Worst Humans of 2005

Another year-end phenomenon that is apparently making its way around the internets is the Worst _______ of 2005. It's very clever, because usually these lists around about the Best of 2005; but these are the Worst! Get it??!

Anyway, making a bullet list is an easy and lazy substitute for insightful writing, so of course I like it.

So, here are my Worst Humans of 2005. People whose absence would have made the world a much healthier, happier, saner place:

1. Bill O'Reilly
This almost goes without saying. The fatuous gasbag turned up the volume on his freak show this year to astonishing levels. After the sexual harassment lawsuit, he has started to become more and more unhinged and sociopathic, in a bid to stay relevant. Pick any show of the year. It doesn't matter. They're all incitements to hatred. Inviting al Qaeda to blow up the Coit Tower in San Francisco? No problem. Ginning up a bogus "War of Xmas" to turn every holiday well-wish into a coded subtextual fight? Sure! Publishing an enemies list? Fuck yeah! NOT including me on the enemies list? The icing on the cake.

2. Barbara Bush
This rotten woman probably deserves a lifetime award more than a specific year. But her fun little quote about Katrina refugees enjoying their new standard of living in the Houston Astrodome nicely punctuates a lifetime of evil. The fact that Babs is supposedly one of the few people that W still talks with daily, only highlights the Freudian nightmare that family is playing out on the rest of us.

3. John Yoo
Law "professor" at Berkeley. I hope that the history books won't overlook this mendacious bastard's role in turning our Chief Executive into a King. On the heels of his analysis that torture is OK as long as you don't call it torture, Yoo has convinced the executive that they're more or less above federal law. If we're at "war," then whatever the President does is per se legal. That's about what it comes down to.

4. John Bolton
Now that he's been back-doored into the UN, he's doing exactly what he wanted to: piss off the rest of the world even more, and do everything he can to grind any progress to a halt. For his continued tantrums, intransigence and general derangement, Bolton is an easy choice.

5. Judith Miller
She's a first amendment martyr. She's a victim of a runaway prosecutor bent on savaging the freedom of the press. She's a Pulitzer-winning journalist who was misled by faulty intelligence. She's certainly NOT a stenographer with a massive chip on her shoulder, and the embodiment of everything wrong with "access" journalism. Right? If she had an ounce of human shame, or pride in her craft, she would have packed up her things and left the NYT quietly, moved to Wyoming and taken a job at a local general store, spending the rest of her life regretting what she'd done to the NYT and to the country. Instead she demands an enormous severance settlement.

6. Fanatics with bombs
OK, we all realize that Iraq is a mess, and that ethnic, religious and political violence were inevitable after Saddam's dictatorship was removed, leaving the vacuum that's there now. But the bombers targetting innocent civilians who happen to be Sunnis instead of Shi'ites, or vice versa, aren't to be excused. Fanatacism comes in many stripes, and the indiscriminate killing of men, women and children on the level that Iraq has seen over the last twelve months is horrific. We may have opened the Pandora's Box, but the nasty shit that came out is still nasty.

7. W
Self-explanatory. He couldn't -not- be on the list.

8. Bruce Chapman
President of the ironically-named "Discovery Institute" in Seattle - the "think tank" that has been pushing Intelligent Design across the country. Now that Kansas has actually bought into that warmed-over creationist nonsense, we have embarassed ourselves to the rest of the world yet again. For working tirelessly to push the U.S. back into the dark ages, Bruce Chapman and his Discovery Institute was certainly one of the worst humans of 2005.

9. "Reverend" Fred Phelps
The same assclown who picketed Matthew Shepard's funeral has taken his freakshow on the road, and spent a good deal of 2005 picketing the funerals of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq. Follow the logic here: Phelps and his slope-headed neanderthals believe that the war casualties are the inevitable and just consequence of America's moral decay. Mostly because of gay sex, or something. I cannot even imagine what it must be like to live in Fred Phelps' head. Must be a horrible place. Lots of spiders.

10. Tie: Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage
For what should be obvious reasons, this vanguard of fascist apologia worked overtime in 2005 to spread their caustic bullshit to every corner of the country. There isn't enough storage space on the internets to document the tsunami of lies that got blast-faxed into this Wurlitzer of wingnutty madness, but Media Matters fights the good fight for us. There is literally nothing too extreme to be championed by these mongoloids, and we saw plenty of it in 2005. Expect the calls for prosecution of dissenters to start being made with straight faces in 2006, rather than the smarmy grin that normally accompanies them now.