100 People part 2

100 People Who Are Screwing Up America

Bernard Goldberg

89 - Jane Smiley
Jane Smiley is an author of many novels and essays. She's a true-blue liberal and proud of it. She's also a first class bigot.
Right after election day 2004, she wrote a piece for Slate, graciously titled, "The Unteachable Ignorance of the Red States." Basically it's about how everyone who voted for George W. Bush is a moron and a bigot, not to mention dishonest, arrogant, and filled with hate.

88 - Aaron McGruder
Aaron McGruder is the creator of a comic strip called The Boondocks, whose hero is a black kid named Huey Freeman.

As the New Yorker put it in a profile of McGruder, Huey "has been treating readers of the funnies page to an unhealthy dose of indignation, paranoia, and hatred" and "has roughly equal contempt for Dick Cheney, Cuba Gooding Jr., and Santa Claus."
Michael Moore says The Boondocks is his favorite strip. Surprise!

87 - Sheldon Hackney
When political correctness first began running amok on the nation's campuses, there were many lively-livered namby-pamby college presidents to help it along. But there probably was no one so pathetically cowardly as Sheldon Hackney of the University of Pennsylvania. That's why columnist John Leo, one of the nation's staunchest defenders of free speech on campus, named his annual award, which he symbolically gives to the college administrator who has done the most to stifle that right, "The Sheldon." "The Sheldon is a statuette that looks something like the Oscar," Leo explains, "except that the Oscar shows a man with no face

looking straight ahead, whereas the Sheldon shows a man with

no spine looking the other way."

86 - Chris Ofili
In early 1999, Chris Ofili was a young artist, pretty much unknown outside of his native Great Britain. Then one of his works appeared in a show called Sensations at New York's Brooklyn Museum. Overnight, Chris Ofili was a sensation himself, hailed in trendy, liberal circles not only as tremendously gifted, but (to his fans, even more important) as a courageous, principled fighter for artistic freedom.
Why? Well, he painted a picture of the Virgin Mary and because he's so cutting-edge, don't you know, he also painted a bunch of female asses on the canvas, then sprinkled the whole thing with that well-known artistic material...elephant crap. Only among the effete elites in the world of art is something like that considered an act of bravery!

85 - The Dumb Celebrity
Cameron Diaz: "Women have so much to loose.

I mean, we could lose the right to our bodies.

If you think that rape should be legal, then don't vote.

But if you think that you have a right to your body,

then you should vote."

Fred Durst (of the band Limp Bizkit, presenting an award at the Grammy's): "I hope that we are all in agreeance [sic] that this war should go away as soon as possible."

Kate Hudson: "Thoughts" on filming the movie Le Divorce in Paris: "Sometimes I'll be walking down the street and I'll hear some American and I'll just go, 'Of course they hate us, of course they can't stand us. We're the most annoying, boisterous creatures in the world.' I mean we come in and we eat mounds of food, and we're like, 'Where's the ketchup for our French fries?' I'm like shut up.' "

Margaret Cho: "There is such a weird strangehold on the liberal community where we're so afraid to speak."

(Speaking on national television.)

Janeane Garofalo: "The Republican Party, their message and their politics of exclusion and their tilted playing field appeals to

the dumb and the mean. There is no shortage of dumb and mean people in this culture. So therefore...the dumb and the mean

find a nice home in the GOP."

84 - The Vicious Celebrity
Alec Baldwin: "If we were in other countries, we would all right now, all of us together would go down to Washington and we would stone [Congressman] Henry Hyde to death! We would stone Henry Hyde to death and we would go to their homes and we'd kill their wives and their children. We would kill their families. What is happening in this country? What is happening? UGHHH!" (Playfully exaggerating, I think, on Late Night with Conan O'Brien, how "we" would deal with Hyde and other congressman involved in the Clinton impeachment.)

Wallace Shawn (playwright, actor, and darling of the New York intelligentsia, writing in the left-wing magazine The Nation):

"Why are we being so ridiculously polite? It's as if there were some sort of gentlemen's agreement that prevents people from stating the obvious truth that Bush and his colleagues are exhilarated and thrilled by the thought of war, by the scale, the massiveness of the bombing they're planning, the violence, the killing, the blood, the deaths...
"Why do they want this war so much? Maybe we can never fully know the answer to that question...Why do some people so desperately to have sex with children that they can't prevent themselves from raping them, even though they know what they're doing is wrong?

Why did Hitler want to kill Jews?"

Sean Penn: "I am not disturbed by Ronald Reagan's Alzheimer's.

You know, there's not a lot of cleaner pictures of karma in the world. I mean, it's not a very Christian way of thinking. I do stray sometimes.

But I go right from him mocking the farm workers and eating grapes on television during the boycott to him dribbling today.

And I feel a sense of justice."

Janeane Garofalo: "What you have now is people that are closet racists, misogynists, homophobes and people who love tilted playing fields and the politics of exclusion identifying as conservative."

83 - The Dumb and Vicious Celebrity
Linda Ronstadt: "I worry that some people are entertained by the idea of this war. They don't know anything about the Iraqi's, but they're angry and frustrated in their own lives. It's like Germany before Hitler took over. The economy was bad and people felt kicked around. They looked for a scapegoat. Now we've got a new bunch of Hitlers."

Martin Sheen: "George W. Bush is like a bad comic working the crowd, a moron, if you'll pardon the expression."

David Clennon (star of the CBS program The Agency):

"I'm not comparing Bush to Adolf Hitler - because George Bush,

for one thing, is not as smart as Adolf Hitler."

Janeane Garofalo: "Our country is founded on a sham: our forefathers were slave-owning rich white guys who wanted it their way. So when I see the American flag, I go, 'Oh my God, you're insulting me.' That you can have a gay parade on Christopher Street in New York, with naked men and women on a float cheering, 'We're here, we're queer!' - that's what makes my heart swell. Not the flag, but a gay naked man or woman burning the flag. I get choked up with pride."

82 - Laurie David
Laurie David is a pain in the ass. She's the wife of Larry David, the comedy writer and actor who created Seinfeld and stars in the HBO hit Curb Your Enthusiasm. She's also an environmental crusader and a Hollywood heavy-hitter when it comes to raising money for liberal causes. But mostly, she's a pain in the ass.

81 - Tim Robbins
I plugged the keywords "arrogant, know-it-all, whining, windbag" into one of those online search engines, and it spit out "Tim Robbins." Robbins reminds me of those middle-aged peace guys you see holding signs on the side of the road that say WAR IS NEVER THE ANSWER and HONK FOR PEACE. They mean well. But they're not too deep.