The 25 Least Influential People Alive by CrevanReaver

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

The 25 Least Influential People Alive

POSTED BY: CREVANREAVER
UPDATED: Tuesday, November 29, 2011 19:12
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Tuesday, November 29, 2011 4:52 PM

Written by a guy named Drew Magary, it's from the left-leaning "men's magazine" GQ:

1. Tim Pawlenty

Every election season produces a number of hilariously pointless candidates who have no chance of winning. Some of them have value as novelty items. Look! It's Alan Keyes, the token black Republican! And over there! It's David Duke! He's a racist! These are the fun, fringy candidates. The Sharpton Sector, if you will. Then there are folks like Pawlenty, who fail to register even as novelties. T-Paw (as he calls himself) spent much of 2011 as a six-foot-tall paperweight, an aggressively forgettable fellow perfectly suited to the role of debate filler. The $1 million he spent to lose the Iowa straw poll might as well have been burned in front of a group of orphans.

2. Princess Beatrice

Wasn't the royal wedding splendid? Was Kate Middleton not utterly radiant in her Sarah Burton gown? In a world of conflict, this joyous occasion proved to be an inspiring and hopeful beacon of... HOLY SHIT, WHO INVITED THE RACCOON WITH THE VAGINA HAT? Take note, Americans: The British have just as many embarrassing hillbilly cousins as we do.

3. Ed Schultz

There are so many repugnant political pundits on TV now, we tend to forget that the likes of Sean Hannity actually represent the best of the lot. Hannity is a piece of shit, but at least he can get your average 85-year-old, gay-hating, gold-hoarding grandma to tune in. Then there are pundits like Schultz. Do you watch The Ed Show on MSNBC? Of course you don't. No one does. The only reason people watch The Ed Show is they're working out in a hotel gym and they can't find a staff member to change the channel to ESPN. Did you know MSNBC suspended Schultz this year? It did! He called Laura Ingraham a "right-wing slut," and he still couldn't get noticed.

4. Tia and Tamera Mowry

The Kardashian sisters rule over the world of vanity reality shows—that brutal subculture of cable-TV programming in which camera crews follow around shitty, uninteresting celebrities while they engage in staged arguments and do boring crap. But the Kardashians, at least, have an inexplicably massive following. So we'll choose the Mowry sisters as representatives of this genre, because their show airs on a worthless channel (The Style Network) and because you almost certainly have no idea who they are, which is as it should be. (Note: There are two of them, but we'll count them as a single unit for this list.)

5. Bono, the Edge, and Julie Taymor

Here's an amazing idea. Let's spend $65 million on a musical about Spider-Man, because kids who like Spider-Man and old Jewish tourists who like to go to Broadway shows are totally the same demographic. Now, we're going to need a batch of forgettable U2 B sides and a harness system designed by Lyle Lanley from The Simpsons' monorail episode. And let's make sure there's a shoe-shopping number! Who's with me? It can't possibly fail!

6. Hank Williams Jr.

The hilarious thing about Hank's getting "fired" from ESPN for comparing President Obama to Hitler is... Exactly what the fuck did he get "fired" from? His "job" consisted of wearing sunglasses indoors and spending a few days each year recutting that god-awful Monday Night Football song he wrote twenty-seven years ago (a song that wasn't even originally written for that program). Welfare recipients have fifty times the annual workload of this man.

7. Amy Chua

You know her as the Tiger Mother, of course. Chua, who wrote an entire book about being the world's strictest mother and did nothing to counter the shallow stereotype that Chinese parents are as emotionally accessible as a pair of boulders, existed this year specifically so that parents could read her book and say, "Fuck that lady. And fuck China." Listen, Amy Chua. Just because you spent hours every night pushing the violin on your daughter doesn't make me the asshole. If anything, I'm gonna be an even lazier parent thanks to you.

8. Steve Williams

Tiger Woods's ex-caddie, a man who makes a living by carrying another man's golf bag, took a moment after a tournament won by his new boss to steal the limelight, blast his former boss, and act as if anyone anywhere gives a shit about caddies: "Obviously it's well documented I've won 145 golf tournaments." YOU WON NOTHING, YOU BAG APE. No one has documented anything about you, other than what a prick you can be when pushing photographers out of the way. There's nothing worse than a profoundly inessential person who's deluded himself into thinking he's the opposite.

9. Hosni Mubarak

This was the year of inept Middle Eastern dictatorships, and Mubarak became the gold standard by falling after a mere eighteen days of protests. Eighteen days! The Chinese government laughs at your lack of fortitude, Hosni. Egypt's president for the past thirty years went from "I'm not going anywhere" to "Okay, I won't run for reelection" to "Okay, I'm leaving" to "Okay, I might be in a coma" in virtually no time. Kind of awesome, when you think about it.

10. January Jones

Thanks to the contract squabble that delayed Mad Men until 2012, we didn't even get to see Jones in the one thing that justifies her existence. Jones spent 2011 serving as human topiary in the new X-Men movie, getting knocked up, and passing every waking hour looking like someone stole her last box of Parliaments.

11. Harold Camping

This is the third time the Family Radio president has given a predicted date for the Apocalypse, and Satan has still not risen out of a massive black chasm to flay us all with his fire lash. Do you know how goddamn disappointing that is to us, Camping? We were promised Rapture. Your arbitrary declarations about the coming of the End Times now serve only one purpose: providing hipsters with a chance to make ironic jokes about the end of the world on Twitter.

12. Paul Reiser

Remember The Paul Reiser Show? You were probably busy watching The Ed Show. Anyway, here's what you missed: a two-episode run of a Curb Your Enthusiasm knockoff featuring Reiser whining about being very wealthy and having very little to do, a problem that no other American is currently experiencing in this economy. Not only was the show awful; its awfulness was an inevitability—its failure so clear from conception that it boggles the mind how no one at NBC stopped it. It's as if network executives don't own televisions.

13. Jeff Ashton

The Marcia Clark of 2011 not only failed to get Casey Anthony convicted of murder but is also writing a book about losing the case, just to remind you how unsuccessful he was at meting out justice for a slain child. Not even Nancy Grace will deign to read it, since she will have already moved on to the new dead white girl in Aruba.

14. Arnold Schwarzenegger

Here's a man who eight freakin' years ago all but admitted to sexually harassing women and proclaimed decades ago in Pumping Iron, "I am cumming day and night." So excuse us if our world was not shattered when we found out—after he left office—that he was plowing the help. At least Anthony Weiner had the courtesy to be disgraced while still in power.

15. Léo Apotheker

Quick, everyone! Who's the exact opposite of Steve Jobs? It's gotta be the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, a company whose new tablet computer was so shitty that it was considering getting out of making PCs entirely. HP's TouchPad was just like the iPad, if the iPad had been designed to obliterate entire sectors of the digital economy. Two thousand years from now, anthropologists will dig up a TouchPad and marvel, "Jesus, this thing looks like a piece of crap. Put it back in the hole."

16. Gwyneth Paltrow

Paltrow spent most of 2011 performing on awards shows (mostly so people could be like, "OMG! I didn't know she could sing! And now I do! I don't know what else to do with this information!"), pushing shit on Goop that no one except Gwyneth Paltrow would buy, and unleashing her awful cookbook upon the world, a book that included such amazingly vapid sentences as "We've got a wood-burning pizza oven in the garden—a luxury, I know, but it's one of the best investments I've ever made." Is it any wonder we all loved watching her die in Contagion?

17. Tina Brown

Brown spent 2011 transforming Newsweek from a magazine no one reads into a magazine no one reads but everyone despises. That's what happens when you star-fuck the corpse of Princess Diana by Photoshopping her at age 50 for your cover, then do a separate Photoshop of her holding an iPhone, and then create a fake Facebook page for her that includes wall posts from Deepak Chopra. Did you know Tina and Di were friends? They were! This Photoshopped image of them having lunch with Stevie Nicks is proof!

18. Tila Tequila

We could include the emoticon bukkake that is Tila Tequila's Twitter feed every single year. Bret Easton Ellis could write 900 pages about it. No one else combines the qualities of being talentless and a has-been quite like this woman. No one else is so clearly living in a paranoid fantasy dreamscape where tweets like this mean something: "Did u miss me too?? Hehe #TilaArmyWorldWide #TilaArmySoldiers #TilaArmy4Life! I love u! No one can keep me away from u! Never! Xoxo."

19. Dr. Marcus Bachmann

While his wife was running around trying to gather enough votes from crazy shitheads to become president, Marcus spent his 2011 being a political prop and running Bachmann & Associates, a small business that provides "reparative therapy" to gay folks who just can't seem to get those pesky gay thoughts out of their heads. Marcus makes this list because the entire area of "reparative therapy" is fundamentally absent of influence, since making a gay person not gay isn't possible.

20. Rosie Huntington-Whiteley

You can just picture Michael Bay sitting at the Chateau Marmont, yelling at an assistant through a megaphone into his cell phone, "Make the hot chick blonde this time! And make sure she doesn't have a smart mouth on her!"

21. Bobby Bonilla

Bonilla retired in 2001, but in July 2011, the New York Mets began shelling out for a deferred portion of the former slugger's contract that will pay him $1.2 million annually for the next twenty-five years. See, the Mets originally thought this payout was a shrewd move, because it allowed them to take Bonilla's deferred money and potentially outearn its value by investing it in a firm run by, you guessed it, Bernie Madoff. And so Bonilla, who is now 48, will earn $30 million over the next three decades, until he turns 72. For doing absolutely nothing.

22. Pitbull

Because who could be less influential than a guy whose music sounds like the aborted offspring of Nelly and Will.i.am?

23. Harrison Ford

Here's a man who has spent years going to great lengths to let you know just what an inconvenience it is for Harrison Ford to be in the movie you're watching. Cowboys & Aliens would have been a bad movie regardless, but Ford made matters worse by sleepwalking through his scenes and treating the publicity for the movie like someone was asking him to build a Malaysian prison.

24. John Boehner

There once was a time when politicians openly courted the wingnut fringe of their respective parties to get their votes, then had the good sense to ignore those imbeciles once they took office. Those days are over. Boehner, who always looks like someone made him stay at work much longer than he wanted to, represents the self-fulfilling prophecy of open cynicism toward the U.S. government: a politician who was elected specifically to not give a shit.

25. President Obama

Okay, so we're cheating a bit with this one. He did order the raid that wiped Osama bin Laden off the face of the earth. But then he used that surplus of political capital to let everyone in Washington stick a boot in his ass. This is a man who should be the most transformational figure of the century. Hell, he promised to be that. Instead he wields all the power of a substitute teacher at night school.

http://www.gq.com/entertainment/humor/201112/25-least-influential-peop
le-alive#slide=1

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Tuesday, November 29, 2011 4:56 PM

ANTHONYT

Freedom is Important because People are Important

Hello,

Surely I belong on this list somewhere.

--Anthony

_______________________________________________

"In every war, the state enacts a tax of freedom upon the citizenry. The unspoken promise is that the tax shall be revoked at war's end. Endless war holds no such promise. Hence, Eternal War is Eternal Slavery." --Admiral Robert J. Henner

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Tuesday, November 29, 2011 5:28 PM

AURAPTOR

America loves a winner!

Beat me to it, Anthony.

And I would have thought that Carrot Top would be on the list, but the dude is headlining in Vegas. I don't care who you are, if you're headlining in Vegas, you're somebody.

Well somebody more influential than I am.

" I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend. "

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Tuesday, November 29, 2011 6:13 PM

CANTTAKESKY

Quote:
Originally posted by AnthonyT:
Surely I belong on this list somewhere.

I think maybe he meant, "Least Influential Celebrities" rather than "people."

I was thinking of a similar list for RWED. 10 least influential posters on RWED.

I think Rap and I might be tied for #1. ;)

-----
Never be deceived that the rich will allow you to vote away their wealth. -- Lucy Parsons (1853-1942, labor activist and anarcho-communist)

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Tuesday, November 29, 2011 7:12 PM

KWICKO

"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." -- William Casey, Reagan's presidential campaign manager & CIA Director (from first staff meeting in 1981)

He also left the entire editorial staff of GQ off his list. Pity. I can't imagine a less influential group of people.

Oh wait. I can too: the entire staff of People magazine.

"Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservatives." - John Stuart Mill

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