Salon's War Room blog has given us a fun holiday gift the 30 biggest hacks of current journamalism list! Folks, there is fun for everyone to be had here. Note it seems they mostly left the FoxNews folks alone with a few exceptions here and there. Too obvious, most of them are, I guess. Follow me over the jump to find out how they ranked, and how you can further make fun of them. Oooh weee!
1 – Richard Cohen
This was what Cohen though would serve as an effective rebuttal to Stephen Colbert’s legendary performance at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner.
First, let me state my credentials: I am a funny guy. This is well known in certain circles, which is why, even back in elementary school, I was sometimes asked by the teacher to "say something funny" -- as if the deed could be done on demand. This, anyway, is my standing for stating that Stephen Colbert was not funny at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner.
2 – Mark Halperin
Needs little introduction around these parts - he practically originated the phrase "This is good news for John McCain!" and well, just generally sucks.
3 – The Moustache of Understanding
Suck on this! baby...
4 – David Broder
The War Room has some fun with his mental shortcomings & lack of, um, morals:
And then sometimes David just up and writes something truly insane, like his recent column about how President Obama needs to start a good old-fashioned war to get the economy humming again.
5 – Marty Peretz
The hacktacular anti-Arab racist who helped trash the reputation of The New Republic & decimated their circulation. I’ll let Eric Alterman do the takedown duties...
6 – Mark Theissen
What a lugubrious twerp this guy is. He’s really barely worth mentioning, other than to note his off-the-charts level of contemptuousness. Here’s a sample of his hack treatment of Obama on terror prosecutions –
By ordering strict adherence to the field manual, Obama also requires that captured terrorists receive better treatment in the interrogation room than common criminals.
Yup, you got something on your chin there buddy, might wanna wipe it off...
7 – Jonah Goldberg
No need for comment really, this one is 100% self-satirizing. "Liberal Fascism". Doughy pantload. That’s Jonah Goldberg.
8 – Maureen Dowd
Her fluffy, preening prose is quite familiar to denizens of the liberal blogosphere. Her acid tongue is occasionally put to good use – she wrote many effective takedowns of Dick Cheney and his poor-man’s Belo Lugosi impersonation. Then there’s what she wrote about Howard Dean’s wife...
9 – Laura Ingraham
I can’t believe Keith Olbermann once dated this individual, and neither can he.
10 – Peggy Noonan
The War Room’s intro paragraph should suffice here:
Peggy Noonan might be the single funniest Op-Ed writer currently working, and for that I do, honestly, respect her. Her red wine-and-laudanum-inspired tales of wandering the Upper East Side in search of some clue to the Contemporary American Mood, her ability to wring a column out of the phenomenon of seeing a Mexican, her sentence fragments and Golden Books prose -- all of this makes for a reliably entertaining Friday read. It's certainly much more fun than a Krauthammer column.
11 – George Will
Helping drag the WaPo into the gutter one half-formed thought at a time...
12 – John Fund
There is apparently no right-wing conspiracy theory you can’t find John Fund waxing idiotic about.
13 – Roger Simon
Well, there are many I would put ahead of Simon (see #s 17, 22) and he’s had some tough times as of late, so I won’t pile on. Let’s just say he epitomizes the philosophy, or lack thereof, of Politico, and leave it at that.
14 – David Ignatius
A true student of hack #4, he has some strange ideas about bipartisanship...
15 – Mort Zuckerman
Is it me, or does this guy always look to be right on the verge of a heart attack?
16 – Michael Barone
I’ll just pull the War Room’s representative quote for this one:
Voters knew the stakes -- polls showed majorities thought this was an important and consequential election -- and both candidates had plenty of opportunity to make their cases. Thanks to the 527s, more money was apparently spent against Bush than for him. So the results cannot be dismissed as an accident. We are now a 51 percent nation, a Republican majority, as once again in America, love has proved stronger than hate.
If you can make sense of that I’ve got a shiny nickel for ya!
17 – William Kristol
He brought the world Sarah Palin before John McCain brought the world Sarah Palin. I mean, what can be said about him, other than that he should have been a serious contender for #1 on this list?
There is scum, there are people with no shame, and then there is Bill Kristol.
18 – Tina Brown
Sometimes people see "liberals" on TV and get a bad impression of liberalism. And what they saw was probably Tina Brown who, while hardly the worst offender here, can still dredge up a ridiculous treatise on just about any frivolous topic just for the hell of it.
19 – Jokeline
The world he lives in is simply not the world most of us live in.
20 – Howard Fineman
Fineman takes the Derek Smalls concept of "lukewarm water" to asinine new heights on a daily basis. Yes, he’s frequently a guest of Keith Olbermann, and for that we can forgive Keith. He has to use what’s at his disposal, you know? But still, the guy is so mealy I wonder why he’s brought on TV to offer his opinion at all – he doesn’t seem to have any!
21 – S. E. Cupp
This is, at best, a very, very confused individual. Watch her debate invisible flying entities while talking in Corey Booker’s general direction...
22 – Tucker
Ahhh, Tucker. When he’s not busy being humiliated by Jon Stewart, he’s impersonating Keith Olbermann via email to little known rubes most likely whilst getting his knuckle hair caught in the zipper of his khakis.
23 – Howard Kurtz
A shining example of how dumb people can dream big and land that fancy talking head job of their dreams! An inspiration to the slightly sub-average everywhere! I’d elaborate further, or include a link, but the guy is really too boring to write on more single syllable about.
24 – Dana Milbank
A sad case. Capable of decent work at times, he’s still also capable of this...
25 – Mickey Kaus
How on Earth did the person who inspired Josh Marshall to blog in the first place ever, um, be Mickey Kaus?!? The professional contrarian’s professional contrarian, it was difficult to choose between the sheer volume of articles with the words "Mickey Kaus" and "Idiot" in their titles, but let’s go with this one.
26 – Jeffrey Golberg
One of the main offending original Iraq war cheerleaders, the War Room notes that:
But he is on this list -- and Judith Miller isn't -- because while Miller has been more or less ostracized from serious journalism (she contributes to Fox, naturally), Jeffrey Goldberg pens cover stories for the Atlantic, where he is both the Middle East expert in residence and the back-of-the-book humor columnist.
Somehow after all this time, this guy is still a "serious" source on issues of foreign policy & national security.
27 – Pat Cadell
Honestly, I’ve never even heard of this clown, probably because I don’t watch FoxNews. Apparently he’s one of those in the Mickey Kaus model, who calls himself a Democrat and then proceeds to argue forcefully in favor of right-wing craziness. I would probably substitute Mark Penn in his place, personally...
28 – Andrew Malcolm
Another hack I’d never paid much attention to. He apparently has something of a track record...
29 – Matt Bai
The War Room highlights this line from his bio,
In fact, I've never lived more than a few miles from a housing project, which probably explains my skepticism toward both Darwinian social policy and the notion that expansive government can fix everything.
So ... you know what that’s about.
30 – Bobo!
Whether pontificating on the political importance of the non-existent Applebee’s Salad Bar, or just making up crap that never happened, David Brooks is as reliable a douchebag as there is in the punditocracy. This graph simply isn’t complete without Matt Taibbi decimating his banal racism though, so here’s one more link to top things off.
Of course, nearly every one of these pillars of journamalism has said at least ten and a half ludicrous things in relation to Barack Obama as well; I left them out so that y’all could have fun in the comments dredging up further asinine insinuations, insults & badly wrong predictions directed at the President, and any other fun errors I may have omitted. Help me complete my project, if you don’t mind.