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May 02, 2005

Worst Columnists of 2004-2005

John Hawkins of Right Wing News asked right-of-center bloggers to list their favorite columnists and the half-vast editorial staff at VC answered the challenge. The answers are here.

I thought it might be fun to do our own best list, but reflected on all the times I've nearly burst a blood vessel reading some moronic screed from the belly of the beast and thought: why not list the WORST columnists of 2004-2005?

Mugged by MoDope? Has Friedman fried your brain? Or is it the Death of Rats who haunts your dreams?

Have at it: ranked from 1-10, who wrote the most illogical, overheated, ideologically-biased tripe of the past year? After an entire year of watching perfectly good rants disappear into the fold in your newspaper or bounce off your monitor, here's your chance to vent your spleen - let 'em have it with both barrels!

I will include my list at the end of the day and tally your results when we have enough entries.

UPDATE: I've decided to bump this to the top and countdown my worst columnists during the day to alleviate my extreme boredom. Where possible, I will link to an egregious example of the columnist's work:

The List:

1. Maureen Dowd
2. Bob Herbert
3. Paul Krugman
4. Frank Rich
5. Michael Morland
6. Molly Ivins
7. Nicholas Kristol
8. Ted Rall
9. Richard Cohen
10. Jesse Jackson

With quotations:

#10: Jesse Jackson: healing racial divisions and bringing America together again:

Who won the presidential race? Given the millions of ballots spoiled and provisional ballots rejected, the unfolding mystery of the exit polls and widespread use of electronic voting machines, we will never know whether John Kerry or George W. Bush received the most votes in Ohio and other swing states.

But we can name the election's big winner: Jim Crow.

# 9 Richard Cohen: doggedly advancing the notion that it's OK to be a narrow-minded bigot in the name of tolerance:

I am pausing now to wonder if the phrase "people of faith" is meant to include Muslims with several wives, Hindus with several deities or even the odd person here and there who believes, as I am sometimes tempted to, that God can be found in a pint of Ben and Jerry's Coffee Heath Bar Crunch. But I think somehow that "people of faith" is meant to embrace only conservative Christians and maybe Orthodox Jews, who are sometimes lumped together as Judeo-Christians. People of faith, you may rest assured, are people of their faith. All others need not apply.

Why thank you Richard. You've now neatly lumped all believers into one category: we're all bigots. Lovely sentiment.

I don't think a gay Presbyterian would be considered a person of faith, no matter how devout, nor, for that matter, a pro-choice Methodist -- say, someone such as Hillary Clinton. The category would certainly not include a Baptist such as Husband Bill or a Jew such as Chuck Schumer or, I venture to say, an Episcopalian such as John McCain, whose faith sustained him in a Vietnamese prison. As for a Roman Catholic such as Ted Kennedy, whose faith informs his liberalism, take it on faith that he would not be considered a person of faith. The phrase would also exclude anyone of any faith who believes in a limited role for religion in public life, especially the schools, if only on the pragmatic grounds that otherwise we will be at each other's throats. This is a lesson of history.

Mr. Cohen is, among his multitudinous talents, apparently also a history teacher. Who knew?

Well I'm aggravated now. I lost the document that had my list and all my comments, so I'm going to have to finish this as I can get to it.

8. Ted Rall there are no words:

Now it's official: American troops occupying Iraq have become virtually indistinguishable from the SS. Like the Germans during World War II, they cordon off and bomb civilian villages to retaliate for guerilla attacks on their convoys. Like the blackshirts who terrorized Europe, America's victims disappear into hellish prisons ruled by sadists and murderers. The U.S. military is short just one item to achieve moral parity with the Nazis: gas chambers.

7. Nicholas Kristof: Sadly, the song remains the same. Somewhere in the Third World, an impoverished woman is suffering and an uncaring Bush administration is to blame:

"I was collecting firewood for my family when three armed men on camels came and surrounded me. They held me down, tied my hands and raped me, one after the other. When I arrived home, I told my family what had happened.

"They threw me out of home, and I had to build my own hut away from them. I was engaged to a man, and I was so much looking forward to getting married. After I got raped, he did not want to marry me and broke off the engagement because he said I was now disgraced and spoilt. ...

"When I was eight months pregnant from the rape, the police came to my hut and forced me with their guns to go to the police station. They asked me questions, so I told them that I had been raped. They told me that as I was not married, I will deliver this baby illegally.

"They beat me with a whip on the chest and back and put me in jail."

And the lesson to be learned from this truly tragic tale?

President Bush and other world leaders could best honor Pope John Paul II by taking action to end genocide unfolding in Darfur region of Sudan; ...message of pope's ministry was about standing up to evil, not about holding grand funerals.

6. Molly Ivins: imagine an older, more bitter (yes I realize that's difficult) Maureen Dowd in a Minnie Pearl hat without the wit or the designer clothes. It's not a pretty sight - no wonder she's so crabby. Oh, and the Shrub Twig Dumbya President of the United States is a liar.

Speaking of healing laughter, the president is providing all Europe with chuckles. After he denounced the idea that the United States is getting ready to attack Iran as "ridiculous," he then promptly added, "All options are on the table." So they laughed, apparently on the polite assumption that the man must be joking.

If you do not pretend to believe everything Bush says, then you are unpatriotic, against Our Troops and probably in support of gay marriage. Those Europeans understand nothing.

5. Michael Morland. Stop. The. Hate.

Let's put it another way: Under Bush, in the past five years, the U.S. has made zero new friends. But we have made a huge number of new and increasingly venomous enemies. And no, they don't hate us because of our malls, Dubya. They don't hate us because of our freedoms. They don't hate us because of our low-cut jeans and our moronic 8 mpg Ford Expeditions or our corrupt Diebold voting system that snuck you into office.

They hate us, George, because of our policies. Anti-Muslim. Pro-Israel. Oil-uber-alles. Anti-U.N. Anti-Kyoto. Anti-planet. Pro-war. Pro-insularity. Pseudo-swagger. Bogus staged "town hall" meetings stocked with prescreened monosyllabic Bush sycophants. Ego. Empire.

But here's the truly sad part, the hideous and depressing and soul-shredding part about all those young kids in the U.S. military right now, all those mostly undereducated, lower-middle-class kids, most of whom aren't even old enough to buy beer and many of whom have barely had sex and many who got sucked into the military vortex in an honest attempt to help pay for a college education so they could go out and not find a decent job in this miserable economy. The sad part is all those kids in the military who've been trained/brainwashed to believe they are serving in Iraq to protect America's freedom, to protect us from, well, something dark, and sinister, and deadly. When in fact, they're not. Not even close.

Well I'm certainly glad he got that off his chest...

4. Frank Rich: four words – The Girly man column.

"...the special Madison Square Garden runway for Mr. Bush's acceptance speech, a giant phallus thrusting him into the nation's lap..."

"..Mr. Bush ...just happened to slide on his own into one of the "several openings" for pilots..."

"Mr. Bush's imagineers have publicized his proud possession of Saddam Hussein's captured pistol, which, in another of their efforts at phallic stagecraft, is said to be kept in the same study where the previous incumbent squandered his own weapon of masculinity."

"...it's not enough to stuff socks in the president's flight suit."

"Such castration warfare has been a Republican staple..."

Ummm... got issues?

3. Paul Krugman: one read explains why Economics was nicknamed The Dismal Science… But he feels the need to explain anyway. Kill yourself now:

If the election were held today and the votes were counted fairly, Senator John Kerry would probably win. But the votes won't be counted fairly, and the disenfranchisement of minority voters may determine the outcome.

2. Bob Herbert: it’s hard to believe that one slender black man can contain this much bile. Believe it.

The officer's comment was a harbinger of the gratuitous violence that, according to Mr. Delgado, is routinely inflicted by American soldiers on ordinary Iraqis. He said: "Guys in my unit, particularly the younger guys, would drive by in their Humvee and shatter bottles over the heads of Iraqi civilians passing by. They'd keep a bunch of empty Coke bottles in the Humvee to break over people's heads."

He said he had confronted guys who were his friends about this practice. "I said to them: 'What the hell are you doing? Like, what does this accomplish?' And they responded just completely openly. They said: 'Look, I hate being in Iraq. I hate being stuck here. And I hate being surrounded by hajis.' "

"Haji" is the troops' term of choice for an Iraqi. It's used the way "gook" or "Charlie" was used in Vietnam.

You know, it's funny. I've been around Marines for 25 years - Vietnam vets, Gulf war vets, Marines returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. I've been around them when they had had too much to drink. I've been around them at funerals.

I have never...NEVER once heard the term "gook" or "Charlie" or "Haji" or raghead.

1. Maureen Dowd: the go-to girl for hyperbole, MoDope never met a strained metaphor she didn’t like. Her brittle, perimenopausal wit wore thin, so the NY Times replaced her with an even bigger b*tch. MoDope goes after Condi Rice, but only shows what a ditz she is with numbers:

She can't do simple equations. She doesn't even know that X times zero equals zero. If you multiply 1,370 dead soldiers times zero weapons of mass destruction, that equals zero achievement for Ms. Rice, who helped the president and vice president bamboozle the country into war.

It's lucky for Ms. Rice that she's serving with men who are just as lame at numbers as she is. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz couldn't be bothered to tally correctly the number of dead soldiers when he testified before Congress. And his boss, Donald Rumsfeld, didn't realize that using an autopen signature on more than 1,000 letters to the relatives of fallen troops added up to zero solace

Do us all a favor, Maureen. Stick to complaining about how men only want to marry their Mommies.

Posted by Cassandra at May 2, 2005 02:48 PM

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Comments

Posted by: Pile On at May 2, 2005 08:59 AM

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