Tuesday, December 27, 2005

The Ten Worst Americans

All Things Beautiful has a challenge to the blogosphere: name the 10 worst Americans of all time. Of course this is done on a day when I have no time, but oh well. Henceforth, the unresearched, off-the-top-of-my-head list, in no particular order.

1. Woodrow Wilson. Dragged us into a stupid European war which had no "good guys", and saddled the planet with the notion of a busybody world power. Thanks, Woodie.

2. Jesse Jackson/Al Sharpton (tie). Holding down the black man by telling him he's being held down by the white man and can't get up.

3. David Duke. New rule, Dave: NO NAZIS.

4. Madonna. Spends 20 years whoring it up, and is now lecturing us about good parenting and sexual morality. Also, her music stinks on ice.

5. Pat Buchanan. A case can be made for nationalism. A (weak) case can be made for socialism. See nominee #3 for the prohibition on combining the two. Pat isn't intrinsically a bad guy from what I understand, but he's made it a lot harder to advocate sensible policies on immigration by conflating those policies with a particularly unattractive brand of nativism.

6. FDR. Not for lying us into war - that was the right thing to do. (And if you want to have a huge amount of fun with an anti-Bush liberal, ask them to explain the difference between what FDR did and what Bush is doing. Be sure to mention the Japanese internment camps, and ask how come putting hundreds of thousands of American citizens into camps is somehow less objectionable than listening in on some phone calls to Algeria.) No, he makes the list for his grotesque, irreversibly stupid expansion of the federal state. Jerk.

7. Bill Clinton, for degrading the office of the President.

8. Every man who has contributed to an abortion by being sexually reckless, economically improvident, or unwilling to step up to his responsibilities; every woman who's had an abortion who saw a reasonable path to avoid it.

9. Michael Jackson.

10. Jeff Goldstein. That man is sick, I tell you. I have pictures.

4 comments:

Glaivester said...

11. George W. Bush. See Woodrow Wilson.

FDR. Not for lying us into war - that was the right thing to do. No, he makes the list for his grotesque, irreversibly stupid expansion of the federal state.

Right. And lying us into war and expanding the federal state are in no ways related to each other.

mythago said...

and ask how come putting hundreds of thousands of American citizens into camps is somehow less objectionable than listening in on some phone calls to Algeria

Shouldn't the comparison be between the Japanese internment camps and our secret detention camps in Eastern Europe? The proper comparison to Bush's wiretaps is Nixon. (Who, strangely, you like more than Madonna.)

I don't think you're going to perplex any liberals by telling them the New Deal was morally worse than internment camps, by the way.

Robert said...

Shouldn't the comparison be between the Japanese internment camps and our secret detention camps in Eastern Europe?

Nope. That would be comparing the treatment of American citizens with the treatment of captured enemies.

The New Deal wasn't worse than internment camps; it was just a bad idea.

mythago said...

That would be comparing the treatment of American citizens with the treatment of captured enemies.

Not all interned Japanese were citizens, and it would be premature to assume that everyone shipped to Eastern Europe was a noncitizen.