100 People Who Are Screwing Up America
70 - Jimmy Swaggart
There are those - okay, let's go ahead and call them "liberals" - who see "intolerance" everywhere, including all kinds of places where it is not. People who see "intolerance" everywhere are so aggressive in pushing their views, both in the media and through the courts, that lots of us have come to regard the very word "intolerance" as a red flag.
Which brings us to TV evangelist Jimmy Swaggart.
"I've never seen a man in my life that I wanted to marry,"
There are those - okay, let's go ahead and call them "liberals" - who see "intolerance" everywhere, including all kinds of places where it is not. People who see "intolerance" everywhere are so aggressive in pushing their views, both in the media and through the courts, that lots of us have come to regard the very word "intolerance" as a red flag.
Which brings us to TV evangelist Jimmy Swaggart.
"I've never seen a man in my life that I wanted to marry,"
said Swaggart during a church sermon on September 12, 2004.
"And I'm gonna be blunt and plain: if one ever looks at me like that,
I'm gonna kill him and tell God that he died."
When this came to light, Swaggart eventually issued an "apology."
When this came to light, Swaggart eventually issued an "apology."
He said he was only joking, but that if he offended
anyone he said that he would kill, he was sorry.
69 - Matt Kunitz
The Executive Producer of Fear Factor,
69 - Matt Kunitz
The Executive Producer of Fear Factor,
the NBC prime-time TV reality show.
68 - Katherine Hanson
Hanson is a self-styled expert in "the culture of violence."
68 - Katherine Hanson
Hanson is a self-styled expert in "the culture of violence."
She believes that in this country we "socialize males to be aggressive,
powerful, unemotional and controlling," and that such activities as
Little League baseball "encourage aggressive, violent behavior..."
Katherine Hanson is one of those angry radical feminists who have helped set the agenda in classrooms all across the country. Under the auspices of Bill Clinton's Department of Education, Hanson's outfit produced more than 350 publications and distributed material to hundreds of educational conferences. By 2000, Hanson's organization had received more than $75 million in federal funds - otherwise known as your tax dollars!
67 - Randall Robinson
As if there's not already enough bitterness and
Katherine Hanson is one of those angry radical feminists who have helped set the agenda in classrooms all across the country. Under the auspices of Bill Clinton's Department of Education, Hanson's outfit produced more than 350 publications and distributed material to hundreds of educational conferences. By 2000, Hanson's organization had received more than $75 million in federal funds - otherwise known as your tax dollars!
67 - Randall Robinson
As if there's not already enough bitterness and
misunderstanding in this country on the subject of race,
along comes Randall Robinson with a bright idea: Reparations!
"The United States is obligated to come to terms with its past and
"The United States is obligated to come to terms with its past and
to make the victims whole," Robinson has written. "This means compensation, restitution, reparations." After all, he argues, Germany has paid billions to survivors of the Holocaust. And on 1988, the United States compensated Japanese-Americans interned during World War II. And besides, he says, America was largely built by centuries of free labor. "An apology is not the end of the matter," Robinson says.
"An apology is the beginning of the matter."
It's a passionate, heartfelt argument that makes you think.
The problem is that when you do, you're hit by the obvious:
that as immoral as slavery was, it ended more than 140 years ago.
And unlike those who survived the Holocaust and those
Japanese-Americans who were kept in camps against their will,
slavery's actual victims are long gone - as are
the people who kept the whole nasty system going.
In fact, millions upon millions of our ancestors
weren't even in this country back in the days of slavery, and,
among those who were, hundreds of thousands died at Gettysburg and on a lot of other battlefields to end slavery.
66 - David Duke
David Duke, who just might be America's most famous bigot with good hair, has been off the radar screen for the past few years, because he was in federal prison, for tax and mail fraud, and before that he was living in Russia, where (no kidding) he wrote an article called
66 - David Duke
David Duke, who just might be America's most famous bigot with good hair, has been off the radar screen for the past few years, because he was in federal prison, for tax and mail fraud, and before that he was living in Russia, where (no kidding) he wrote an article called
"Is Russia The Key To White Survival?"
65 - Oliver Stone
The problem with Oliver Stone is not really that he's a leftist with paranoid fantasies about sinister forces running America.
65 - Oliver Stone
The problem with Oliver Stone is not really that he's a leftist with paranoid fantasies about sinister forces running America.
People have a right to their delusions. Besides, in Hollywood having fashionably leftist delusions is always an excellent career move.
The problem isn't even that Stone lies about history and unloads his fantasies on the rest of us in his movies. It's his right as an "artist"
The problem isn't even that Stone lies about history and unloads his fantasies on the rest of us in his movies. It's his right as an "artist"
- the word they like to use in the "creative community" to describe themselves - to put whatever he wants on film,
as long as he can get someone to pay for it.
No, the problem is that, even as he plays fast and loose with facts, distorting things in the most unscrupulous and heavy-handed way,
No, the problem is that, even as he plays fast and loose with facts, distorting things in the most unscrupulous and heavy-handed way,
Oliver Stone cavalierly goes out of his way to present his warped take on events ... as real, authentic history.
64 - James Wolcott
James Wolcott is a respected columnist for the ultra-chic
64 - James Wolcott
James Wolcott is a respected columnist for the ultra-chic
Vanity Fair magazine. On Election Day 2004,
he posted the following message on his website:
"I am preparing myself for either outcome today.
Should Kerry win, I will post an important statement called
'A Time for Healing,' or something equally noble sounding.
Should Bush win, I shall post a statement of philosophical resignation
tentatively titled 'Good, Go Ahead, America,
Choke On Your Own Vomit, You Deserve To Die.'
The latter will probably require a little more tweaking."
This is what is known as sophisticated wit in such sophisticated witty places as Manhattan. Except you just know he's not kidding
This is what is known as sophisticated wit in such sophisticated witty places as Manhattan. Except you just know he's not kidding
She lives in Manhattan, and when she was 34 years old,
went off the Pill because it made her "moody,"
and became pregnant. At the doctor's office,
she gets the unexpected news that she's carrying three fetuses.
"My immediate response was, I cannot have triplets," Ms. Richards tells us in her guest column for New York Times Magazine on July 18, 2004.
rarely have I read anything so chilling as Ms. Richards's essay titled
"When One Is Enough" - on the subject of what is
euphemistically called "selective reduction."
"I was not married; I lived in a five-story walk-up in the East Village; I worked freelance; and I would have to go on bed rest in March. I lecture at colleges, and my biggest months are March and April. I would have to give up my main income for the rest of the year. There was a part of me that was sure that I could work around that.
But it was a matter of, Do I want to?" "I asked the doctor: 'Is it possible to get rid of one of them? Or two of them?' The obstertrician wasn't an expert in selective reduction, but she knew that with a shot of potassium chloride you could eliminate one or more."
The point is not that Amy Richards is in favor of abortion, an issue as complicated and contentious as any in our public life. The point is that this woman is the poster child for all those who so easily reduce the procedure simply to a matter of personal convenience. Amy Richards is not even embarrassed to let the world know that she would rather croak than leave her five-story walk-up in Manhattan.
62 - Howard Stern
I have friends whom I admire and whose opinions I respect, who tell me they like Howard Stern. They tell me they like his honesty. How he's not afraid to go against the grain and take the un-PC position.
But come on! Who are we kidding? The "honesty" most of his fans really like is the same "honesty" that kids have, the uncontrollable compulsion to say whatever comes into their underdeveloped little minds, like,
"Boy, you make stinky farts." They tune to Howard for the adolescent, look-how-naughty-I-can-be-stuff.
None of this means that I think Howard Stern should be taken off the air for indecency. That's not what this is about - at all! This is a very big, very free country, and people should be allowed to say almost anything, even on the radio, even (I'm afraid) in the morning. No, this is about something else entirely. It's about Howard Stern as a form of pollution, as a kind of sludge that runs through our culture today.
61 - Michael Savage
At a time when we can use a lot more civility in our national discourse, you can count on Michael Savage to tell you to take your pansy-ass civility and drop dead, "you hateful nothings," you "stinking rat hiding in the sewers." A few years back, in the summer of 2003, Savage had a weekend talk show on MSNBC, when someone called in with something he didn't like. "So you're one of those sodomites. Are you a sodomite?" Savage demanded. The caller replied: "Yes, I am." "Oh, you're one of the sodomites. You should only get AIDS and die, you pig. How's that?"
How's that? MSNBC fired him, that's how it is.
And even worse, Savage's brand of over-the-top bile - which puts him right in there with the angriest haters on the Left - plays right into the hands of liberals, who use him as a bludgeon against even mainstream conservatives. To them, Michael Savage is not simply someone who "gives voice to the right wing's darkest fantasies," as one profile put it, but that he's typical of all conservatives!
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