Any magazine can do a year-end list of influential people who have accomplished far more than most of us ever will. But only GQ possesses the iron testicles to count down the twenty-five least significant men and women of 2012—a collection of people so uninspiring that we should round them all up and stick them on an iceberg. Please note that these folks are ranked in no particular order, because all zeros are created equal.
1. Mitt Romney
Was anyone inspired by Mitt Romney? Did anyone vote enthusiastically for Mitt Romney? Of course not. Voting for Romney is like hooking up with the last single person at the bar at 4 a.m. The only successful thing he did this year was embody every black stand-up comedian's impression of a white person. Thank God the election's over. No more endless photos of Mitt staring winsomely off-camera with that attempted smile on his face. No more glaring campaign mishaps week after week after week. No more labored media efforts to make him look like anything other than Sheldon Adelson's pampered money Dumpster. Good-bye, Mitt. I hope you enjoy the rest of your life quietly ensconced at Lake Winnipesaukee, blissfully ignorant of the plight of anyone who doesn't have $300 million squirreled away in the Bahamas.
2. Amanda Bynes
I didn't think it was possible for God to invent a worse driver than Lindsay Lohan, but here you go. Bynes spent all of 2012 avoiding acting gigs and trying desperately to run over your dog. And yet she isn't anywhere close to being as fascinating a train wreck as Lohan. I could watch Lohan implode for years and years, yet Bynes merits only a token shrug. Step up your game, missy. Sometime in the near future, there's a sensational vehicular-manslaughter trial with your name on it!
3. Madonna
That cheerleading outfit isn't making you look any younger, Madge. It's time for you to stop putting out aggressively bland comeback albums and make room for Ke$ha and Katy and the other 800 female artists out there who change outfits every five minutes to distract people from their terrible singing.
4. Dwight Howard
Congratulations, Dwight! You're a Laker now. And all you had to do to become one was spend months making vague demands of the Orlando Magic and then backtracking on those demands like a spineless pussy until every American hated your guts and wanted to see you fail. "I'll stay in Orlando if you fire my coach! Or maybe I won't. Or maybe you could fire the coach and then build a statue of me made out of frozen butter. NO WAIT TRADE ME TO BROOKLYN NO WAIT DON'T TRADE ME THERE BECAUSE I THOUGHT BROOKLYN WAS MORE CONVENIENT TO MANHATTAN THAN IT ACTUALLY IS." In a just world, Dwight Howard will hurt his knee and doctors will take seventeen months to make a proper diagnosis.
5. Gotye
For two decades I have waited for the next Cobain, a voice so original that it changes the face of rock 'n' roll. Finally, this year, an outsider came along who broke the stranglehold of processed pop and became a global sensation. It's just too bad that the artist in question is a Belgian emo guy who can't handle a simple breakup with a hint of grace. "You didn't have to stoooooop so low." You make Alanis Morissette sound like Slayer. You are rock's genocide. Also, the next time you film yourself naked for a video, wash your feet.
6. George Zimmerman
There's nothing funny about the tragic shooting death of Trayvon Martin. However, there is something morbidly comedic about a man deluding himself into thinking that his life is in danger because a black teenager walking by might assault him with a bag of Skittles. In George Zimmerman's world, he's a hero. Thankfully, very, very few other human beings live in George Zimmerman's world.
7. Michelle Obama
It was a game effort by the first lady to get Americans to eat healthier. She founded the "Let's Move!" campaign to get our children to contemplate forward locomotion. She even wrote a book about growing her own vegetables, which many people bought as a passive-aggressive way of telling someone they're fat. And yet we're still all hopeless corpulent shits. You tried, Mrs. Obama. You really did. Sorry we're such poor listeners. Now why not join the winning team and indulge in this delicious pint of Häagen-Dazs Caramel Cone ice cream? It's so rich and sweet and delectable. Come on. REWARD YOURSELF.
8. Ryan Lochte
The individual-medley-of-douchiness world record was shattered this year by Lochte, the U.S. swimmer who managed to increase the Ashton Kutcher-ness of the London Games by 80 percent. Lochte would have been far more influential if he'd come in dead last. That way, American fathers could have turned to their sons
and said, "You see? This is what happens to you when you buy American-flag mouth grills and act like a dipshit." There will always be a place on this list for the man who invented the catchphrase Jeah!
9. Gregg Williams
The disgraced former NFL defensive coordinator—the man who pioneered the New Orleans Saints' bounty program—is the rare person stupid enough to deserve being scapegoated. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell needed a proper villain to make sure that fans thought the violence inherent in football was actually the work of a few rogue actors, and Williams played the role perfectly by putting his bounty system into PowerPoint and ordering his charges to "kill the head" of opposing players. What a moron. Also, no grown man would ever be inspired by the following actual Gregg Williams motivational slogans:
"Respect/Fear!!!"
"This isn't even shooing the chicken."
"FUCKING COMPLACENT."
"Bus your trays back to the cafeteria!"
9. Gregg Williams
10. Jerry Sandusky's Lawyer
Let us take a stroll through the razor-sharp legal mind of Joe Amendola: "I know! I'll have my client go on national TV prior to his trial to be grilled by Bob Costas so we can all witness him declare, ‘I enjoy young people,' after searching blankly for the proper response to the question ‘Are you sexually attracted to young boys?' as if Costas just asked him where he put his car keys. How can this possibly go wrong?"
11. Guy Fieri
This year the white-trash fusion chef opened his flagship Manhattan restaurant, featuring a pork shank that was cooked like one giant piece of General Tso's chicken and a menu that explicitly declared, "Go big or go home!" Crush that shank, you guys! I'd wager that 90 percent of his customers that first night were foodies planning to review the place ironically. The other 10 percent were tourists for whom Turkey Tequila Fettuccine represents the apex of molecular gastronomy. Oooh, a whole lamb bathed in Cheetos dust! FANCY.
12. Keith Olbermann
There was only one bridge left for Olbermann to burn this year, and when it was time for him to alienate himself from Current TV, he did it in classic Olbermann fashion, bitching about broken promises and writing frantic missives to anyone who dared accuse him of being less than a perfect little angel while working at Current. But don't feel bad for Keith. He's now free to live the life he's always dreamed of: taping "Special Comment" segments from his own toilet and descending into a permanent state of manic paranoia. Why can't this happen to Hannity, too?
13. Lance Armstrong
Every year brings new and incontrovertible evidence that Lance Armstrong is the polar opposite of the inspiring legend he was once made out to be. It's like peeling back the layers of an onion that's nestled inside an asshole. Just this year, Armstrong dropped his fight against the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency in the most dickish and self-delusional way possible ("There comes a point in every man's life when he has to say, ‘Enough is enough' "), then got fired by Nike and his own Livestrong charity. Also, Outside magazine found that Livestrong "donates almost nothing to scientific research." I put nothing past him anymore. By 2014, I expect him to be charged with supplying elephant growth hormone to Roger Clemens and orchestrating the civil war in Syria.
14. Billy Crystal
It's a measure of how irrelevant the Oscars have become that Eddie Murphy could back out of the gig and producers thought that bringing in an even more washed-up comic would somehow rejuvenate the ceremony. Did Billy compare movies to baseball within six seconds of strolling out onto the stage? Of course he did. Did he dress up in blackface and impersonate Sammy Davis Jr.? Of course he did. Did he plug his new horrible-looking movie—the one that wasn't slated to come out for ten more months? Of course he did. There should've been a live from the catskills graphic on the screen during his monologue. "This is my ninth time hosting the Oscars. So tonight just call me War Horse." Take his jokes—please.
15. Bobby Valentine
The Boston Red Sox jettisoned manager Terry Francona—who only won two World Series for his famously cursed franchise—in favor of Valentine, a man whose greatest accomplishment in baseball remains wearing a fake-mustache disguise to sneak back into the dugout after getting ejected from a game. Bobby V immediately obliterated the Sox, somehow dividing the clubhouse even further less than a year after the Sox had bickered their way to one of sports history's all-time great collapses. He called his own third baseman a head case, allegedly got caught napping on the job, and capped off the year by calling his team "the weakest roster we've ever had in September in the history of baseball." Bobby, in your incapable hands, any roster is the weakest roster in baseball.
16. Whoever Directed John Carter
John Carter became the biggest bomb in history in part because Andrew Stanton, the movie's director, mistakenly believed that we were as into Edgar Rice Burroughs as he was. Next time you waste $250 million shooting and reshooting a terrible movie based on obscure source material, ask around first. Not everyone is frothing for a Captain Koala movie, my friend.
17. James Dolan
I don't understand what possesses the James Dolans and Donald Sterlings and Dan Snyders of the world to exhaust every way to get everyone to hate their guts. Is that rewarding? Is the Knicks owner even human? Does he have some kind of "stubborn dick" gene that the rest of us lack? Maybe Dolan will invite us to his secret daily lunch with Isiah Thomas and clue us in.
18. Aaron Sorkin
Watching an Aaron Sorkin show is like someone force-reading you the Huffington Post. Only with The Newsroom, it's as if all the HuffPo entries are taken from 2010 and Coldplay's "Fix You" is playing in the background. This was the year TV critics finally realized that having a lot of dialogue does not equal having good dialogue. ZOMG SO MANY WORDS HOW DOES SORKIN DO IT? The only time The Newsroom will ever actually affect the news is a year from now, when my Twitter feed lets me know it's been canceled.
19. Adam Sandler
Every year, Adam Sandler releases fresh cinematic evidence that he has no respect for you, your $12, or your cognitive abilities. And thanks to the disappointing gross for That's My Boy, Americans have finally caught on. At this point, the only reason Sandler makes movies is so that Rob Schneider can earn a living. It's like political cronyism, only the end result is a shitty movie instead of a bridge to nowhere. Political cronyism is funnier.
20. The Remaining Scraps of Occupy Wall Street
Good job, guys! You really showed those Wall Street bigwigs you meant business by failing to adopt proper leadership and embodying virtually every awful liberal-hippie stereotype—the hand signals, the completely non-germane protest signs, the white-boy dreadlocks... I mean, you really went all out to piss away the public's sympathy as quickly as possible. Say what you will about the Tea Party, at least it managed to get people elected.
21. Jamie Dimon
It's a measure of how completely fucked the banking world is that the JPMorgan Chase CEO can have his investment office suffer a $6 billion trading loss—a loss that came from the same kind of risky credit-swap deals that ruined the economy four years ago—and still keep his job. In fact, Dimon later said he's "an outspoken defender of the truth." O RLY? He's the perfect evil CEO. I picture him bathing in a tub of gold Krugerrands and firing a pistol at his butler to make him tap-dance.
22. James Brady
I'm sorry to put you on this list, sir. Your efforts to curb gun violence in this country have been admirable. And yet we can't stop shooting one another. In fact, every time there's a mass shooting, we actually go buy more guns so that we can get to the next mass shooting even faster. Maybe we should move on to easier causes. Like grenade control. If we try hard enough, I think we could easily reduce mass grenadings in this country by 100 percent.
23. Jim Lehrer
"Um, excuse me, excuse me, lemme just... Governor, we're way over. We're going to come back to taxes in just a moment... Excuse me, no wait, WAIT. You keep talking! Why do you keep talking! I'M IN CONTROL HERE, DAMMIT! I AM A RESPECTED NEWSMAN AND YOU WILL... No, no, I'm not fini—STOP STUMPING! [begins to cry] People don't know how hard this is, okay? You guys just ignore me and go right into your own talking points! Oh, you don't agree? Okay, I'll give you seventy minutes for rebuttal."
24. Hulk Hogan
When I was a kid, I wanted to be just like Hulk Hogan. Funny how getting caught banging his best friend's wife on tape and then finding out that his best friend was allegedly the one taping it has now diminished my admiration. Kudos to Hulk for having a big ol' dick, though. That thing is thicker than a turnbuckle.
25. Tucker Carlson
Stop having Daily Caller employees harass the president when he's trying to finish a sentence, and stop dressing like a Dead Poets Society villain, and maybe people will take you seriously.
Was anyone inspired by Mitt Romney? Did anyone vote enthusiastically for Mitt Romney? Of course not. Voting for Romney is like hooking up with the last single person at the bar at 4 a.m. The only successful thing he did this year was embody every black stand-up comedian's impression of a white person. Thank God the election's over. No more endless photos of Mitt staring winsomely off-camera with that attempted smile on his face. No more glaring campaign mishaps week after week after week. No more labored media efforts to make him look like anything other than Sheldon Adelson's pampered money Dumpster. Good-bye, Mitt. I hope you enjoy the rest of your life quietly ensconced at Lake Winnipesaukee, blissfully ignorant of the plight of anyone who doesn't have $300 million squirreled away in the Bahamas.
I didn't think it was possible for God to invent a worse driver than Lindsay Lohan, but here you go. Bynes spent all of 2012 avoiding acting gigs and trying desperately to run over your dog. And yet she isn't anywhere close to being as fascinating a train wreck as Lohan. I could watch Lohan implode for years and years, yet Bynes merits only a token shrug. Step up your game, missy. Sometime in the near future, there's a sensational vehicular-manslaughter trial with your name on it!
That cheerleading outfit isn't making you look any younger, Madge. It's time for you to stop putting out aggressively bland comeback albums and make room for Ke$ha and Katy and the other 800 female artists out there who change outfits every five minutes to distract people from their terrible singing.
Congratulations, Dwight! You're a Laker now. And all you had to do to become one was spend months making vague demands of the Orlando Magic and then backtracking on those demands like a spineless pussy until every American hated your guts and wanted to see you fail. "I'll stay in Orlando if you fire my coach! Or maybe I won't. Or maybe you could fire the coach and then build a statue of me made out of frozen butter. NO WAIT TRADE ME TO BROOKLYN NO WAIT DON'T TRADE ME THERE BECAUSE I THOUGHT BROOKLYN WAS MORE CONVENIENT TO MANHATTAN THAN IT ACTUALLY IS." In a just world, Dwight Howard will hurt his knee and doctors will take seventeen months to make a proper diagnosis.
For two decades I have waited for the next Cobain, a voice so original that it changes the face of rock 'n' roll. Finally, this year, an outsider came along who broke the stranglehold of processed pop and became a global sensation. It's just too bad that the artist in question is a Belgian emo guy who can't handle a simple breakup with a hint of grace. "You didn't have to stoooooop so low." You make Alanis Morissette sound like Slayer. You are rock's genocide. Also, the next time you film yourself naked for a video, wash your feet.
There's nothing funny about the tragic shooting death of Trayvon Martin. However, there is something morbidly comedic about a man deluding himself into thinking that his life is in danger because a black teenager walking by might assault him with a bag of Skittles. In George Zimmerman's world, he's a hero. Thankfully, very, very few other human beings live in George Zimmerman's world.
It was a game effort by the first lady to get Americans to eat healthier. She founded the "Let's Move!" campaign to get our children to contemplate forward locomotion. She even wrote a book about growing her own vegetables, which many people bought as a passive-aggressive way of telling someone they're fat. And yet we're still all hopeless corpulent shits. You tried, Mrs. Obama. You really did. Sorry we're such poor listeners. Now why not join the winning team and indulge in this delicious pint of Häagen-Dazs Caramel Cone ice cream? It's so rich and sweet and delectable. Come on. REWARD YOURSELF.
The individual-medley-of-douchiness world record was shattered this year by Lochte, the U.S. swimmer who managed to increase the Ashton Kutcher-ness of the London Games by 80 percent. Lochte would have been far more influential if he'd come in dead last. That way, American fathers could have turned to their sons
and said, "You see? This is what happens to you when you buy American-flag mouth grills and act like a dipshit." There will always be a place on this list for the man who invented the catchphrase Jeah!
The disgraced former NFL defensive coordinator—the man who pioneered the New Orleans Saints' bounty program—is the rare person stupid enough to deserve being scapegoated. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell needed a proper villain to make sure that fans thought the violence inherent in football was actually the work of a few rogue actors, and Williams played the role perfectly by putting his bounty system into PowerPoint and ordering his charges to "kill the head" of opposing players. What a moron. Also, no grown man would ever be inspired by the following actual Gregg Williams motivational slogans:
"Respect/Fear!!!"
"This isn't even shooing the chicken."
"FUCKING COMPLACENT."
"Bus your trays back to the cafeteria!"
10. Jerry Sandusky's Lawyer
Let us take a stroll through the razor-sharp legal mind of Joe Amendola: "I know! I'll have my client go on national TV prior to his trial to be grilled by Bob Costas so we can all witness him declare, ‘I enjoy young people,' after searching blankly for the proper response to the question ‘Are you sexually attracted to young boys?' as if Costas just asked him where he put his car keys. How can this possibly go wrong?"
This year the white-trash fusion chef opened his flagship Manhattan restaurant, featuring a pork shank that was cooked like one giant piece of General Tso's chicken and a menu that explicitly declared, "Go big or go home!" Crush that shank, you guys! I'd wager that 90 percent of his customers that first night were foodies planning to review the place ironically. The other 10 percent were tourists for whom Turkey Tequila Fettuccine represents the apex of molecular gastronomy. Oooh, a whole lamb bathed in Cheetos dust! FANCY.
There was only one bridge left for Olbermann to burn this year, and when it was time for him to alienate himself from Current TV, he did it in classic Olbermann fashion, bitching about broken promises and writing frantic missives to anyone who dared accuse him of being less than a perfect little angel while working at Current. But don't feel bad for Keith. He's now free to live the life he's always dreamed of: taping "Special Comment" segments from his own toilet and descending into a permanent state of manic paranoia. Why can't this happen to Hannity, too?
Every year brings new and incontrovertible evidence that Lance Armstrong is the polar opposite of the inspiring legend he was once made out to be. It's like peeling back the layers of an onion that's nestled inside an asshole. Just this year, Armstrong dropped his fight against the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency in the most dickish and self-delusional way possible ("There comes a point in every man's life when he has to say, ‘Enough is enough' "), then got fired by Nike and his own Livestrong charity. Also, Outside magazine found that Livestrong "donates almost nothing to scientific research." I put nothing past him anymore. By 2014, I expect him to be charged with supplying elephant growth hormone to Roger Clemens and orchestrating the civil war in Syria.
It's a measure of how irrelevant the Oscars have become that Eddie Murphy could back out of the gig and producers thought that bringing in an even more washed-up comic would somehow rejuvenate the ceremony. Did Billy compare movies to baseball within six seconds of strolling out onto the stage? Of course he did. Did he dress up in blackface and impersonate Sammy Davis Jr.? Of course he did. Did he plug his new horrible-looking movie—the one that wasn't slated to come out for ten more months? Of course he did. There should've been a live from the catskills graphic on the screen during his monologue. "This is my ninth time hosting the Oscars. So tonight just call me War Horse." Take his jokes—please.
The Boston Red Sox jettisoned manager Terry Francona—who only won two World Series for his famously cursed franchise—in favor of Valentine, a man whose greatest accomplishment in baseball remains wearing a fake-mustache disguise to sneak back into the dugout after getting ejected from a game. Bobby V immediately obliterated the Sox, somehow dividing the clubhouse even further less than a year after the Sox had bickered their way to one of sports history's all-time great collapses. He called his own third baseman a head case, allegedly got caught napping on the job, and capped off the year by calling his team "the weakest roster we've ever had in September in the history of baseball." Bobby, in your incapable hands, any roster is the weakest roster in baseball.
John Carter became the biggest bomb in history in part because Andrew Stanton, the movie's director, mistakenly believed that we were as into Edgar Rice Burroughs as he was. Next time you waste $250 million shooting and reshooting a terrible movie based on obscure source material, ask around first. Not everyone is frothing for a Captain Koala movie, my friend.
I don't understand what possesses the James Dolans and Donald Sterlings and Dan Snyders of the world to exhaust every way to get everyone to hate their guts. Is that rewarding? Is the Knicks owner even human? Does he have some kind of "stubborn dick" gene that the rest of us lack? Maybe Dolan will invite us to his secret daily lunch with Isiah Thomas and clue us in.
Watching an Aaron Sorkin show is like someone force-reading you the Huffington Post. Only with The Newsroom, it's as if all the HuffPo entries are taken from 2010 and Coldplay's "Fix You" is playing in the background. This was the year TV critics finally realized that having a lot of dialogue does not equal having good dialogue. ZOMG SO MANY WORDS HOW DOES SORKIN DO IT? The only time The Newsroom will ever actually affect the news is a year from now, when my Twitter feed lets me know it's been canceled.
Every year, Adam Sandler releases fresh cinematic evidence that he has no respect for you, your $12, or your cognitive abilities. And thanks to the disappointing gross for That's My Boy, Americans have finally caught on. At this point, the only reason Sandler makes movies is so that Rob Schneider can earn a living. It's like political cronyism, only the end result is a shitty movie instead of a bridge to nowhere. Political cronyism is funnier.
Good job, guys! You really showed those Wall Street bigwigs you meant business by failing to adopt proper leadership and embodying virtually every awful liberal-hippie stereotype—the hand signals, the completely non-germane protest signs, the white-boy dreadlocks... I mean, you really went all out to piss away the public's sympathy as quickly as possible. Say what you will about the Tea Party, at least it managed to get people elected.
It's a measure of how completely fucked the banking world is that the JPMorgan Chase CEO can have his investment office suffer a $6 billion trading loss—a loss that came from the same kind of risky credit-swap deals that ruined the economy four years ago—and still keep his job. In fact, Dimon later said he's "an outspoken defender of the truth." O RLY? He's the perfect evil CEO. I picture him bathing in a tub of gold Krugerrands and firing a pistol at his butler to make him tap-dance.
I'm sorry to put you on this list, sir. Your efforts to curb gun violence in this country have been admirable. And yet we can't stop shooting one another. In fact, every time there's a mass shooting, we actually go buy more guns so that we can get to the next mass shooting even faster. Maybe we should move on to easier causes. Like grenade control. If we try hard enough, I think we could easily reduce mass grenadings in this country by 100 percent.
"Um, excuse me, excuse me, lemme just... Governor, we're way over. We're going to come back to taxes in just a moment... Excuse me, no wait, WAIT. You keep talking! Why do you keep talking! I'M IN CONTROL HERE, DAMMIT! I AM A RESPECTED NEWSMAN AND YOU WILL... No, no, I'm not fini—STOP STUMPING! [begins to cry] People don't know how hard this is, okay? You guys just ignore me and go right into your own talking points! Oh, you don't agree? Okay, I'll give you seventy minutes for rebuttal."
When I was a kid, I wanted to be just like Hulk Hogan. Funny how getting caught banging his best friend's wife on tape and then finding out that his best friend was allegedly the one taping it has now diminished my admiration. Kudos to Hulk for having a big ol' dick, though. That thing is thicker than a turnbuckle.
Stop having Daily Caller employees harass the president when he's trying to finish a sentence, and stop dressing like a Dead Poets Society villain, and maybe people will take you seriously.
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