THE 2010 COCKTAILHAG.COM BAD GUY LIST
“There are many bad men around the world who run countries and we don’t topple them, and indeed in earlier years we had actually supported Saddam Hussein when he was fighting against Iran. The argument that someone is a bad man is an inadequate argument for war and certainly an inadequate and unacceptable argument for regime change.”
- John Major, former British prime minister, commenting on former prime minister Tony Blair’s recent admission that, even without weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein, the 2003 invasion of Iraq by US and UK forces was justified
- The Guardian, 2/2/10
Yes, cocktailhag.com fans, it’s the first annual Name The Bad Guy Contest, in which you, our commenters, rack your brains to come up with the definitive list of bad guys around the world and in all walks of life.
Don’t just limit your picks to bad guys in politics! No! Widen the field and, with some semblance of reasoning, put up a bad guy who meets the everyday standard of, well - just being a bad guy!
Let’s get started. I’ll kick things off and you jump in when the urge strikes.
So, Sir John said Saddam Hussein was a bad guy, but he didn’t think Sadddam was a bad enough guy to be knocked from his golden throne by force because he didn’t have WMD that could be bolted on top of a rocket, and then fired at London with a 45 minute ETA, as Tony Blair believed. So is Sir John saying Blair is a bad guy for getting it so wrong, or for being willing to get along by going along with George Bush? Oh, and then, does all this mean W. was a bad guy? Ya think?
Who are all the bad guys as we look around and try to get firm footing on the bridge to the 21st century?
How about Tiger Woods? Should we invade golf courses from now on and keep him from sullying the game for lying about sex and being a meta hypocrite about marriage?
How about Nevada Senator John Ensign, who is willing to blow smoke into the face of a national television audience for six minutes about his sexual adventures and possible conflict of interest as a senator on matters related to his sexual adventures? Should we invade Nevada and remove him from office?
Is Glenn Beck a bad guy for shedding faux tears on Fox News? Should we invade Fox News headquarters in New York and remove this embarrassment to American journalism once and for all?
There are so many bad guys to choose from!
Let’s hear from you.
From a previous century:
http://www.baseballlibrary.com/ballplayers/player.php?name=Walter_OMalley_1903
In a famous incident, writers Pete Hamill and Jack Newfield wrote their own list of the three worst villains of the 20th century on a piece of paper to settle a discussion they were having over lunch.
They each wrote the same three names in the same order: Hitler, Stalin, Walter O’Malley.
Wow, sprog, being a member of the Boston baseball hot stove league, I didn’t even think of baseball bad guys.
In an instant, you’ve opened a gigantic gourd.
Walter O’Malley indeed!
From a Boston baseball perspective, the roster of bad guys who decamped from the Red Sox to supposedly greener pastures is long and embarrassing.
One of those “traitors” is Wade Boggs.
Boggsie, a man of ritual and superstition, who always ate fried chicken before a game, had some glory years with the Sox early in his career, and all things considered, was a man who possessed one of the purest of swings. He had a hitter’s stroke.
His image in Beantown however was not tarnished by his penchant for fried chicken during pre-game in the clubhouse. At one point during his career in Puritan Boston, he ran afoul of the fans’ affections when it was reported that he was having an affair with a woman “not his wife.” Her name is not recalled now (she could have been Fanny Foxe for all I know); and it really doesn’t matter (actually it was Margo Adams, and in the kerfufflle of it all, Boggs eventually endured an interrogation by Barbara Walters), except that he was soon traded to the Yankees, the evil empire. Like Roger Clemens, another “traitor” to the cause of the Olde Towne Team, Boggs became a member of a World Series-winner in New York, well before the Sox finally won the Series in 2004, thus ending an 86-year drought.
Boggs finished his career with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, and there notched his 3,000th MLB hit – a home run.
Wade Boggs became a bad guy in Boston, but he was a true hitter, whether in the batter’s box at Fenway, or anywhere else.
He is a Hall of Famer (2005), also receiving dispensation of a sort in Boston when the team put him its pantheon (2004). Boggs’ lifetime stats: .328 BA, 3,010 hits, 118 HR, and 1,014 RBI. He appeared in 12 straight All Star games as an A.L. third baseman, third in that stat behind Brooks Robinson and George Brett.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dxz_4z0pW2s
There are two bad guys that come to mind (because I just finished reading some particulars about them): Jim DeMint (R-SC) and Pete Hoekstra (R-MI).
Now the former is worse than the latter simply because he’s not as transparently idiotic as Hoekstra. He’s worse–he’s cunning, manipulative and altogether a cynical abuser of logic, rationality and what once was called human decency. Sample quote from a blog post (full entry at sig):
As for Hoekstra, Casual Observer has a post at FDL’s The Seminal regarding his “trip to Yemen”:
http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/21957
Yet when I think about it, perhaps the bad guys here are those citizens who actually support these people with money and votes. It’s the weirdest sort of masochism:
“Senator/Congressman, why should I vote for you? Do you promise to continue your abuse of me? Will you promise to layer lie upon lie and do your utmost to further your political prospects at the expense of yo-yos like me? Because absent that–absent shabbily cloaked language that smears the Other while rewarding our elite–you won’t get my support.”
The Dick is at the top of my list and will go down as the man who broke the camel’s back of America and its imperial reign. The Dick is my top bad guy because he fucked us in so many different ways.
He destroyed any integrity America had left or positive global image. He was a better seducer and propagandist than Goehring and a worse tyrant than Hitler. He may not have caused as many deaths yet, but we don’t know the billion or more that might die do to global warming because Dickhead stole the election from Al Gore. Gore as president may well have set our globe on a far different course. The agony and tragedy he is directly responsible for came at a time when the world should have been beyond wars and setting a new course for peace. Again, Al would have sought that. This all time screwer saw the end of any chance for our congress to ever work together without massive system change.
As top bad guy, he has the sleaziest, most dastardly smile of any president. I could go on and on, but I don’t want to throw up after just waking up so I will stop.
Yup. No doubt. Dick Cheney wins by a mile. The Prince of Darkness spent more than a decade dismantling much that is good in this country. The problem is he continues to do so.
He should not be in the public spotlight. He should be in jail.
You should let the effects of the psychedelic drugs in the holiday egg nog subside before logging on, your dementia is just too magnified this early in the year.
I bet you are so clear-headed that you don’t even know who “you” is. Tell me all knowing seer who “you” is.
Well, since there are so many contenders, I did the easiest thing; crack open the NYT Magazine to see who Deborah Solomon was interviewing, and guess what? John Yoo! He’s Baaaad, but of course doe-eyed Deb treats him with her usual deference. You see, he “had” to write the torture memos, as a lawyer answering a “legal question” for his “client.” The interview manages to be more cringe-inducing than the picture, wherein Yoo looks like a doll in an ill-fitting suit. The man is both stupid and evil, which comes through even in Solomon’s softball tete a tete.
Obviously, the usual suspects from the Bush administration, but I think Bill Kristol is up there because of several reasons: first, he’s not stupid (like Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck), and he does what he does intentionally. He’s evil. He has a publishing venue and still has a place on TV, which astonishes me, frankly. Even though the NYT kicked him to the curb, someone still pays him to write garbage.
I think Fred Hiatt is also a really bad man.
Art Modell is a real prize, but you’d have to be a Clevelander to appreciate that.
I think that badness + public platform does compound the bad, especially when said platform is never taken away even in the face of rank incompetence, so Kristol and Hiatt are definitely up there. Hiatt may be worse, since he brings a whole stable of little baddies with him on his crappy page. I don’t think stupidity detracts from badness; GWB being a perfect example.
What makes Beck and Palin bad is that they do mean harm with their lies and rabble-rousing, or they don’t care, both bad.
Mmmph. I agree that all of the above were bad guys, but if we’re going to indict them, we ought to think about giving an honorary indictment to the American People. Dick Cheney is undoubtedly an asshole, but we think of him as one largely because he was honest about being an asshole. Believe me, he has a lot of company when you consider all of American history.
When Kennedy said: Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country, everybody, and I mean EVERYBODY cheered. Did anyone ask whether sentiments like that had any place in a democracy? When he also said: Let every nation know… as far as I remember, there wasn’t a single person, left right or center, who remarked on the incredible belligerence masked by the stirring rhetoric.
I’d argue that we’ve gotten what we asked for, whether we knew we were asking for it or not. In a very fundamental way, Dick Cheney is just Kennedy without the frills. With Obama, the frills are back. This time of course, there are at least some who’re complaining about it, but not very many. Put that in your hope and smoke it.
Well, WT…. Given the irregularities of both the 2000 and 2004 elections, and the absurdly pro-Bush bias of the media in both cases, it’s tought to lay that much blame on the average voter. Of course, a disturbing amount of bloodlust always lurks beneath the surface of American politics, particularly since WWII, and I think some of that comes from not having had the crap bombed out of us. That sort of thing brings out the inner pacifist in people. (As the Heel likes to point out, we voluntarily set about flattening our cities after the war because we were so jealous….)
Kennedy may have used belligerent rhetoric, but unlike Dick he was something of a war hero, so more people gave him a pass.
Well, education does go a long way toward preserving what one generation learns for those which follow. I doubt, barring a complete cataclysm, that the human race will ever forget how to factor a quadratic equation. The horrors of war, on the other hand, seem to be forgotten almost as soon as the bodies are buried, and the bricks put on top of one another again.
Does anyone ever read the list of names on the Civil War memorials which you can still find in almost every middle sized town east of the Mississippi, or wonder who all those young men might have been? Frankly, I doubt it, not even in the South, which has built a minor industry out of its disappointments in that war. The Stars and Bars, yes, but the kids who died for it 150 years ago? Not so much.
It’s a good thing, because if the future of the quadratic equation were up to me, it would already be lost.
As for war, few discuss the hundreds of thousands dead in the “war of northern aggression,” but boy, did Bush apologists love to talk about Lincoln’s constitutional breaches, real and imagined. When I walk through Lownsdale Square, downtown, there is a quaint memorial, a column with cannons, commemorating Oregon’s dead from WWI. The numbers seem kind of small to me.
I happened to see a news clip (CNN, I think) that showed a burial ceremony at Arlington. The report noted that there are more than 100 burials there each week.
I didn’t know that and your observation made me think–how many are aware of the names of these men and women, killed days ago (presumably), apart from their families?
You’re right, there’s a veritable army of bad guys bivouacked across the fruited plain. But are they “bad” because they are in league with the forces of Satan, perhaps hoping for an eternal position in Beelzebub’s cabinet, or are they just reptilians that offend our personal sense of propriety and morality? Is someone that uses their position to enrich themselves by pandering to the infantile psuedo-ideas of the ignorant evil or just opportunistic? Are Tiger Woods, Kwame Kilpatrick, and John Edwards bad guys or just guys with no sales resistance? Is there some kind of moral breathalyzer that we can have Pinnochia Pelosi or Harry Reid or Barney Frank or Chris Dodd blow in so we can determine if their purported concern for the lower orders of society is genuine or just a technique to retain an elected office with perks Caesar Augustus never dreamed of? Is Janet Napolitano actively enabling aviation sabotage while destroying modern air travel or just fulfilling her destiny as a utopian doofuss nobody will remember in ten years? We just can’t know, without close personal experience, if anyone is truly bad, especially those operating in the subdivision of criminal activity we call politics.
The real culprit is broken systems, not broken or bad people. Your list of bad guys or my list is not the real problem. WT has pointed out the group most responsible, US. If US refuses to fix those broken systems, we get what we deserve.
I forgot. Nailhead is definitely bad, in that his partisan blinders and childish name-calling only goes to one side of the aisle. Woods, Kirkpatrick are Heels, but that’s different than bad. (Maybe the Heel will care to weigh in on this…) Dodd and Frank are compromised, particularly when it comes to the banks, but their badness isn’t in league with a Tom DeLay, for instance. Ben Nelson and Max Baucus are bad, as in corrupt, Joe Lieberman is bad as in corrupt, hypocritical, and bloodthirsty. Harry Reid is a poor leader, but certainly only bad to Dittoheads. Ditto, no pun intended, Nancy (that’s her name) Pelosi. Righties can’t stand her because she is, for a Democrat, a pretty effective leader, and more liberal than most high-ranking Democrats.
Bad is a little word, well within the Fox News vocabulary. You should look it up, Tom.
Yes, Tart, amongst heels you find bad specimen as you may know – the liar/cheater types. Heelishness somewhat stipulates such behavior but as Consuela (is that Frank?) keeps pointing out –
“Time wounds all Heels”
Happy new year, all, and stay away from the bad men – heels being the least of your problem, one would think.
I definitely vote for Dick (I sometimes refer to him as 4-BAD).
We must invade his rancid, undisclosed lair forthwith. But first, our invading force must be trained and equipped to withstand vampiric skull-bats, demon monkey imps, and the noxious fumes emitted from the maw of the Cheney itself. And they must be conditioned never to glance into the Cheney’s eyes, or their faces will instantly slough from the bone into a gruesome, bubbling mass of liquified flesh.
On behalf of all of our bad-searching cocktailhag.com commenters, let me say it’s an honor to have you here, DC.
A lot of former Blackwater guards may be out of work. Maybe we can recruit some of them especially for assaults on the monkey imps, persuade them it’s time to “give back” to the nation.
What better way to do that than to get Mr. Bad himself.
The honor is mine! This looks like a cool crowd.
And don’t forget the Spawn, chained at the entrance to the cave, spitting venom at any who dares approach.
They look just like the OverCheney, but with smaller heads, and gray little bodies like misshapen infants.
Unfortunately, we’re all gettin’ kinda bad …
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704152804574627960532587996.html
i ges taht i wood pick taht kruthammer guy becuase he is teh one hoo told me to give adnomo credit.
i reely think kruthammer goes threw life with a hard on because4 he got hurt an now want to punish people no mattr woo they r.
i also think the furst 911 troofer shud be on teh list.
What, no women?!
Well… if you were going to include women, I’d have to nominate Linda Tripp, the epitome of what it means to have an older female friend who betrays her younger friend… not to win a man away from her, or to beat her out of a job, but simply to achieve a political agenda, the over-turning of a presidential election. [Major FAIL!]
Call me sexist, if you will, but I really think it was just too bad that Tripp didn’t get that makeover before she met Monica. Maybe there was a bit of sexual jealousy mixed in there, too…
Consider how much harm that episode also did to mother/daughter relationships. If Monica’s mother could be expected to testify against her daughter, so could any other mother in America. One wonders how many mothers forbade their daughter, after that saga, from confiding in them.
Fortunately, that line of exploitation has not been explored further, since powerful men seem to prefer making war, rather than dicussing sexual pecadilloes… but it could have been.
Skeptic, no slight is intended here by focusing on bad guys.
Bad girls are a world unto themselves, and they’re worthy of another post (step right up!), not to segregate mind you, but to give them their due, as in, all the credit in the world.
Back to bad guys though, I mean they still have all the heavy weapons: off-shore guns bolted to navy ships, batteries of howitzers arrayed across picturesque rolling plains, bunker busters dropped from intercontinental bombers, credit default swaps, bundled (or bungled) mortgages, lucrative defense and mercenary contracts, shoe and underpants explosives, etc. The whole nine yards
The other thing is (and I think this speaks well of bad girls) bad guys are pretty much two dimensional. They have two positions: on and off.
Bad girls are a bit more complicated. They can do on and off of course, but they can also idle for an indefinite period of time, conveying ambiguity, emanating a sort of low hum – such as one would hear from a rheostat, installed in a boiler room.
I’d say there’s more mystery in a bad girl’s middle position than most bad guys can handle.
I would think that’s a tremendous and as yet unexplored advantage. I would imagine in that more reflective state, bad girls have much more power to ruminate about sexual peccadilloes in a push/pull sort of way – not to mention many other provocations. Plus, I just read the other day a new controversy has, er … erupted, among some scientists about whether there really is a “G” spot. A female British columnist has pointed out the current research was hammered out by a mostly male crew, and she wondered if these guys put too much emphasis on drawing conclusions from dry mechanical data and evasive female research subjects, instead of a somewhat deeper emotional interpretation. Hmmm …
I don’t know what to make of that. More digging may be required.
Of course, the researchers seeking answers about the G-spot would have to be men!
I did see the headlines about that controversy, but didn’t think it was worth following up. At least, not for now.
In any case, I do appreciate your discussion about the variations between bad guys and bad girls. You might be on to something…
ANOTHER BAD GUY DISCOVERED: We report; you decide.
These days, Jerry Levin, the former Time-Warner CEO, and his wife run an addiction rehab center in Santa Monica, California.
The center is described in brochures as “a place to revel in the wonder of you.”
The Financial Times reports Levin is not only helping people to “revel in the wonder” of themselves; he’s making a round of public apologies for his role in the 10th anniversary sale of Time-Warner for shares in AOL which at the time were inflated by the dot-com boom.
Levin appeared on CNBC Monday and said, “I presided over the worst deal of the century, apparently, and I guess it’s time for those involved in companies to stand up and say: you know what, I’m solely responsible for it. I was in charge. I’m really very sorry about the pain and the suffering and loss that was caused. I take responsibility.”
I appears Levin consumed ten years in the effort to “revel in the wonder” of himself, while helping others to “revel in the wonder” of themselves, before finding the gumption to go on national television – albeit a business news channel – to admit he fucked up.
The FT called the $164b sale of TW shares “disastrous,” and Levin urged other business leaders who presided over recent corporate debacles including, presumably, outright fraud, to follow his example.
“Where is the stand-up leadership,” he said, “that’s going to take responsibility for what’s happened and do something about it?”
Levin went on to say the AOL deal was a “magnificent concept,” but added that he did not treat employees’ fears with enough compassion.
“It’s a little hard to exercise compassion, connection and love when the market is very unforgiving,” Levin said.
Levin admitted he’s waited a long time to apologize for the AOL deal.
“Maybe you could say in my case it’s a little late.”