That List

I tried to get a list started a week back but it never got off the ground. Fortunately a co-worker borrowed one from a website, so I decided to borrow it too and re-post here, (along with ample links and appropriate credit). Since we're all a little dyslexic, I abbreviated it down to my personal favorites. Here then is the Cliff Notes version of The Buffalo Beast's 50 Most Loathsome People for 2004 --

#50. Ann Coulter
Crimes: Coulter plummets down the list as she slips into irrelevance. As her columns degenerate further into absurd, incoherent attacks against her own personal paranoid fantasy of fanged, drooling, Saddam-loving liberals who hate America and childish France-bashing, we find our outrage slowly giving way to a baffled “I can’t believe I used to go out with you” feeling. Her arguments are ridiculous, her vitriol forced, her hatchet face even harder to look at. Still, she insulted a one-armed war veteran, called reports of the hundreds of tons of missing munitions in Iraq false, claimed Wesley Clark was pro-infanticide, and blamed Abu Ghraib on the presence of women in the armed forces—they’re not all like you, Ann—and on and on. It’s just not worth debunking someone who has no credibility in the first place.
Smoking Gun: Has credibility in the minds of more people than we can stomach acknowledging.
Punishment: Skull crushed with rock.

47. 50 Cent
Crimes: Sole credential for being a rapper, aside from his affiliation with Dr. Dre, is having been shot several times. Spent his first record company advance on crack to sell. Can barely talk, let alone rap. Represents the worst aspect of urban culture, its tendency to collapse in on itself in an orgy of mobsterism and self-destructive spending. Obnoxious tendency to pull out large wads of cash and wave them around in people’s faces (not a figure of speech).
Smoking Gun: Ugliest rapper to make it since Biggie.
Punishment: Getting his ass kicked by Will Smith.

39. Tom Cruise
Crimes: Inexplicable stardom. In a just world, Brendan Fraser would get an Oscar before this carbon copy of every other rich asshole cokehead with a fast car. Consistently influential in casting women in his movie for the sole purpose of nailing them. Extremely convincing when he plays an ambitious, superficial prick.
Smoking Gun: Always plays an ambitious, superficial prick.
Punishment: Caught in the act with Vin Diesel.

38. Toby Keith
Crimes: The worst kind of proud-to-be-brainwashed dolt, one who feels he should express himself. The fact that this ambulatory hamburger’s opinions were ever given public forum is an indictment of our entire civilization and all human history leading up to this point.
Smoking Gun: Plays country music.
Punishment: Impaled on improperly installed American flag attached to tractor-trailer, dragged for 12 hours, eaten by wolves.

28. Ben Affleck
Crimes: His uncanny ability to produce an unending stream of shitty movies and still get work rivals that of even Kevin Costner. Has coasted for years on a reputation built largely on a former association with Matt Damon, but has done nothing to justify his star status aside from boning Jennifer Lopez. Gigli was the cinematic equivalent of the Madrid bombings.
Smoking Gun: CGI scenes in Daredevil were more lifelike than his oafish live action.
Punishment: Reunited with J-Lo.

25. Dr. Phil
Crimes: Not a doctor. Not wise. Offers troubled souls nothing but the sweet feeling of surrendering control. Only reason for prominence is that Oprah just couldn’t support her show by herself anymore. Offers troubled simpletons meaningless slogans that resonate for a maximum of five days before they realize they already knew that shit and they still can’t stop whatever compulsive behavior got them onto his show in the first place. Is almost certainly regularly involved in some unspeakable depravity that he can’t stop and which caused him to fabricate his public persona in a frantic attempt to convince us he’s normal.
Smoking Gun: Both presidential candidates were forced to submit to his pedantic bullshit in some bizarre new soft focus emasculation ritual to get slack-jawed housewives to vote for them.
Punishment: A lifetime of guest spots on Springer.

23. Jerry Bruckheimer
Crimes: “Producer” really just means “guy with the money” in Hollywood. Master of the incoherent action sequence, full of unnecessary cuts and jittery close-ups. His rapidly multiplying CBS cop show empire is replete with ridiculously beautiful cops and scientists (and murderers and victims and witnesses) and impossibly stylish interiors. The “CSI” franchise perfectly fulfills the viewing needs of a fat, lazy nation: no running, no car chases, just sitting around, talking, and playing with gadgets. The real crimes, however, are the movies including Kangaroo Jack, Coyote Ugly, Bad Boys, Bad Boys 2, Days of Thunder, Gone in 60 Seconds, and the so-stupid-it’s-funny Armageddon. Imagine what else could have been done with that money.
Smoking Gun: Who brings a fucking Gatling gun to an asteroid?
Punishment: Made into shoes for Martin Scorsese.

18. Mel Gibson
Crimes: As with any religious nut, expects people to take his delusional bullshit seriously. Is obsessed with pain and suffering, as can be observed in the numerous Hulk Hogan style “now I’m really mad” scenes in nearly all of his movies, in which he endures medically impossible levels of bodily punishment before rising to vanquish his cartoonish foes. This is such a routine motif in Gibson’s work that we half expected Jesus to jump off the cross and start kicking Jewish ass in The Passion of the Christ. More historically revisionist than Oliver Stone.
Smoking Gun: Shot about 11 times in the climax of Lethal Weapon II, yet still saunters off with his partner as the credits roll, apparently not in need of
medical attention.
Punishment: Neurodegenerative illness that could have been cured through stem cell research.

15. Condoleezza Rice
Crimes: The phrase “politics is show business for ugly people” has never had so fine a foil. Smirks condescendingly at senior Senators when they ask her silly questions about gross negligence in the area of national security. Winner of the Beast award for most likely to make Grover Norquist’s dick hard. Promoted for feverishly licking Cheney’s boot for four years.
Smoking Gun: Gets to sleep in the big house now.
Punishment: thrown into the arctic from the Exxon oil tanker that used to bear
her name.

13. Joan Rivers
Crimes: The most ghastly face science has managed to create without the use of chemical weapons. As a pioneer in facial reconstruction, she shows us that, in the future, every famous woman will gradually turn into a cross between a sickly geisha and the Joker. The red carpet fashion-cop shtick she does with her broken, spiritless daughter is such an obvious inferiority complex manifestation we almost feel sorry for them, until we remember they’re making millions of dollars for it.
Smoking Gun: The sheer, ugly self-hatred of a woman with that face, that voice, and that personality nitpicking Nicole Kidman.
Punishment: Face falls off into wet cement at Mann’s Chinese Theatre.

8. John Ashcroft
Crimes: Promoting sexual shame, writing and singing alarmingly jingoistic and terrible songs, flattening constitutional protections, detaining brown people at will without charges or counsel, pretending to be a patriot, and intentionally ignoring terrorism in his pre-9/11 tenure.
Smoking Gun: Put a fucking curtain up to cover a naked breast on a statue. A statue.
Punishment: Only heterosexual judge on the supreme court in 2035.

7. Donald Trump
Crimes: Hopelessly addicted to narcissism. Shares Saddam Hussein’s compulsion to have gaudy structures named after himself. Is to dignified wealth what Michael Jackson is to competent childcare.
Smoking Gun: The hair alone justifies violence.
Punishment: Forced to expose his tiny penis before crowds of laughing celebrities on “Who Wants to See Donald Trump’s Penis?”

6. George W. Bush
Crimes: Too numerous to mention. The worst piece of shit ever to run this country, including King George III; when’s the last time a president made half his country want to move to Canada? Lays claim to the legacy of Jesus Christ as he hungrily sucks what little life-essence is left from the world. Appears to be only dimly aware that he is destroying the future, but seems to think it’s kind of funny.
Smoking Gun: Too numerous to mention.
Punishment: To have his fortune stolen from him by Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle and Wolfowitz, and be denied Medicaid.

3. You
Crimes: You gaze idly at the carnage around you, sigh, and go calmly back to your coffee and your People magazine. You can’t stop buying useless crap, though you’re drowning in a deepening pool of debt. You think you’re an activist because you bitch all day on the internet, but you reelect the same gangsters at a 99% rate. You consider yourself informed because you waste a significant portion of your life watching the same three news stories cycle over and over again on your gargantuan, aerodynamic television set while you eat processed food. You really thought everything would be okay if Kerry won. Not only do you believe in an invisible man who magically farted out the universe, you also excoriate and marginalize those who disagree. You have a poorer understanding of your country’s foreign policy history than a third world peasant, but you can’t wait to see what Julia Roberts will be wearing at the Oscars. You cheer as Ukrainians challenge an election based on exit poll data, but keep waiting around for someone else to fix your problems. You can’t think, you can’t organize and you won’t act. This is all your fault.
Smoking Gun: You’re fat.
Punishment: You’re soaking in it.

2. Donald Rumsfeld
Crimes: At least Herman Goering knew how to conquer people. Rummy is the richest person in the white house, a former auto and pharmaceutical CEO and the one who nurtured Dick Cheney’s career. So rife with corruption and fascist desire he makes dirt look clean. Carries himself in press conferences like a cranky grandfather who is sick of hearing his daughters whine about how he molested them every now and then.
Smoking Gun: Abu Ghraib.
Punishment: Abu Ghraib.

1. Kenneth Blackwell
Crimes: The greasy, rancid piece of crap who delivered Ohio for Bush by any
means necessary, and then bragged about it in a recent fundraising letter. A black man who has no reservations about screwing over his own people in his lust for power and money. Blackwell is the kind of soulless traitor without whose complicity no nefarious evil plot ever goes down. In step with the future of global elections.
Smoking Gun: Phony recounts, media lockouts, intentional misallocation of voting machines, you name it.
Just Punishment: Dissolved in barrel of acid.

© 2004 The Beast

Why, oh why, they left out Walden O'Dell of Diebold infamy, I don't know.

Let's all start drinking now,

-- Mz M.


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