Just out! Some highlights:
31) Newt Gingrich
Crimes: Polygamous, aggressive when threatened, and insulated by a thick layer of blubber, Newt Gingrich is the walrus of American politics — if walruses were pandering dissemblers who masked their rank hypocrisy with sneering condescension. After cheating on and then leaving his first wife in the cancer ward, while proposing an open marriage to his multiple sclerosis-suffering second wife (because, hey, he was already rutting a young House staffer with no eyelids), Newt led the charge to impeach Clinton for his lack of “family values.” And compared to his record as Speaker, his personal life seems ethical by contrast. Newt fancies himself as the “big ideas” candidate. So far, these big ideas include an $800,000 campaign website, buying fake Twitter followers, a half-million dollar Tiffany’s debt, making children work as janitors, overt racism, pretending that lobbyists are historians, and this just in: making the moon the 51st state of the union.
Smoking Gun: “There’s no question at times in my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate.”
Sentence: Charred by an explosion on the set of Transformers 4.
30) Alex Jones
Crimes: The popularity of Jones’s conspiracy theory website and radio show is a testament to America’s failed education system. Worse than exclusively reporting utter nonsense, Jones has the exasperating habit of mixing real stories — like the NDAA — with ridiculous bits about interdimensional “clockwork” elves that commune with and instruct New World Order puppeteers via hallucinogens. The sad result is that when the MSM ignores an important news item — like the NDAA — and it’s picked up by the belligerent Jones, most sane consumers of internet news feel justified in thinking that it must be complete bullshit.
Smoking Gun: “You just can’t make this stuff up!”
Sentence: Jones, Lyndon LaRouche, and the Pope walk into a bar, the building collapses and crushes them all.
26) Rick Santorum
Crimes: So far in the closet, he’s standing next to your dad’s stack of vintage Playboys. Seriously. Not only does this guy conflate homosexuality with bestiality, he thinks all sex is sin unless it’s procreative. A longtime fan of watching scantily clad brutes engage in sweaty, choreographed battle (he actually lobbied for the WWF, blocking steroid screening because pro wrestling’s not a real sport), Santorum’s politics is pure kayfabe where he plays the good sweater-vested God Boy whose duty is to wrestle evil in all its secular incarnations. In reality, however, he’s a shit-stain of biblical proportions who’s guilty of cronyism, defrauding his constituents, screwing over veterans, and defending sexually abusive priests.
Smoking Gun: “As the hobbits are going up Mount Doom, the eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else. It’s being drawn to Iraq. You know what? I want to keep it on Iraq. I don’t want the eye to come back to the United States.” (OK, that’s from 2006, but it’s a classic)
Sentence: The Blah Plague.
23) Ron Paul
Crimes: More free market Muppet than man, Paul’s libertarianism is a deeply schizophrenic ideology wherein personal freedom trumps everything — especially personal freedom. Whether it’s regulating women’s uteri under the pretense of “state’s rights,” defending sexual harassers, or hypothetically voting against the Civil Rights Act, Paul’s positions display bewildering lack of intellectual coherence. Most grating (aside from his horrifically racist and homophobic eponymous newsletter, or that he’s a doctor who doesn’t understand evolution), he’s managed to posture as an economic populist, despite the fact that his Randroid quest to eliminate government is the stuff of which oligarchies are made. But he would, like, totally legalize weed, dude.
Smoking Gun: “The notion of a rigid separation between church and state has no basis in either the text of the Constitution or the writings of our Founding Fathers.”
Sentence: Separated indefinitely from “The Precious.”
18) Rick Scott
Crimes: A vampiric parasite, rivaled only by Creed for the loudest sucking sound to ever come out of Florida, Scott made his private health care fortune by bribing doctors, stealing billions from Medicare, closing hospitals, shilling homeopathic snake oil — and viciously attacking any reform that would cut into his mostly uninsured customer base. As the Tea Party-backed anti-stimulus candidate for governor, a company he partially owns collected $60 million in stimulus funds. He personally spent $73 million barely becoming governor, and then refused millions in federal health care money, so that many Floridians would still patronize his criminally awful Solantic walk-in clinics. Paid lip service to “small government” ideals while trying to mandate expensive Big Brother drug tests for welfare recipients and state employees. The consummate Koch fiend, Scott’s MO is to cry poverty, and sell off state prisons, schools, bridges, roads, etc. to the highest bidder. He’s so despised in Florida that his endorsement would’ve tarnished even the reputation of American Caligula Newt Gingrich.
Smoking Gun: “I’ve got a quote in my office: ‘First they came for the Jews, and I wasn’t a Jew so I didn’t say anything…’ We shouldn’t be allowing candidates to attack people in business, we should be saying… ‘That’s us.’”
Sentence: Scott experiences a dull ache in his leg while campaigning for reelection at a Kissimmee Wal-Mart in 2014. He visits the conveniently located in-store Solantic clinic which misdiagnoses his deep vein thrombosis as a sprain. Three days later, as he addresses a convention of gourmet mushroom growers, the blood clot reaches his lung mid-sentence and he collapses on the floor. His final words are: “I like the taste of shiit–”
9) John Boehner
Crimes: A corporate shill, inside trader, and blubbering alcoholic, who in pandering to the Tea Party ascendants helped create a monster he couldn’t control. As House Speaker, Boehner’s as responsible as anyone for a year of total government impotence which saw our credit rating downgraded, pizza sauce labelled as a vegetable, and “In God We Trust” affirmed as the national motto. The most infuriating thing about Boehner playing “fiscally responsible” politics over the debt ceiling was that the debt ceiling isn’t a limit on how much we can borrow, it’s a limit on how much incurred debt we’ll pay back — which is like saying that the responsible thing to do is to use your credit card and not pay the bill.
Smoking Gun: “We’re legislating. He’s campaigning. It’s very disappointing.”
Sentence: Ground up with a giant mortar and pestle, mixed with water, used to dye hunting jackets and pylons.
6) Barack Obama
Crimes: A post-constitutional demagogue who ran on closing Guantanamo Bay, and ended up signing away Americans’ right to trial. But you can’t blame him for it. Really. Because he’ll be out of office when it begins. The guy is literally ordering flying robots to murder people throughout the Arab world — Americans even — but if you call him a fascist people think you’re in league with Glenn Beck or Lyndon LaRouche. While playing ninja assassin abroad, he takes a decidedly different tact with the terrorists at home, often folding to the whims of insane Republicans like so much origami. In too many ways, his first term may as well have been Bush’s third — with weak Wall St. regulations, an unconscionable war on medical marijuana and whistle-blowers, and total inaction on global warming. Seemingly more concerned with the rights and prosperity of those in the Middle East, his silence on the often violent OWS crackdowns was nothing short of galling.
Smoking Gun: “I want to be very clear in calling upon the Egyptian authorities to refrain from any violence against peaceful protesters. The people of Egypt have rights that are universal. That includes the right to peaceful assembly and association, the right to free speech, and the ability to determine their own destiny. These are human rights. And the United States will stand up for them everywhere.”
Sentence: Toothy head from Jonathan Chait.
5) Mitt Romney
Crimes: The Schrödinger’s cat of American politics, Mittens is simultaneously on both sides of every issue, and no one truly knows his position until he opens his mouth. He’s so incapable of honesty that he’s even lied about his own name. Morally dissonant, too, much of the seed money for Bain Capital — which made Mittens millions by gutting companies, killing jobs and raiding pensions — came from an El Salvadorian family that financed death squads in the ’80′s, but when it came time to do business with Artisan Entertainment, Romney refused because they produce R-rated movies. But what can you expect from a guy who purports to believe that Native Americans descended from Jews and hung out with Jesus, God lives on the planet Kolob, the devil invented coffee, and underwear can be magic. And he’s so damn white he makes Justin Bieber seem like Gil Scott-Heron.
Smoking Gun: “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.”
Sentence: Cut into pieces and sold off to the highest bidder.
1) David (and Charles) Koch
Crimes: Heirs to a fortune created largely by their John-Birch-crazy father’s oil deals with Stalin, the putrid fruit didn’t fall far from the hypocritical tree. The billionaire Kochs are still profiting from business with America’s enemies in Iran and, as the Tea Party’s sugar daddies, spending big to trump reason at home. Their cash and ideology can be found lurking behind nearly every “free market” think tank, anti-labor front group, global warming-denying sophist, and malfeasant politician hellbent on making the rich richer at the expense of everyone else. Perhaps the most sinister Koch-bankrolled endeavor is the American Legislative Exchange Council. As mentioned above, ALEC drafts corporate-approved legislation for state representatives to introduce as their own. These model bills primarily focus on union busting, instituting discriminatory voter ID, and privatizing every state institution imaginable. There’s a multi-front war being waged on the middle class in which these guys are the generals. And in a fitting tribute to the disingenuous gods of irony, Koch scaremongering over socialism and wealth redistribution is subsidized in part by the American taxpayer.
Smoking Gun: “If I called up a senator or a congressman to discuss something with them, and they heard ‘David Koch is on the line,’ they’d immediately say, ‘That’s that fraud again — tell him to get lost!’”
Sentence: The plot of that Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd movie Trading Places.
31) Newt Gingrich
Crimes: Polygamous, aggressive when threatened, and insulated by a thick layer of blubber, Newt Gingrich is the walrus of American politics — if walruses were pandering dissemblers who masked their rank hypocrisy with sneering condescension. After cheating on and then leaving his first wife in the cancer ward, while proposing an open marriage to his multiple sclerosis-suffering second wife (because, hey, he was already rutting a young House staffer with no eyelids), Newt led the charge to impeach Clinton for his lack of “family values.” And compared to his record as Speaker, his personal life seems ethical by contrast. Newt fancies himself as the “big ideas” candidate. So far, these big ideas include an $800,000 campaign website, buying fake Twitter followers, a half-million dollar Tiffany’s debt, making children work as janitors, overt racism, pretending that lobbyists are historians, and this just in: making the moon the 51st state of the union.
Smoking Gun: “There’s no question at times in my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate.”
Sentence: Charred by an explosion on the set of Transformers 4.
30) Alex Jones
Crimes: The popularity of Jones’s conspiracy theory website and radio show is a testament to America’s failed education system. Worse than exclusively reporting utter nonsense, Jones has the exasperating habit of mixing real stories — like the NDAA — with ridiculous bits about interdimensional “clockwork” elves that commune with and instruct New World Order puppeteers via hallucinogens. The sad result is that when the MSM ignores an important news item — like the NDAA — and it’s picked up by the belligerent Jones, most sane consumers of internet news feel justified in thinking that it must be complete bullshit.
Smoking Gun: “You just can’t make this stuff up!”
Sentence: Jones, Lyndon LaRouche, and the Pope walk into a bar, the building collapses and crushes them all.
26) Rick Santorum
Crimes: So far in the closet, he’s standing next to your dad’s stack of vintage Playboys. Seriously. Not only does this guy conflate homosexuality with bestiality, he thinks all sex is sin unless it’s procreative. A longtime fan of watching scantily clad brutes engage in sweaty, choreographed battle (he actually lobbied for the WWF, blocking steroid screening because pro wrestling’s not a real sport), Santorum’s politics is pure kayfabe where he plays the good sweater-vested God Boy whose duty is to wrestle evil in all its secular incarnations. In reality, however, he’s a shit-stain of biblical proportions who’s guilty of cronyism, defrauding his constituents, screwing over veterans, and defending sexually abusive priests.
Smoking Gun: “As the hobbits are going up Mount Doom, the eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else. It’s being drawn to Iraq. You know what? I want to keep it on Iraq. I don’t want the eye to come back to the United States.” (OK, that’s from 2006, but it’s a classic)
Sentence: The Blah Plague.
23) Ron Paul
Crimes: More free market Muppet than man, Paul’s libertarianism is a deeply schizophrenic ideology wherein personal freedom trumps everything — especially personal freedom. Whether it’s regulating women’s uteri under the pretense of “state’s rights,” defending sexual harassers, or hypothetically voting against the Civil Rights Act, Paul’s positions display bewildering lack of intellectual coherence. Most grating (aside from his horrifically racist and homophobic eponymous newsletter, or that he’s a doctor who doesn’t understand evolution), he’s managed to posture as an economic populist, despite the fact that his Randroid quest to eliminate government is the stuff of which oligarchies are made. But he would, like, totally legalize weed, dude.
Smoking Gun: “The notion of a rigid separation between church and state has no basis in either the text of the Constitution or the writings of our Founding Fathers.”
Sentence: Separated indefinitely from “The Precious.”
18) Rick Scott
Crimes: A vampiric parasite, rivaled only by Creed for the loudest sucking sound to ever come out of Florida, Scott made his private health care fortune by bribing doctors, stealing billions from Medicare, closing hospitals, shilling homeopathic snake oil — and viciously attacking any reform that would cut into his mostly uninsured customer base. As the Tea Party-backed anti-stimulus candidate for governor, a company he partially owns collected $60 million in stimulus funds. He personally spent $73 million barely becoming governor, and then refused millions in federal health care money, so that many Floridians would still patronize his criminally awful Solantic walk-in clinics. Paid lip service to “small government” ideals while trying to mandate expensive Big Brother drug tests for welfare recipients and state employees. The consummate Koch fiend, Scott’s MO is to cry poverty, and sell off state prisons, schools, bridges, roads, etc. to the highest bidder. He’s so despised in Florida that his endorsement would’ve tarnished even the reputation of American Caligula Newt Gingrich.
Smoking Gun: “I’ve got a quote in my office: ‘First they came for the Jews, and I wasn’t a Jew so I didn’t say anything…’ We shouldn’t be allowing candidates to attack people in business, we should be saying… ‘That’s us.’”
Sentence: Scott experiences a dull ache in his leg while campaigning for reelection at a Kissimmee Wal-Mart in 2014. He visits the conveniently located in-store Solantic clinic which misdiagnoses his deep vein thrombosis as a sprain. Three days later, as he addresses a convention of gourmet mushroom growers, the blood clot reaches his lung mid-sentence and he collapses on the floor. His final words are: “I like the taste of shiit–”
9) John Boehner
Crimes: A corporate shill, inside trader, and blubbering alcoholic, who in pandering to the Tea Party ascendants helped create a monster he couldn’t control. As House Speaker, Boehner’s as responsible as anyone for a year of total government impotence which saw our credit rating downgraded, pizza sauce labelled as a vegetable, and “In God We Trust” affirmed as the national motto. The most infuriating thing about Boehner playing “fiscally responsible” politics over the debt ceiling was that the debt ceiling isn’t a limit on how much we can borrow, it’s a limit on how much incurred debt we’ll pay back — which is like saying that the responsible thing to do is to use your credit card and not pay the bill.
Smoking Gun: “We’re legislating. He’s campaigning. It’s very disappointing.”
Sentence: Ground up with a giant mortar and pestle, mixed with water, used to dye hunting jackets and pylons.
6) Barack Obama
Crimes: A post-constitutional demagogue who ran on closing Guantanamo Bay, and ended up signing away Americans’ right to trial. But you can’t blame him for it. Really. Because he’ll be out of office when it begins. The guy is literally ordering flying robots to murder people throughout the Arab world — Americans even — but if you call him a fascist people think you’re in league with Glenn Beck or Lyndon LaRouche. While playing ninja assassin abroad, he takes a decidedly different tact with the terrorists at home, often folding to the whims of insane Republicans like so much origami. In too many ways, his first term may as well have been Bush’s third — with weak Wall St. regulations, an unconscionable war on medical marijuana and whistle-blowers, and total inaction on global warming. Seemingly more concerned with the rights and prosperity of those in the Middle East, his silence on the often violent OWS crackdowns was nothing short of galling.
Smoking Gun: “I want to be very clear in calling upon the Egyptian authorities to refrain from any violence against peaceful protesters. The people of Egypt have rights that are universal. That includes the right to peaceful assembly and association, the right to free speech, and the ability to determine their own destiny. These are human rights. And the United States will stand up for them everywhere.”
Sentence: Toothy head from Jonathan Chait.
5) Mitt Romney
Crimes: The Schrödinger’s cat of American politics, Mittens is simultaneously on both sides of every issue, and no one truly knows his position until he opens his mouth. He’s so incapable of honesty that he’s even lied about his own name. Morally dissonant, too, much of the seed money for Bain Capital — which made Mittens millions by gutting companies, killing jobs and raiding pensions — came from an El Salvadorian family that financed death squads in the ’80′s, but when it came time to do business with Artisan Entertainment, Romney refused because they produce R-rated movies. But what can you expect from a guy who purports to believe that Native Americans descended from Jews and hung out with Jesus, God lives on the planet Kolob, the devil invented coffee, and underwear can be magic. And he’s so damn white he makes Justin Bieber seem like Gil Scott-Heron.
Smoking Gun: “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.”
Sentence: Cut into pieces and sold off to the highest bidder.
1) David (and Charles) Koch
Crimes: Heirs to a fortune created largely by their John-Birch-crazy father’s oil deals with Stalin, the putrid fruit didn’t fall far from the hypocritical tree. The billionaire Kochs are still profiting from business with America’s enemies in Iran and, as the Tea Party’s sugar daddies, spending big to trump reason at home. Their cash and ideology can be found lurking behind nearly every “free market” think tank, anti-labor front group, global warming-denying sophist, and malfeasant politician hellbent on making the rich richer at the expense of everyone else. Perhaps the most sinister Koch-bankrolled endeavor is the American Legislative Exchange Council. As mentioned above, ALEC drafts corporate-approved legislation for state representatives to introduce as their own. These model bills primarily focus on union busting, instituting discriminatory voter ID, and privatizing every state institution imaginable. There’s a multi-front war being waged on the middle class in which these guys are the generals. And in a fitting tribute to the disingenuous gods of irony, Koch scaremongering over socialism and wealth redistribution is subsidized in part by the American taxpayer.
Smoking Gun: “If I called up a senator or a congressman to discuss something with them, and they heard ‘David Koch is on the line,’ they’d immediately say, ‘That’s that fraud again — tell him to get lost!’”
Sentence: The plot of that Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd movie Trading Places.
