1. Larry King
Larry King, aside from looking like a caricature of a Halloween mask that was left out in the sun for four years, is just a blathering idiot. His show features the most retarded panel line-ups--Meghan McCain, Joy Behar, Ronald Reagan Jr., and Kiki McLean... My God, what a treasure trove of insightful opinion!--and infinitely worse guests. No, that's not quite right. Actually, Larry King scores the best guests. He just asks the worst fucking questions I've ever heard. He could have Ahmadinejad on and the first question would be "So Mahmoud, I'm going to play a clip of Katy Perry's new music video and then we're going to talk about it. Okay?"2. Wolf Blitzer
Wolf Blitzer makes Jewish nursing home residents throw remotes at the television. His voice, which can be characterized as "stumbling monotony," in tandem with his eyes, which can be characterized as "really fucking annoying," combine to form, when spread out over the three fucking hours CNN gives him everyday, perhaps the most annoying pundit and the most bland show on TV today. The worst part of his show, aside from him, his voice, and his questions, is undoubtedly the degree to which he makes the viewer needlessly wait. At the opening of his show, "The Situation Room" (4:00 P.M.) , he will say in his best overly-dramatic voice, "New news about Froot Loops--Is General Mills killing your children?" And then you wait, and wait, and wait, and wait, until finally, at 6:48, he throws the story over to some braindead reporter, and it turns out there was a cereal recall in a small town in Seattle because of possible lead poisoning. Which of course means that Wolf Blitzer created news that did not exist. Which is nothing new for him, because he's an idiot devoid of meaningful insight or opinion on anything that actually matters.3. Ali Velshi
Ali Velshi, CNN's go-to business and Wall Street dude, is a douchebag. He reminds me of the uppity Asian business school kids in college who aced all of their problem sets and midterms without ever actually internalizing the real-world usefulness (or lack thereof) of what they were learning. Like any other business pundit, he specializes in unfettered retardation. If the DJIA soars, he will be called in to opine on why. Because there is always a reason why. And because he knows it, obviously. "Wall Street had a great day today because The New York Times published this cool photo of Tim Geithner." Velshi's pipeline into the inner workings of The Street is both incomparable and invaluable. Clearly this much is true.4. Erica Hill
Okay, I don't hate her. She's ridiculously hot and a bright beacon of charm amidst a sea of virtually unending dullness.5. Jack Cafferty
Jack Cafferty is probably my least favorite TV personality. He does not contribute nothing. He makes everyone who views his blatherings a significantly dumber human being as a result. "The Cafferty File," his daily segment on Wolf Blitzer's show, is where he gives a topic du jour to his audience (I don't want to even imagine who these mouthbreathers are) and asks them to send in their thoughts. To his credit, he has stood up to right-wing idiocy constantly over the years. But not to his credit, he has made the act of standing up to right-wing idiocy look like a fool's game. (If you're in favor of gay marriage, you certainly don't want Steve-O leading the cause.) He's worse than Alan Colmes; he's a one-man sacrificial lamb. There's no Sean Hannity required. Think about how it looks: You have 50 CNN pundits all spouting the same Beltway tripe, day in and day out, and then you have Jack Cafferty, the senile grandpa, leading the way in favor of torture prosecutions.Plus, he has the most annoying voice of anyone on CNN. And beating out Wolf isn't easy.
6. Ed Henry
Ed Henry is the guy everyone knew in college, fitting the archetype of the douche-frat-hand-cum-successful-CEO quite well. Except he's not a CEO, he's a Senior White House Correspondent. And so instead of having to backslap with him at regular ten-year intervals, you get to see him, in all his self-aggrandizing glory, every afternoon on C-SPAN during the White House briefing. He's not blatantly partisan--people who appear regularly on CNN rarely are. He's just a total shill for contrarianism, whether it even resembles intelligent debate or not. (It often looks as if he's just shilling for Republicans, and that may be true, but I think it's more that he has nothing intelligent to say, ever, and so he resorts to being John Boehner's personal stenographer because that task is insanely easy, and quite fun.) His questions are invariably mindnumbingly stupid, and any occasion on which he "gets it right" can simply be chalked up to to the Broken Clock Theorem. Moreover, he's one smug fuck. He loves getting aggressive in spots where logic would dictate that there is no issue. CNN revolves around the short clip, so his dream is to catch Robert Gibbs in a slip-up, forcing a walk-back or creating a minor hysteria. He fantasizes himself as Woodward reincarnate, only instead of uncovering major presidential corruption, he'll settle for getting a scoop on whether Nancy Pelosi is going to be eating pizza at the White House on Friday. Fuck him and all ten horses he rode in on.7. Sanjay Gupta
CNN's Chief Medical Correspondent and failed Surgeon General nominee, Sanjay Gupta, isn't that bad. I'm just not sure what he's ever contributed to society. Obviously he demands a high price from CNN for his myriad "services" (which include live-blogging a reenactment of Natasha Richardon's accident and death). And as I recall he did some miracle-working with emergency patients in Iraq some years back. But that doesn't really have much to do him being a pundit. America as a whole seems to have gotten, um, much unhealthier since he's had his job. I won't lay blame on him, but I can't see where credit is due here. He seems to specialize in fear-mongering the common cold, which is hilarious, but not particularly useful.8. Roland Martin
Roland Martin, CNN's "black pundit" and temporary host for Campbell Brown's "No Bias No Bull," is also alright in my book. He's not particularly intelligent or suave or entertaining, but I developed a modicum of affection for him ever since he was crying on TV when Obama won. It is funny how pigeonholded he is on CNN, though; Anderson Cooper will go around the table, asking about how such-and-such policy will affect Capitol Hill to one person, Wall Street to another, oil companies to a third, internal White House politics to a fourth, and then he'll finally get to Martin: "What are they saying about this in Harlem, Roland?"9. John King
John King should be sitting in the backroom at Madame Tussauds, leafing through transcripts of his old interviews. His only source of value came in the form of election handicapping, but NBC's Chuck Todd destroyed him in 2008. So now he's just a regular Washington journalist, laying out the facts as... they appear in Human Events headlines.10. Candy Crowley
The only more apt name would be Big Mac McShouty. Candy Crowley is the embodiment of evil. Her analyses are as well-developed as her abdominal muscles. She stands (er, hulks) on television, every night, spewing GOP talking points and utterly refusing to find out whether any of them are actually true. She delights in political kabuki theater more than she takes pleasure in Twinkies. Her face looks eerily similar to the "after" pictures of that facial transplant pioneer, and from the neck down it just gets worse. She has never seen a scoop she didn't immediately want to sink her teeth into--be it Jeremiah Wright videos or Chunky Monkey. Candy Crowley is simply the personification of everything wrong in society. That she still holds a job is a testament to something which I really, really don't want to imagine.
