The 50 Most Loathsome People 2009

[Initech]

They usually publish this list at the beginning of the year but I figure it's worth a repost since there's several names on there that everyone would recognize, such as:

1. Glenn Beck

Charges: As the Sybil of cable punditry and graduate of the prestigious University of I Don’t Remember, Beck’s bipolar professor routine is hands down the funniest thing on TV. When he gets out the chalkboard and starts drawing trees and playing misspelled word association games with a comically grave demeanor, Beck makes Stephen Colbert look like a piker. The fact that millions of Americans think he knows what he’s talking about, however, is not funny at all. If this simpering boob, blubbering the same old reds-under-the-bed melodrama from the ‘50s with a sophomoric Da Vinci Code twist, is the face of the people’s rebellion, sign us up for the empire.
Exhibit A: “This president has exposed himself as a guy, over and over and over again, who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture… I’m not saying that he doesn’t like white people.”
Sentence: Drowned in crocodile tears; eaten by crocodile.

Or:

2. Charles Koch

Charges: As the CEO of the nefarious Koch Industries, the second most profitable private company in the US, he’s like a 3-D Mr. Burns sans ethics and environmentalism. His family’s wealth comes from fossil fuels and speculation, and is maintained through their lobbying and disinformation campaigns. His dad cofounded the John Birch Society, known for claiming that water fluoridation was a communist plot to poison Americans. Koch bankrolls every faux free market think tank from Freedom Works to Cato to Americans for Prosperity. They’ve funded the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, founded by Jon Overton, whose Machiavellian masterstroke was a political theory (The Overton Window) of making one’s unpopular policy goals more palatable by promoting an even less popular and more radical agenda. The death of health care reform doesn’t seems so bad after the summer-long threat of having the tree of liberty watered with the blood of patriots and tyrants, does it? The saddest part of this whole thing is, of course, that Koch is the tyrant, and puppet master of both media shills like CNBC’s Rick Santelli and their furiously dumb fans.
Exhibit A: Throughout the ‘80s, Koch Industries ran a “systematic, management-directed scheme to steal crude oil from producers on federal and Indian lands.” While swindling Indians may seem a bit cliché, Koch made enough off the scam to make his own brother blow him in. The fine? A whopping $25 billion, about a tenth of the money Koch stole. With numbers like that, they’d be crazy to not still be doing it.
Sentence: Blood used to water the tree of liberty, the poinsettias of sound environmental policy, the shrubbery of ethical contract law, and the cornfields of common sense regulation.

Or:

10. Doug Coe

Charges: As sinister “godfather” of the disturbing C Street Family, a self-described “Christian Mafia,” Coe’s forty-year role in American politics has been largely shrouded in Prayer Breakfast bacon. Although he’s not an ordained minister, his organization (aka The Fellowship) enjoys tax-free status as religious advisor, unethical enabler and frat house tool shed for America’s power elite on both sides of the aisle. Coe espouses a perverted brand of Christianity, stressing the power of covenants and the moral exceptionalism of the powerful. To Doug and his Fellowship, Hitler, Mao and bin Laden are to be admired for the power they wielded and the loyalty they demanded. Not satisfied to have contributed to a doubling of AIDS in Uganda by having Family members in congress shift millions in aid from sex education to abstinence-only programs, Family members in the Ugandan legislature have proposed a bill that make homosexuality punishable by death. Killing gays? Maybe Coe’s right; Jesus and Hitler are similar that way.
Exhibit A: “A covenant is… powerful. Can you think of anyone who made a covenant with his friends? … Yes, Hitler made a covenant. The Mafia makes a covenant. It is such a very powerful thing.”
Sentence: Uganda butt-sex.

The whole list:

http://www.buffalobeast.com/?p=1645#more-1645

[Scuba]

1. Sad that so many of us can think of 50 candidates off the top of our head.