someone is “openly gay AND in the closet.”

But then, people who make stupid lists like this* aren’t hindered by logic.

*Yes, right wing magazines and blogs make equally stupid lists like this all the time, and THEIR 50 most loathsome people would be just as predictable (Keith Olbermann, Michael Moore, yadda yadda…). Lists like this are a lazy writer or publisher’s way of getting some attention.

I thought you said you weren’t going to read it

But in all seriousness, I don’t see the contradiction you do. One can be openly racist in their actions, yet knowing that racism is wrong, will deny the underlying motivations of their actions. I think your comment holds water if they wrote used the word “proudly” instead of “openly.”

[Miller]

@astorian

How can the Tear Partiers be “openly racist AND lying about it”?

Easy:

Guy 1: “I hate niggers!”

Guy 2: “You’re a racist!”

Guy 1: “No I’m not! I’ve never said a racist thing in my life!”

See? Openly racist, then lying about. It’s not really that unusual a behavior, although not usually as blatant as my example. Holocaust deniers do this all the time: they’ll often promote blatantly anti-Semetic ideas, and then deny that they have any anti-Semetic beliefs.

[Miller]

Incidentally…

Years and years ago, back when Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect was still on Comedy Central, I saw an episode where a woman was arguing that it was always, without exception, immoral to lie. And someone asked her, “What if you were hiding Jews in your house in WWII, and the Nazis came and said, ‘Do you have any Jews here?’” She replied, “I believe that God would intervene so that I wouldn’t have to lie.”

Which struck me as just extraordinarily stupid and obnoxious. I remember thinking, “God’s going to manifest His divine and eternal majesty to prevent you from having to tell a fib to a Nazi, but he can’t be bothered to shift his eternal ass to prevent six million Jews from being exterminated?” And then follow it up with, I dunno, a whole bunch of cursing, or something. But it was right before the commercial break, and when they came back, they were talking about something else. But that exchange took up a little corner of my mind, and every now and then it’d pop up, and I get all pissed off at the stupid bitch all over again. Never had any idea who she was or why she was on the show. Or even what she looked like, really. No clue who she was at all, just that she was a intermittent but persistent annoyance in my subconscious.

Then I’m reading the article in the OP, and I see this in Christine O’Donnell’s entry:

…doesn’t understand that lying to Nazis would’ve been moral…

I do some Googling, and I find out that yes, indeed, it was Christine O’Donnell on that show twelve years ago.

I thought I’d just been hating her since the most recent election cycle. Turns out, I’ve been hating her for more than a third of my life, and I didn’t even know it.

ETA: and it turns out it was Eddie Izzard who asked her the Nazi question! Neat!

[BrainGlutton]

@astorian

How can the Tear Partiers be “openly racist AND lying about it”? If they were openly racist, they’d be PROUD of it, not denying it. That’s as self-contradictory as saying someone is “openly gay AND in the closet.”

Have you ever seen one of their rallies? Yes, they are openly racist and lying about it.

[BrainGlutton]

…doesn’t understand that lying to Nazis would’ve been moral…

Well, neither did Immanuel Kant.

[Beware_of_Doug]

@awldune

“Is secretly gay” features in an alarming number of entries. Dunno what’s up with that.

It’s a dish site. You can’t do a dish site without “secretly gay” any more than you can do a sports column without “work ethic.”

[F.U.Shakespeare]

@MsRobyn

Yes, if this were Spy, we’d call these people “short-fingered vulgarians.”

Or, “bosomy dirty book writers”.

[Beware_of_Doug]

Finally got to Number One. It’s worth reposting…

@The Beast

1) You
**Charges: **Your brain’s been cobbled together over millions of years of blind evolution and it shows. You’re clumsy, stupid, weak and motivated by the basest of urges. Your MO is both grotesquely selfish and unquestionably deferential to questionable authority. You’re not in control of your life. You wear your ignorance like a badge of honor and gleefully submit to oppression, malfeasance and kleptocracy. You will buy anything. You will believe anything. You believe that evolution is a matter of belief. You likely scrolled down to #1, without reading the rest, because you’re an impatient, semi-literate Philistine who’s either unable or unwilling to digest more than 140 characters at a time. You think Epic Beard Man is a national hero and that Bradley Manning might be Eli and Peyton’s brother. You believe in American exceptionalism despite the contrary, compelling and overwhelming evidence. You tacitly partake in all manner of atrocity without batting a lash. You’re actively participating in our species’ extinction and you’re either in denial or you just don’t give a shit. You escape into every sort of mind-numbing distraction and ridiculous, convoluted fantasy, so you don’t have to face the bitter, terrifying fact that your life is utterly meaningless.
**Aggravating factors: **The careers of Rush Limbaugh, Oprah Winfrey, John Stossel and Justin Bieber; the success of The Secret, “Medium” and Atlas Shrugged; the election of Rand Paul; the existence of Kentucky, Texas and “Sarah Palin’s Alaska.”
**Sentence: **Bad teeth, an affinity for afternoon tea and the guilt-plagued, nostalgic psyche of a fallen empire.

Don’t look at me. I didn’t even know there was a town called Kentucky, Texas.

[user_hostile]

@Beware_of_Doug

Finally got to Number One. It’s worth reposting…

 **Originally Posted by The Beast, The World's Only Website**
 1) **You** Blah, blah, blah
**"Aggravating factors:** The careers of ..., *John Stossel*,..."

John Stossel? Give me a break!

[astorian]

@B.Serum

I thought you said you weren’t going to read it

I didn’t read it- I’m quoting BrainGlutton’s citation.

[Gyrate]

@astorian

I haven’t even looked at the list and I’m not going to, but let me test my psychic powers. Carnac says the top ten are…
Sarah Palin
Christine O’Donnell
Michelle Bachmann
Sarah Palin
Pope Benedict
Glenn Beck
Antonin Scalia
Bill O’Reilly
Sean Hannity
Sarah Palin

How’m I doing so far? (See? I saved you the trouble of reading it yourself!)

To be fair, the Democrats don’t entirely escape: Barack Obama comes in at #14 and Charlie Rangel, Julius Genachowski and Alvin Greene are up in the 40s. And that’s not including the various slebs like Perez Hilton, some of whom are probably liberal.

@Merneith

Bachmann, Benedict, O’Reilly & Hannity didn’t make the cut. Palin & Beck were the only two of your suggestions in the top ten.

Scalia is there at #4 as part of the group responsible for Citizens United v. FEC, along with Kennedy, Alito, Roberts and Thomas.