The BEAST 50 Most Loathsome People in America, 2005

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50. Geraldo Rivera

Charges: A mustache only slightly less loathsome than Tom Friedman’s-if only because fewer people take Rivera seriously. Began his career as a seemingly skilled and passionate muckraker, but having been exposed countless times as a shameless, megalomaniacal fraud, he absolutely refuses to get out of our living rooms. Most recently, Geraldo was accused of making a frail, elderly victim of Hurricane Katrina whom he "rescued" do multiple takes of the rescue scene with Rivera for Fox News cameras. Geraldo heroically carried the woman’s dog.

Exhibit A: Claims he defected from CNBC to Fox News for patriotic reasons.

Sentence: Sealed inside Al Capone’s vault with a phalanx of Neo-nazis armed with folding chairs.

49. Michelle Malkin

Charges: A curious case of racial Stockholm syndrome with a palpable lust for violent ideological oppression and displays of imperial power. Rose to prominence in conservative circles by congratulating white America for its most shameful chapter since slavery, and encouraging a return to form in her book, In Defense of Internment. Malkin thinks it’s hunky-dory to detain an entire demographic indefinitely if it makes the rest of us feel more comfortable. Her newest, Unhinged, argues that liberals have lost their minds, because they are upset with the direction their country is taking. Her evidence is a carefully collected selection of the dumbest things liberals have ever said, as if she couldn’t have just as easily filled an entire library with the insane ravings of right-wingers. Her accusations of blind hatred and vitriol mimic soul sister Ann Coulter’s classic tactic of psychological projection: whatever Malkin is, she sees in her opponents.

Exhibit A: Internment was so irresponsible that it prompted 40 history professors to sign a letter condemning it.

Sentence: Detained indefinitely without charge and waterboarded hourly for looking at a cop "all slanty-like."

48. Larry the Cable Guy

Charges: The absolute nadir of the American South’s baffling cultural hegemony. A middle-class Nebraskan, raised in Palm Beach, whose parents sent him to private school, masquerading as an Appalachian mutant and making millions off the nine-toed cyclopes in his audience by calling his material "blue collar," when it’s really just a celebration of proud ignorance. The latest in a long line of "entertainers" propagating the lie that real talent is elitist. The South has risen again—just long enough to grab the rest of the nation by the legs and pull it back down to its Lovecraftian depths. Isn’t even "bad funny." Makes Jeff Foxworthy look like Chris Rock.

Exhibit A: Ostensibly humorous catchphrase translates into "complete the task."

Sentence: Sent back in time for the sole purpose of having Mark Twain’s cigars extinguished on his face.

47. Martha Stewart

Charges: Only in America could a plutocrat and insider trader find sympathy among her social inferiors—people she would have either sterilized or mustard gassed, if the law permitted her. Stewart, a woman so frigid she makes Gila monsters look cuddly, rode this wave of infamy to a resurgence in popularity and a second television show. To the nation’s delight, she then used this public forum to demean the aborigines in her charge with robotic mordancy. Is in obvious discomfort when laughing. Would have drowned the survivors on the Titanic and used their corpses as a human pontoon to walk to dry land.

Exhibit A: Seemed to genuinely enjoy prison.

Sentence: Forced to use own K-Mart products.

46. Bruce Chapman

Charges: Founder of the misnamed "Discovery Institute." Despite its pioneering title, Chapman’s organization seeks to make one of the world’s oldest, dumbest ideas the prevailing ideology, to "undiscover" evolution and set us back more than a century. Seems to believe a petition signed by 400 PhDs and professors is convincing proof of Intelligent Design’s widespread acceptance, when more scientists named "Steve" endorse Darwin. A lazy dissembler, he blames the lack of actual research and peer-reviewed articles on ID on academic "blackballing." Right, ‘cause Galileo had it easy. Chapman’s sole trailblazing achievement in the field of academic inquiry has been in proving scientists can be even smugger--when driven by theology.

Exhibit A: Held high-level positions under Reagan and Bush, Sr. Is not a scientist.

Sentence: Infested and colonized by scabies mites: eyeless, brainless parasites unique to humans—perfectly evolved to afflict us. Succumbing to the maddening itch, Chapman skins himself alive.

45. Robert Novak

Charges: The absence of charges, for one. While the Valerie Plame leak scandal has taken down one prominent reporter and tarnished the reputation of several others, Novak—the one who actually printed the leak—remains inexplicably unscathed, unless you count the profane bout of crankiness that got his satanic ass bounced to Fox News, where, after all, he really belongs. Either Novak has secretly revealed his sources, damaging his already dubious journalistic credibility, or he is simply so well ensconced in the Washington power structure that he can’t be removed, like a metastasized tumor.

Exhibit A: The sheer, dreadful, angler-fish ugliness of the man, which can only be explained by the gradual accumulation of several lifetime’s worth of misanthropy, or possibly possession by demonic entity.

Sentence: Finds himself chained to a desk with James Carville; figures out he’s in hell only after several weeks pass without winning a single argument.

44. George Lucas

Charges: It needs to be said: George Lucas is an awful writer and a shitty, shitty director. His second Star Wars trilogy absolutely sucked from beginning to end, and was in fact the least brave creative endeavor he could possibly have chosen, a guaranteed grand slam. Lucas has grown so accustomed to massive commercial success that he has no idea he’s putting out the worst work of his career, and no one dares to tell him. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter, because an army of sexless, sedentary thirty-something dweebs with an unhealthy fixation on Princess Leia will insist that his schlock is brilliant as if their lives depend on it, and an absurdly disproportionate media blitz always brings the kids in. But everything that was great about the first trilogy—reasonably decent acting, an engaging storyline and cool model-based special effects—is gone, replaced by detestably unsympathetic characters reciting torturously bad dialogue in a manner so wooden that coaching from Keanu Reeves would have helped, and CGI effects that, while painstakingly crafted down to the nanopixel, somehow looked less real than plastic spaceships and Muppets.

Exhibit A: Already revising the new trilogy for DVD releases.

Sentence: Cast into the gaping maw of Tatooine’s all-powerful Sarlacc and digested alive for a thousand years, along with a talkative Jar Jar Binks.

43. Rush Limbaugh

Charges: Rather than engage in the admittedly difficult task of justifying GOP policies rationally, the key to Limbaugh’s success is attracting an audience that actually yearns to be lied to. It doesn’t matter how many righteous fact-checkers assail him in print and on the web, because dittoheads don’t care that he’s lying, as long as the lies justify their prejudices. Limbaugh’s program is not just hypocritical; it is a celebration of hypocrisy for ignorant crackers, angry at smart people and strung out on the dwindling sensation that they are better than everyone else by virtue of their race, sex, nationality or level of bluster, because their character and accomplishments don’t warrant such feelings. If political discussion were sex, the Limbaugh audience would be a horde of virgins beating off to deranged rape fantasies.

Exhibit A: Started out in sports radio; hasn’t changed his approach one bit.

Sentence: Starved to death in full view of glazed ham; ACLU mistakenly bestowed entire estate due to barbecue sauce stain on last will and testament.

42. Nancy Grace

Charges: Revenges herself nightly for the murder of her fiancée on every criminal suspect and defendant; facts be damned. Despite her viscous, Gump-like hyper-drawl, her brain can barely keep pace. Looks like a camel in drag. Her crude vindictiveness is to the myth of the southern belle what Roots was to the myth of the genteel South.

Exhibit A: Repeatedly utters a snarling "You know what?" at guests who question her-not as a rhetorical device, but as a declarative sentence.

Sentence: Wrongly convicted and summarily executed by intrauterine electrocution on national television, so horrifying the nation that capital punishment is thenceforth outlawed.

41. Charles Krauthammer

Charges: Considered an intellectual authority among neocons, Krauthammer, like his colleagues George Will and Tony Blankley, really only presents a passable facsimile of gravitas, substituting vocabulary for intelligence, mischaracterization for argument, and intolerable haughtiness for authority. The fact that this wanton fascist’s opinions are not only considered fit for mainstream consumption, but among the cream of the conservative crop, is a maddening indictment of both the media and conservative movement.

Exhibit A: Posed a hypothetical scenario involving 9/11 "architect" Kalid Sheikh Mohammed to advocate legalizing torture, when the actual Kalid Sheikh Mohammed was actually tortured without any such legislation.

Sentence: Lockheed-designed bionic exoskeleton he receives from Dick Cheney in exchange for opposing stem cell research goes berserk, ignoring Krauthammer’s excited protestations as it uses its powerful titanium arms to pulverize his loved ones and donate his life savings to Hamas.

40. Tom Cruise

Charges: Criminal narcissism. After mega-lawyer Bert Fields threatened to sue The BEAST over Cruise’s inclusion in last year’s Loathsome List, we responded by giving him the editorial finger, and bracing ourselves for the legal spanking of our lives. Instead, the episode seemed to trigger a cascading ego crisis, culminating in a rapid and irrecoverable image downgrade from exalted idol to ridiculous buffoon. From his laughable claim of psychological expertise to his worst acting performance ever—as a man in love—Cruise simply cracked up on camera in 2005, and a public hitherto willing to overlook his obsessively inauthentic personality and comical religious affiliation had finally had enough. Cruise is a perfect example of a person who is simultaneously in love with and completely unfamiliar with himself, living in perpetual fear of self-actualization, and asserting a legal right to live free of criticism. A guy who can do whatever the hell he wants, yet chooses to devote his life to maintaining the public perception that he is somebody else.

Exhibit A: "I care man, I care. I care about you. I care about your children. I care about these people here in this room. Every one of you. And I...I mean it. That is not just some words to me. That is a promise." Seriously, can’t even act like a human being.

Sentence: A lifetime of forced, joyless sex with famously beautiful women, only to have his colossal gay porn library posthumously bequeathed to the Smithsonian by bitter, unloved offspring.

39. Dr. David Hager

Charges: A Bush appointee to the FDA who was the key figure in its rejection of emergency oral contraceptive Plan B as an over the counter drug, which Hager bragged was the second time in fifty years the FDA has ruled against the overwhelming approval of its own advisory committee. The author of books like Stress and the Woman’s Body and As Jesus Cared for Women, Hager repeatedly sodomized his ex-wife for years against her will, alternately apologizing for or denying it when confronted by her, offering excuses like "You asked me to do that" and "Oh, I didn’t mean to have anal sex with you; I can’t feel the difference," she told The Nation. Seems a bit fishy, a supposed authority on women’s health who can’t detect such a significant distinction with his most sensitive instrument.

Exhibit A: "My official comment is that I decline to comment."

Sentence: A three-day group ramming by the multi-dildoed Oregon chapter of NOW, after which Hager will walk with a pronounced limp, never to regain control of his sphincter, and discover himself to be inexplicably pregnant.

38. Mr. Blackwell

Charges: Has made a career of releasing an annual list judging the most superficial members of society based solely on their most superficial aspects. Richard’s "Worst Dressed" celebrity lists have all the redeeming qualities of syphilis. Is clearly motivated by jealousy towards young, beautiful women, because he knows he can never be one.

Exhibit A: Routinely cited by E!, Entertainment tonight and People Magazine; we’ve got to settle for Celebrity Justice.

Sentence: Teeth extracted with pliers and used to bedazzle Britney Spears’s jean jacket.

37. Donovan McNabb

Charges: Played so poorly that his demoralized and alienated teammates yearned for the return of ego-vampire Terrell Owens. A chocolate commodity so inoffensive he makes Hershey bars look militant. Responded indignantly to loopy criticism from the head of the Philly NAACP, but laughed off Rush Limbaugh’s racist broadsides. Choked in the fourth quarter of Super Bowl; this year he enjoyed the worst fourth quarter passer rating in the league. Made over $11,000,000 in 2004.

Exhibit A: Logged only significant playing time this season with his mom in soup commercials.

Sentence: Peon at a Campbell’s Soup cannery in China. Flogged routinely for underperformance.

36. John Rendon

Charges: The man behind the man behind the curtain. His PR firm created the Iraqi National Congress in 1991 and dubbed Ahmed Chalabi its brave leader. Has been on the CIA’s list of organizations to funnel money to since the key role it played ousting Noriega from Panama for papa Bush. Three weeks after 9/11 the Rendon Group began collecting a $326,000 a month paycheck for disseminating Iraq war propaganda by organizing and funding the INC, amongst other activities such as bribing and coercing foreign journalists to beat the drum for war. The Rendon Group played matchmaker between Ahmed Chalabi, Judith Miller and a well-trained Iraqi defector with wild, polygraph-disproved claims of vast WMD stockpiles. A former McGovern supporter and lifelong Democrat who enjoys his life as the Goebbels of outsourcing.

Exhibit A: This self described "information warrior" produced the now infamous tight shot short film of the falling Saddam Hussein statue with a small, yet enthused cast of INC players he had shipped into town with CIA money and planes.

Sentence: Paid handsomely to saturate the global media with fabricated reports that the cure for cancer is "punching John Rendon in the throat."

35. Michael Brown

Charges: Second fiddle to Bush’s Nero—except that while New Orleans sank, Michael Brown just fiddled with himself. A man of geological indolence, Brown makes lichens seem dynamic. Despite being woefully unqualified for his job as FEMA director, it was Brown’s lethal callousness that really astounded (and killed) so many Americans. When one of only two FEMA employees Brown had vouchsafed New Orleans wrote two days after Katrina that "the situation is past critical," Brown responded, "Thanks for the update. Anything specific I need to do or tweak?" When he finally arrived in Louisiana, Brown was preoccupied with demanding more time to eat dinner at a Baton Rouge restaurant, instead of sucking down an MRE and getting to work doing his incredibly important job, like a fucking man. Brown reacted to the most important moment in his life like an immature college student who realizes he’s fucking up the semester and stops going to class without telling anyone. No human being can possibly be this ineffective unless he simply doesn’t give a shit if people die.

Exhibit A: In subsequent communications, Brown asked, "Can I quit now? Can I come home?" and complained about trouble finding a dog sitter. With almost comical indifference to those actually suffering, he wrote: "I’m trapped now, please rescue me."

Sentence: What else? Dehydrated, starved, and slowly baked to death on a Ninth Ward rooftop while repeatedly buzzed by news helicopters. Body secretly recovered and incinerated by Blackwater operatives as part of a Cheney-initiated campaign to keep casualty figures artificially low.

34. Scooter Libby

Charges: Known as "germ boy" within the administration for his obsession with creating panic over biological warfare in order to facilitate huge government vaccine purchases and alter markets to the benefit of big pharmaceutical industry stock holders like Rumsfeld, George Shultz and himself. Sound familiar? A high-level fall guy, responsible for leaking what was in the interest of profit, not leaking what wasn’t, and barking on cue to produce the noise of governance without the drawbacks of actual governance.

Exhibit A: "The Aspens turn in clusters," or something.

Sentence: Raped by bear.

33. Johnny Damon

Charges: Any baseball player with highlights in his hair should be faced with the same penalty system applied to those using performance-enhancing steroids. It’s ruining the game. And if a ball player is going to grow a beard, it should be a Charlie Manson/Thurman Munson scraggle of bushy whiskers, not a neatly manicured and softly conditioned frame for your pretty face. The only thing that got Damon to step into line and quit hair-farming was a 52 million dollar check from the New York Yankees. Boston prayed for the multi-bladed Gillette that officially made him a Yankee to slip while gliding over his Adam’s apple and spill his lifeblood into the bathroom sink.

Exhibit A: Going from the Red Sox to the Yankees is like fucking the guy that murdered your husband.

Sentence: Killed by barrage of hurled D cell batteries when he takes the field at Fenway next season.

32. Kenneth Tomlinson

Charges: Hired to infiltrate the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, making way for a GOP takeover of the final outlet for objective, fact-based TV reporting left largely unsullied by corporate manipulation. Why is it that whenever conservatives complain about the "liberal bias" of investigative journalism programs, they seek to “balance” them out with shows that feature wealthy Republicans sitting in chairs and talking? And why is that those who rail against "racial quotas" have no problem with affirmative action when it’s applied to newsroom ideology? Tomlinson’s heavy-handed invasion was so objectionable that he was forced to resign, but he left behind some real gems: new CPB president and CEO Patricia Harrison was co-chair of the RNC, Assistant Secretary of State and oversaw the production of now-notorious fake news segments for the White House; and the new Chairwoman and Vice Chairwoman are both major donors to the RNC. Look forward to a new, more "balanced" era in public broadcasting.

Exhibit A: Next year’s children’s special, "Elmo and Milton Friedman’s Supply Side Christmas Adventure."

Sentence: Life as Bill Moyers’ butler, including sponge baths and diaper service.

31. Rita Cosby

Charges: Unholy pastiche of fearmongering and celebrity ringworm with the brain of a moth, the integrity of a tapeworm, and the appearance and larynx of a sugar-addicted, glass-eating drag queen.

Exhibit A: Her banter with Joe Scarborough kills children.

Sentence: Kicked in the nuts.

30. Hillary Clinton

Charges: Let’s face it: one reason the Republicans have done so well in recent elections (aside from touch screen voting machines) is that they are consistent in their views, however nuts they are, while "new Democrats" like Clinton are willing to hump every fence they come across. Hillary’s recent triangulation on issues like flag-burning and naughty video games has no right-wing equivalent in reality, but it would be something like Alaska Senator Ted Stevens launching a campaign against logging. Claims to pray all the time, which even her supporters know is bullshit.

Exhibit A: Will probably cause yet another tragic Republican presidency.

Sentence: Designated cookie-baker for Feminists for Life.

29. Terri Schiavo

Charges: Sacrificed her grey matter to vanity, only to become the focus of a manufactured media blitz involving the character assassination of her husband, the selective coverage of fifty protestors by 200 reporters, and a disgusting demonstration of congressional overreaching, all in deference to a frightening fringe culture’s farcical take on ethics. If you can’t tell a brain-dead oxygen-waster from a fetus, you’ve got no place debating policy or exploiting a devastated family to further your idiotic agenda or political career.

Exhibit A: As confirmed by a conspicuously underreported autopsy, Schiavo feels the same about her current situation as she did a year ago.

Sentence: To have the circumstances of her death become a bizarre political freakshow; to be worshipped as a religious idol by weak-minded weirdoes who never knew her, stripping her and her family of all dignity as she lies, powerless to stop it, in a hospital bed. Oh, right. Never mind.

28. Joe Lieberman

Charges: Technically there are 55 Republicans in the Senate, but that’s not counting their favorite shill Joe Lieberman. He’s a Democrat because…well…he’s from Connecticut. And he’s Jewish. But Lieberman has spent his time since "losing" to Bush/Cheney in 2000 spooning the White House and attempting to inoculate their increasingly insane policies from legitimate criticism. Resembles Tex Avery cartoon character Droopy Dog in voice, demeanor, and spinelessness.

Exhibit A: "Freedom of religion doesn’t mean freedom from religion." Apparently, it also doesn’t mean freedom from asinine revisionism.

Sentence: Made into Oval Office footstool.

27. Ann Coulter

Charges: The fact that Coulter is considered desirable by Republicans betrays their sick and masochistic nature. We saw Coulter in person this year, and she is a revolting skeleton with a boob job and a grotesquely oversized head, who feeds only on the hatred of her target audience, liberals. Sole redeeming quality is that she is impossible to take seriously--she's really more of a shock comic than a political commentator, whether she knows it or not.

Exhibit A: "I’m getting a little fed up with hearing about, oh, civilian casualties."

Sentence: Confined to Mississippi; forever banned from interacting with the lefty intellectuals she lives to antagonize.

26. Spammers

Charges: Wasting billions of minutes of time and millions of dollars in bandwidth on the thin hope that a few poor saps will be stupid enough to believe that a Nigerian banker actually wants to give them millions of dollars, or that responding to an unsolicited e-mail is the smart way to refinance their mortgage or enlarge their penis. Every day, we must perform the tedious task of combing through our e-mail and deleting the nine tenths of it which consist of the most retarded marketing in history, along with mean-spirited swindles and ads for the vilest pornography imaginable. All because these jack-offs can think of no better way to support themselves than by pestering the entire fucking planet.

Exhibit A: Your inbox.

Sentence: Faces repeatedly smashed into keyboards until dead; bodies made into actual Spam; greedily devoured by Nigerian bankers.

25. Paris Hilton

Charges: Won’t go away. A head so empty, the rails of coke that sustain her must dissipate in clouds around her ears; this residual high the only explanation anyone would come within five feet of her. Brainless, her spinal cord defies physics, like an Indian rope trick. Her Carl’s Jr. commercial, while an uninspired approximation of eroticism, was still hotter than her actual "sex" tape, in which she only made noise when she wasn’t screwing—that’s not hot. Squints inexplicably for photo ops, suggesting even minimal focus is beyond her. Her continued success as a celebrity famous for nothing, despite the eerie resemblance she bears to the inbred banjoist from Deliverance and a lack of talent so profound that others become duller as they approach her, indicates that something is fundamentally wrong with humanity.

Exhibit A: Somehow, everybody in America knew that this completely pointless person had lost her dog, and we are all diminished by the experience.

Sentence: Locked in a room with a high steel ceiling which lowers a centimeter per hour, until she either solves a Rubik’s cube or is crushed; whichever comes first.

24. Jim Guckert

Charges: The most hilariously twisted figure of 2005, including Michael Jackson. Guckert, better known as Jeff Gannon, truly lived a life in need of two names: the upright, macho, McCarthyite Clark Kent and the buff, military-fetish prostitute Superfag. Gannon symbolized so many things: the exponential erosion of journalistic standards, the fundamental hypocrisy in the heart of each Republican (further evidenced by their charges of "gay-bashing" when liberals could not conceal their amusement at his outing), unseemly conflicts of interest between the press and the GOP, etc. But what was lost in the sauce was that Gannon was a straight-up plagiarist, actually copying and pasting sections of White House press releases into his articles, and we don’t mean quotations. Now that’s a lazy propagandist. Nobody seemed to find that part of the story particularly interesting, but hey, what’s violating the first rule of journalism next to hotmilitarystuds.com?

Exhibit A: Despite having been publicly exposed to be a clownish impostor and an embarrassment to his party, Gannon refuses to go away, clinging ever more tenaciously to the same self-denying dogma that made him a laughingstock in the first place.

Sentence: Reunited with reality, in the form of ass cancer.

23. Jennifer Wilbanks

Charges: Wasting the entire nation’s time and attention without actually being abducted and killed. The "Runaway Bride" fiasco marks a new low point in modern news, an episode in which the media devoted more attention to a single fruitcake than the rest of the damned world, discovered her to be simply an inconsiderate flake, and continued their shameless round-the-clock coverage of her unabated for many days afterward, compulsively playing 10 seconds of towel-headed perp walk footage over and over and over again, as world events were left to take care of themselves. This bug-eyed bitch and her doormat fiancée, after all, were important—right?

Exhibit A: Even if she were actually abducted and killed, it wouldn’t have merited 1/1000^th the coverage she got in the first day of this speculation orgy.

Sentence: Actually abducted and killed.

22. Jesse Jackson

Charges: Having parlayed a brief association with and willingness to mimic Martin Luther King Jr. into a lifelong career, Jackson finally cast aside all vestiges of integrity in 2005, diving headlong into rhetorical prostitution appearances in support of three extremely dubious "heroes": transparent pedophile Michael Jackson, all-star wide receiver and raging asshole Terrell Owens, and convicted quadruple-murderer Stanley "Tookie" Williams, who Jackson compared to Nelson Mandela. Providing the post-black pop star with racial cover for what must have been an exorbitant amount of money, and arguing that Tookie’s writing a children’s book makes up for mocking the death-rattles of his victims, Jackson managed to make Al Sharpton look good last year. It’s a long, soul-destroying trek from "I have a dream" to "I have to get a receipt for my expense account."

Exhibit A: Jackson’s Rainbow/PUSH coalition organized a five-bus caravan, ostensibly to bring New Orleans residents wiped out by hurricane Katrina back to the Big Easy for guaranteed jobs and housing. Only fourteen of the two hundred passengers were actually from New Orleans. Three quarters of the passengers went right back home. Forty-eight were hired, three of which were from New Orleans.

Sentence: Jackson awakes to discover that he really has 'had a dream,' and that he is actually white, dirt poor, unemployed, and a terrible dresser.

21. Bill Frist

Charges: A physician whose senatorial career has been a protracted renunciation of the Hippocractic oath. First and foremost, Frist does harm. Drew the scrutiny of the SEC and Department of Justice for directing the sale of $6 million worth of stock in his brother’s company, while claiming not to know he even owned it. Diagnosed Terri Schiavo from the senate floor, proclaiming "that is not somebody in a persistent vegetative state," and then denied ever having made such a judgment. His Harvard Medical School classmates reproached him in a letter for having exploited his medical training. Made protecting drug maker Eli Lilly from litigation for putting mercury in vaccines a provision of the Homeland Security bill. Honed his surgical skills on cats he adopted from pet shelters—really.

Exhibit A: Opposed Patients’ Bill of Rights.

Sentence: Brain damage due to botched botox treatment.

20. Oprah Winfrey

Charges: Winfrey’s entire life is an exercise in self-aggrandizement, from the TV show which tells us what to read and how to live to her eponymous magazine, every issue of which features her smug countenance on its cover. More than just another insufferable Hollywood egotist, Oprah is something more akin to a housewife messiah, providing false hope and faux spirituality for experience-deprived worshippers. Everything she does is strategically designed to draw more praise, more devotees, and of course more money. Recently had celebrated poet Maya Angelou on her program to promote her new poem, which Oprah read for the audience as if she wrote it herself, as she seems to actually believe.

Exhibit A: Dr. Phil.

Sentence: Crushed by self-commissioned 40-story platinum Oprah statue.

19. James Sensenbrenner

Charges: Hates free speech. Sensenbrenner is every truculent moron who ever shouted you down for informing him or called you a traitor for disagreeing with him. Sensenbrenner wants to apply criminal penalties for broadcast indecency—jail for swearing. Sensenbrenner and his supporters don’t know a damn thing about freedom or democracy; they may not even understand that they are clearly against these concepts. They are terrible, mindless, trained by decades of churchgoing into an unquestioning loyalty and a bitter resentment of dissent. That’s why they didn’t mind when this turgid cock abruptly ended a hearing on the Patriot Act after a single round of questioning because the witnesses were talking about Guantanamo. Sensenbrenner gaveled the hearing to a close over the objections of many, and when it became clear that the Democrats weren’t leaving, this old, worthless bag of shit turned off the microphones and ordered CSPAN to turn its cameras off, clearly enraged by the idea of liberals getting a turn to talk. Specializes in legislative attacks on civil liberties and the separation of powers, such as the Patriot Act and 2005’s REAL ID Act, which made its way into law as a rider attached to a military spending bill, and allows the Homeland Security Department to bypass any law or court to erect physical barriers at our borders.

Exhibit A: If Sensenbrenner ran the country, we’d go to jail for writing this.

Sentence: Spine-mounted electrode racks Sensenbrenner’s body with searing pain every time he utters an article, pronoun, or any form of the verbs "to have" and "to be."

18. Tommy Hilfiger

Charges: Egomaniacal designer of drab, ironically patriot-hued clothing, manufactured by Chinese migrants who overcrowd the equally drab Pacific Rim factories of the United States Commonwealth of Saipan, favorite illegal vacation spot of Jack Abramoff and Tom Delay. Workers slave for pennies, are administered forced abortions, and still can slap a "Made in the USA" sticker on their products.

Exhibit A: Publicly raising a spoiled cunt on MTV’s post-apocalyptic "Rich Girls," and hosting a primetime CBS reality infomercial while peddling overpriced trash made by slaves.

Sentence: Receives gift from Ralph Lauren—a Sicilian necktie.

17. William A. Donohue

Charges: If Jesus Christ were alive today, Catholic League president Bill Donohue would regularly call him a faggot in casual conversation. Purports to somehow defend Christianity by attacking nearly everybody on the planet in a perpetual frenzy of hateful, red-faced rage. As far as Donohue is concerned, the main focus of Catholicism is to stamp out homosexuality and Hollywood Jews who "like anal sex."

Exhibit A: When a liberal blogger posted an "O’Reilly Factor" parody transcript wherein Donohue launches a campaign against responding to sneezes by saying "gesundheit" instead of "God bless you," many failed to get the joke, because, well, it’s just plain realistic.

Sentence: Actually judged by true Christian god.

16. R Kelly

Charges: As if videotaping himself urinating on an underage girl wasn’t bad enough, Kelly decided to follow up by inflicting the worst piece of music in American history upon the public consciousness. Kelly claims he is a genius for squeezing out what are so far 12 installments of his “hip hopera,” “Trapped in the Closet,” like so many virtually identical turds, with no variation in musical content and a story line so patently terrible that it soon became the subject of a parody-frenzy involving Saturday Night Live, South Park, Mad TV, Jimmy Kimmel, and the Upright Citizens brigade, among many others. Even his good songs all seem to be about fucking underage girls.

Exhibit A: Seriously—pissing on an underage girl.

Sentence: Trapped in a closet. Eventually dies of thirst.

15. Karl Rove

Charges: A greasy pig whose only distinction in life is his total lack of decency. Rove is decidedly not a genius; he is simply missing the part of his soul that prevents the rest of us from kicking elderly women in the face. His admirers have elevated fanatical, amoral ambition to the status of a virtue, along with lying, cheating, and negligent homicide, all in the name of "values." Quite possibly the worst person in the worst White House in American history.

Exhibit A: "As people do better, they start voting like Republicans - unless they have too much education and vote Democratic, which proves there can be too much of a good thing."

Sentence: Lowered head first into oil refinery smokestack.

14. Elisabeth Bumiller

Charges: The ultimate Bush hagiographer, Bumiller is responsible for unearthing such essential information as Bush’s iPod playlist and how he always makes his bed time. Bumiller’s weekly presidential throat job in the rapidly declining New York Times, the "White House Letter," reads like transparent ad copy for the president. Her unabashedly moist, worshipful tone would seem a little over-the-top at an RNC convention. Bumiller revealed the secret of her success to her alumni magazine at Northwestern: doing the very least that her job description requires. "At every press conference I stand up every time and ask a question," Bumiller said. "No matter what." Wow.

Exhibit A: "You can’t say George Bush is wrong here. There’s no way you can say that in the New York Times…You can’t just say the president is lying. You don’t just say that in the… You can’t say the president is lying—that’s a judgment call… What is wrong with that? What is your problem with that? What? Why do you all object to that?"

Sentence: The Times' reign as the "paper of record" is finally brought to an end when the paper’s headquarters are demolished by readers upon publication of Bumiller’s final dispatch, "Bush’s Taint: Sweet Like Honey."

13. God

Charges: If your answer to the age-old question of God’s existence is "yes," your next question should be, "Why is he such a dick?" After three major natural disasters, not to mention the eternal constants of famine, war and disease, to believe in God is to believe either that He enjoys fucking with us, or at best has totally lost interest in the whole "people" thing. Never calls anymore.

Exhibit A: Mosquitoes, Ralph Reed.

Sentence: Forever listening to an unending stream of idiotic, mundane prayers uttered by the dumbest, most inarticulate people in His creation.

12. Barbara Bush

Charges: Her polluted womb nurtured the seed of American decadence. The root of America’s decay; the poison tree from whence the fruit loop George W. Bush sprang. This unfeeling, unthinking patrician hag spawned America’s most notorious welfare child, whose every glaring deficiency has been excused or underwritten by undeserved wealth. Chuckling, she remarked of poor people displaced by Hurricane Katrina, "And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them." Of their plans for permanent relocation, she speculated: "What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas." A true aristocrat, she sees poor people as another species.

Exhibit A: George H.W., George W., Jeb, Neil, Jenna, Barbara, Noelle, succeeding generations.

Sentence: Hysterectomy on principle. Bound and thrown into Lake Pontchartrain. If she floats, burned at the stake. If she drowns, even better.

11. Samuel Alito

Charges: The US Supreme Court’s fait accompli. President Bush’s closet case follow-up to the "most qualified" Harriet Miers' disastrous nomination, Alito was defended vociferously as a victim of racism by conservatives for being labeled "Scalito," a nickname clearly signifying his kinship of judicial philosophy with Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, and nothing else. Writes autistic opinions, in which language itself is rendered meaningless. For example, he wrote in a decision that the government should not protect plaintiffs from "employers who, although they have not acted with the intent to discriminate, may have treated their employees unfairly." When Alito puts on his Supreme Court robe, America can say "Arrivederci" to a woman’s right to choose.

Exhibit A: In a landmark case, Alito distinguished himself by advocating the most extreme interpretation of law on the conservative Third Circuit; the decision prompted one observer to note, "[F]or the first time since 1973, a Federal court of appeals has directly said that Roe v. Wade is no longer the law of the land."

Sentence: Paper cut while handling the Constitution, left untreated, becomes infected, eventually killing him. Wife cries.

10. Bill O’Reilly

Charges: Even Limbaugh must bow before O’Reilly’s unparalleled bullying skills and ability to deliver undiluted bullshit with an air of brusque authority. O’Reilly is so comfortable with his astounding hypocrisy that he didn’t skip a beat when he was publicly revealed to be a comically perverse sexual harasser, continuing to sanctimoniously moralize about the corrosive effects of rap music and intellectualism on American society. Main tactic against his critics, whose jobs rank among the easiest in the world, is to accuse them of his own methods: arbitrary smears, selective quotation, partisan motivation, and intellectual cowardice. Infuriatingly claims to be a political "independent" who just happens to parrot virtually every Republican talking point and equate mainstream liberals with Nazis and Stalinists. Claimed his call for abandoning San Francisco to al Qaeda bombing was "satirical," which is itself the funniest thing he’s ever said. An honest to goodness list-making Joe McCarthy wannabe, with the ACLU standing in for the Communist Party.

Exhibit A: O’Reilly’s novel, Those Who Trespass, which reads like an eighth grade writing assignment, is about a blustery news correspondent, demoted from foreign correspondence to less prestigious work (as O’Reilly was when he moved from ABC News to Inside Edition), who murders a string of colleagues he feels have hindered his career. "I kill you on page six," he told Charlie Gibson on Good Morning America.

Sentence: After O'Reilly's influence fundamentally changes the nature of jurisprudence, he is tortured and jailed for life when it is discovered that he once leafed through a copy of the Communist Manifesto as a teen.

9. BTK Killer

Charges: It’s not so much the depraved sexual murder or sociopathic lack of remorse—if we started including every homicidal freak in this list, there'd be no room to display our prodigious political bias. It’s the fact that Dennis Rader turned out to be, in the end, a sad, needy wuss. His jaw-dropping statement at his sentencing, coming after a series of tearful, enraged victims’ statements, revealed the extent of Rader’s detachment from reality—doling out thank-yous to his lawyers, the cops, his prison guards and the gang back at lock-up, like he just won an Oscar, cracking inside jokes and pretending to be 'close' with people who doubtless wished they could beat him dead with his own severed arms.

Exhibit A: "I feel like a star right now."

Sentence: Bound. Tortured. Killed.

8. Judith Miller

Charges: The human warhead Ahmed Chalabi fired into America's collective ass on behalf of the federal government. A dutiful stenographer, Miller regurgitated all of Chalabi’s erroneous assertions about Iraq’s weapon’s capabilities without skepticism and threw in a few of her own. Essentially started a war with bad reporting, and remained indefatigably self-satisfied throughout the ensuing imbroglio, her mantis-like face fixed in a smile behind oddly insectival sunglasses. Managed to cast herself as a martyr for journalistic principles, despite her role as a conduit for a successful White House propaganda campaign, which is exactly why they’d try to use her to leak a CIA agent’s identity—to break the law again.

Exhibit A: Told a Salon interviewer in May, 2004, while US troops were already dying, "You know what, I was proved fucking right. That’s what happened. People who disagreed with me were saying, 'There she goes again.' But I was proved fucking right," which shows that not only doesn’t Miller really report for the Times, but she also doesn’t read it.

Sentence: After a brief but horrible stint as a chemical weapons test subject for Monsanto, Miller is vivisected without anesthesia and her organs are harvested alive to be preserved as spares for Seymour Hersh.

7. Thomas Friedman

Charges: The worst of all creatures in the political opinion jungle: a cretin who thinks he’s a genius. Friedman’s intolerable knack for converting irreducibly complex geopolitical/socioeconomic situations into simplistic, tin-eared insta-clichés makes him one of the most dangerous people on the planet, arming people even stupider than him with the illusion of knowledge in the form of a crude vocabulary of badly mixed metaphors and ill-conceived flashcard images, thereby having a negative net effect on the nation’s intellect. India and China are "like a bottle of champagne" which someone has been "shaking for 40 years;" the modern economy dictates that "you need to be at a certain level to be able to claim your share of a global pie that is both expanding and becoming more complex;" and the threat of terrorism is a "bubble" that threatens to "undermine" open society. Friedman’s disorienting literary ineptitude is nearly enough to distract us from the indisputable fact that he has no fucking idea what he’s talking about. For this dolt-friendly parlor trick and a slavish devotion to globalization and technology as abstract, almost mystical tenets, Friedman has achieved iconic status. Exhibits the easy smile and benevolent smugness of an unjustly celebrated man who has never thought very deeply or rigorously about anything at all.

Exhibit A: Despite his constant exaltation of the internet as some kind of global cure-all, Friedman had to actually fly to London to discover that European newspapers were having misgivings about Guantanamo Bay.

Sentence: Column outsourced to Bangalore, where there is some difficulty in finding a peasant ignorant and ineloquent enough to please his audience. Compelled at gunpoint to write a 500-page retraction of his recent best-seller, called No, Actually the World is Round.

6. Michael Jackson

Charges: Jackson’s second escape from accountability for a well-known lust for little boys was disappointing, but at least his image is forever ruined, causing him to flee the country. Unfortunately, his own imperiled children have not been taken from him. First plan upon acquittal was to build another amusement park, this time in Africa, where apparently it must be easier to buy off parents and/or potential prosecutors. Currently in Bahrain, where he is negotiating a consultant job with a company to help set up—yup—theme parks. Like a spider whose web has been destroyed, Jackson simply relocates and spins a new one. On top of all of this, he hasn’t recorded a decent track since Thriller’s success drove him off the deep end, and has retroactively ruined such now-creepy titles as "PYT (Pretty Young Thing)" and "The Way You Make Me Feel."

Exhibit A: Truly living in a fantasy world of his own creation, Jackson insists with a (figuratively) straight face that he has only had a nose job. Remember when Prince was weird?

Sentence: Forced to actually relive his childhood, including all of the beatings and molestation which transformed him into the inhuman freak he is today.

5. Tom Delay

Charges: A politician so horrible, his prior career as an exterminator constitutes fratricide. Smiled for his mug shot like it was a campaign poster. Asked three young Katrina evacuees, “Now tell me the truth, boys, is this kind of fun?” One of an elite handful of white Americans still engaged in the time-honored tradition of screwing over Indians. Responding to a request he extinguish his cigar in a restaurant in accordance with federal regulations, Delay replied, “I AM the federal government.” Claimed that there was “no fat left to cut” from the federal budget to offset New Orleans reconstruction costs. So arrogant in abuse of power that he doesn’t even take time to construct plausible lies.

Exhibit A: Explaining his failure to enlist during Vietnam: "So many minority youths had volunteered…that there was literally no room for patriotic folks like myself."

Sentence: Bashed to death with hammer.

4. You

Charges: Silently enabling and contributing to the irreversible destruction of your planet. Absolving yourself of your responsibility to do anything about it that your immediate neighbors don’t. Assuming that it’s normal behavior to spend several hours each day totally inert and staring into a cathode ray tube. Substituting antidepressants for physical motion. Caring more about the personal relationships of people you will never meet than your own. Shrugging your shoulders at the knowledge that your government is populated by criminal liars intent on fooling you into impoverished, helpless submission. Cheering this process on.

Exhibit A: You don’t even know who your congressman is.

Sentence: Deathbed realization that your entire life was an unending series of stupid mistakes and wasted opportunities, a priceless gift of potential extravagantly squandered, for which you deserve nothing but scorn or, at best, indifference, and a cold, meaningless demise.

3. George W. Bush

Charges: Simply put, the stupidest man ever to lead this country. Bush’s lobotomized Will Rogers routine is a satirist’s dream, a European intellectual’s caricature of the dipshit cowboy American, all balls and no brains. Often responds to questions by attempting to define the word he finds the most challenging in them. Thinks press reports of his various crimes are responsible for his waning popularity, rather than the deeds themselves. Interprets the constitution like a Unitarian interprets the bible; for maximum convenience and with no regard to the actual text. Foreign policy vision is less serious and more simplistic than an issue of Captain America.

Exhibit A: "I want to thank the President and the CEO of Constellation Energy, Mayo Shattuck. That’s a pretty cool first name, isn’t it? Mayo. Pass the Mayo."

Sentence: Trapped for eternity under shoddily manufactured Diebold voting machine, unable to reach nearby refrigerator full of hot dogs and bourbon.

2. Dick Cheney

Charges: At the forefront of nearly every administration effort to annihilate the constitution. A true psychopath with only one motivating force; insatiable greed. Insists that we can only remain "free" through torture, spying and secrecy. Bears the crooked ugliness of a man whose entire life has been devoted to a senseless pursuit of power, and whose most effective weapon is a total lack of ethics, or even decorum. So cartoonishly evil he defies parody.

Exhibit A: "I think they’re in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency."

Sentence: Strapped to chair; eyes removed with melon baller. Nursed back to health. Lips sewn to a rubber hose connecting him to a 500 gallon nutrition shake. Nursed back to health. Fingers, hands, toes, feet, nose and genitals devoured by hungry pigs. Nursed back to health. Legs and arms ground to stubs with belt sander. Nursed back to health. Fitted with earphones that play only Christina Aguilera songs, and left alone to think about what he has done.

1. Pat Robertson

Charges:  If Pat Robertson’s local Starbucks caught fire, he would claim that God was punishing them for giving him a caramel latte when he ordered vanilla. Robertson has always been a demonic charlatan with the credibility of Miss Cleo and a lust for Armageddon in his vile, rat-toad heart, but this was really his year to shine. In 2005, Robertson called on God to vacate seats in the Supreme Court (the almighty obliged, killing Rehnquist), advocated assassinating Hugo Chavez, said ‘judicial activists’ were a more serious threat to America than terrorists, called criticism of the war treason, said John Roberts should be thankful for Hurricane Katrina, which he implied was “connected” to Roe v. Wade, attributed Ariel Sharon’s stroke to divine retribution for the Gaza pullout, said “the Antichrist is probably a Jew alive in Israel today,” and implied that God would wipe the residents of Dover, PA off the map for rejecting Creationism. Not to mention raising huge sums of cash from his zombie army, much of which is diverted from his charity operations to his business interests, including African diamond mines. Has long advocated that America simply ignore the Supreme Court. Robertson’s God is an insecure, misogynistic, homicidal fanatic—just like Pat.

Exhibit A: Vehemently opposed to voluntary abortion in America, but okay with forced abortion in China, where his cable investments depend on the good graces of the government.

Sentence: Repeatedly struck by lightning.

Contributors: Allan Uthman, Paul Jones, Ian Murphy, Chris Riordan
Editor: Allan Uthman
Illustrations: Ian Murphy