Want a nasty, informative, viciously-insulting list with something to offend everyone? Check out the Buffalo Beast's
list of the top 50 most loathsome people of the year. Here are a couple of good ones, and the whole list is solid, and surprisingly informative. They quickly work in lots of details I'd forgotten over the course of the year, and offer quite a few tidbits I didn't know at all. And yes, of course Sarah Palin got #1. I've tried to stop picking on her since she's (mercifully) returned to her tundra-based obscurity, but this summation is too juicy to resist excerpting:
20. Joe the Plumber
Charges: The Che Guevara of bald, pissed off white men. In a lot of ways, Samuel Wurzelbacher really does represent the average American -- basing economic opinions on unrealistic expectations of personal future success, blaming his failure to meet those expectations on minorities and old people, complaining about deadbeats getting his taxes when he isn’t actually paying his taxes, and advertising his own rudimentary historical and mathematical ignorance by warning of creeping socialism in a country whose highest income tax rate has dropped by half in thirty years. “Joe” indeed symbolizes the true American dream—to become undeservedly rich and famous through a dizzyingly improbable stroke of luck. As American folk heroes go, Wurzelbacher ranks somewhere between Hulk Hogan and Bernie Goetz.
16. Rick Warren
Charges: Dubbed "America's Pastor" by The Nation, he's duped people from both sides of the political spectrum into thinking he's the kinder, fatter version of James Dobson. Though he is fatter, how could anyone think a man who -- professionally -- quotes a book written by a make-believe space-giant, instructing the murder of homosexuals, could be anything other than a delusional bigot? Still riding the undeserved wave of fame onset by a meth-head kidnap victim’s ownership of his pop-psych hybrid of churchy prudishness and self-help pabulum The Purpose Driven Life, Warren had a big year hosting a presidential forum at his gay-sounding Saddleback Church, helping to pass Prop 8 and being tapped to invoke said make-believe space-giant at Obama's inauguration. Plus, his neatly trimmed goatee is the queerest thing we've ever seen.
Exhibit A: "God tells us that he created all the land animals on the sixth day of creation, the same day that he created mankind. Man and dinosaurs lived at the same time." Can you feel the wisdom?
Sentence: He shalt giveth The Lord a blumpkin and eatheth of the pie until he bursts.
#1: Sarah Palin
Charges: If you want to know why the rest of the world is scared of Americans, consider the fact that after two terms of disastrous rule by a small-minded ignoramus, 46% of us apparently thought the problem was that he wasn’t quite stupid enough. Palin’s unending emissions of baffling, evasive incoherence should have disqualified her for any position that involved a desk, let alone placing her one erratic heartbeat from the presidency. The press strained mightily to feign respect for her, praising a debate performance that involved no debate, calling her a “great speaker” when her only speech was primarily a litany of insults to city-dwellers, echoing bogus sexism charges when a male Palin would have been boiled alive for the Couric interview alone, and lionizing her as she used her baby as a Pro-life stage prop before crowds who cooed when they should have been hurling polonium-tipped javelins. In the end, Palin had the beneficial effect of splitting her party between her admirers and people who can read.
