I’ll give the original Manhattan Project guys a break, but after that Teller went nuclear-nuts, discrediting Robert Oppenheimer (I guess for actually caring about nuclear holocaust victims), pursuing and building hydrogen bombs, lobbying against the nuclear test ban treaty, encouraging the use of nuclear bombs for anything from creating artificial harbors to extracting oil from Alberta oil sands, lobbying for the Star Wars missile defense and always: a bigger, more destructive, nuclear arsenal.
To a man with a bomb, I guess every problem looks like Hiroshima.
Phred and phamily are just attention-seekers whom no one takes very seriously. They make a lot of noise, show up (or not show up) to places where they’re not wanted, then go on to the next place to make a lot of noise. When they get butt-hurt, they sue; the proceeds are what keeps this circus going.
If you want to get seriously outraged, you need to put Anita Bryant on that list. She actually lobbied in Florida to deny rights to gays.
As bad as he is, Fred Phelps is a carnival clown whose concrete destructive influence on anyone outside his own congregation is zero. He pisses a few people off, but at the end of the day his schtick will wind up doing more to promote gay rights and atheism than any right-wing agenda.
I’d vote for the spies Aldrich Ames, Robert Hansen, and Jonathan Pollard. They betrayed their oaths and their trust and sold secrets to foreign intelligence services that put our assets at risk, and in the case of Ames and Hansen, got them killed.
Yes, Bryant did a lot of harm too. However, by dismissing Phelps as “just attention-seekers whom no one takes very seriously,” you make the same mistake that RickJay does: you assume that every individual sees the world the same way you do. If you’re a gay teen in the flyover states, trust me, you don’t need the Dope to tell you who Phelps is. Added to which–though it’s clearly not as bad as it was when I was a gay teen in the flyover states–the culture at large seems pretty content to, as you say, not take Phelps seriously. Try to imagine the world through eyes other than your own, and you might understand that Phelps does not mean the same thing to you as he does to someone with a completely different worldview from yours. Sorry that sounds like it does, but your response, and RickJay’s, make it pretty clear that you haven’t made much effort to empathize with that suicidal gay teen in rural Kansas.
Understand of course, Robyn and RickJay, that I opened this in Great Debates because I knew there would be a wide range of opinions. I don’t mean to suggest that my worldview is any more universal than yours. I bristled a bit at how definitively and subjectively–and seemingly thoughtlessly–Phelps was dismissed as irrelevant, when he is lethally relevant to someone who lives in a world very different from the one you live in.
I knew all about Stonewall when I was 11; I cried in fear when Harvey Milk was killed in my freshman year in highschool. Trust me, there are suicidal teens who know very well who Phelps is.
Yikes. I just saw my gr-gr-gr-grandfather listed as the #4 worst American. Fortunately the sins of the fathers are not visited upon the sons. At least that’s the theory…
This only makes sense if it’s about who has done the most damage to America and to the world, not if it’s about who have been the worst psycho killers. What, we need another list with Dahmer and Bundy at the top?
In that regard, go with the people who have, directly or indirectly, caused the most deaths and the most suffering unnecessarily and foreseeably, and next the ones who have been in strongest violation of the principles of civilization we purport to uphold. Handpuppets don’t count; their puppeteers do.
So, in no particular order, you are invited to chew on:
Henry Kissinger
Dick Cheney
Andrew Jackson
Warren Harding
Nathan Bedford Forrest (for the KKK, not for the CSA)
Newt Gingrich
Henry Frick
Robert Taft Sr.
Antonin Scalia
King Philip
Ulysses Grant
All of whom must, by your definition, be even worse than “the fucking beast from Revelations”, as you so quaintly described her not so long ago.
