Who is the worst columnist in America?
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
Cinnamon Stillwell, SF Chron.
got a sample?
good call. She’s so fucking awful I simply stopped reading her column. It’s not easy to be the worst writer at the Chronic Ill, but she does it.
booman, she’s one of those 9-11-changed-everything former liberals, now demanding strong government to protect her from evil terrorist muslims.
To answer this, I had to think back to the last time I read a newspaper opinion page and that’s a stretch of my aging memory. But, as I dimly recall, I was appalled by Charles Krauthammer. It wasn’t just the content either. I was shocked that he was such a lousy writer. His ideas were badly presented, scrambling over themselves and around strangely convoluted metaphors. The gist of his arguments lacked logical cohesion even if I suspended my lack of belief in his positions. The whole essay was a mess that would have gotten a big fat F from any high school English composition teacher in America.
I’ll second Krauthammer. A wingnut without the gift of gab. William Buckley was wrong, but he said it in a spell-binding manner. Krauthammer would get an “F” from Buckley. Come to think of it, he gets and “F” from me. And a “U” too.
Cal Thomas is in the running. His thinking stopped evolving in 1952.
Off the top of my head, Caroline Glick at the Jerusalem Post, but since you specified “America” then I have to go with Jennifer Rubin over at Commentary. Think “Malkinvania/Pammycakes meets MoDo The Red.”
If AIPAC has a Minister Of Propaganda, it’s her. And the great thing is she’s absolutely terrible at spin, and takes indefensible positions even the Village Idiots won’t touch.
hands down, the absolute worst is jay ambrose.
distributed by the scripps howard news service.
take a look at the titles / themes of the crap that he writes:
Why jay ambrose Is A Hack, Wanker and Reich Wing Apologist
casting a vote for Victor Davis Hanson, the professor who thinks nobody but him has ever read history.
Cal Thomas is nominated already, he’s really awful too.
Pat Buchanan should be mentioned if we mean “wrongest” columnist, but he’s a much better writer than Hanson or Thomas.
No one has mentioned him: is it because Bill Kristol is too obvious?
DavidNYC makes a good case for Michael Barone.
Thomas Sowell drives me nuts.
There are too many too count; it’s like a 100-way tie for worst.
Some lovely recommendations so far. I would just note that folks may be assuming — perhaps on the basis of the focus of this site, which would be perfectly reasonable — that “columnist” means “political columnist.”
I mention this just because I think it pretty likely that the worst columnist in America is a sportswriter, though I’m not prepared to give names. It’s just that the level of a) knowledge of relevant facts, b) cogency of reasoning, and c) facility with language — to name just three criteria — always seems to drop precipitously when I turn to the sports pages (or sports sites) from, say, political or editorial pages/sites, awful though the latter tend to be. Though there are admirable writers out there, the field seems to be such a cesspool that I can’t help thinking the worst is in there somewhere.
Then again, it could just be that I spent too much time reading the “Fire Joe Morgan” site when it was up and running.
Ah. We must be thinking of Gregg Easterbrook. Idiotic about football, idiotic about climate change, idiotic about science, idiotic about…well you get the picture. Name a topic, old Gregg has written something truly appalling about it.
On the left I would say Richard Cohen of WaPo – he reminds me of a diarrhetic Shi Tsu. On the right there is no better example of an excrement-flinging simian than Madame Adam’s Apple herself, Ann Coulter.
he reminds me of a diarrhetic Shi Tsu
Ha! You win today’s James Agee “Obscure in meaning, but nevertheless imaginative, hilarious, and in some inexplicable way convincing dismissive analogy” award.
(Named for James Agee’s comment in a review of the film “Good News”: “Joan McCracken makes me think of a libidinous peanut; Mel Torme reminds me of something in a jar, but is, unfortunately, less quiet.”)
Previous winners include film critic Manny Farber, who wrote of the film The Graduate that “In [this] film, there is a studied effort to make everyone exotic and nutty, like walking fish tanks.”
I don’t know who the worst is, but Anne Applebaum is in the running.
I can’t believe no one has mentioned that self-important, over-inflated bag of hot gaseous substance, Thomas Friedman!
The Mustache of Understanding.
Crrrazy Peggy Noonan.
Jonah Goldberg
Oh yes! Excellent candidate!
Ding! Ding! Ding!
The classic illustration of nepotism in the press.
The son of a momma who brought down a President.
That’s not nepotism, Tarheel.
It’s tit-for-tat, spook style.
Bet on it.
She did a job for some element of the Intelligence community and part of the payback was a position in a spook-influenced,…no, make that spook run…publication for her son.
That’s how it works…
And someday, sonny boy will do other jobs for them.
It’s a family thing, the Intelligence community. Makes me feel all warm and squishy inside.
AG
Oh, and some day Jonah will be Michael Corleone. I get it.
Oh, sorry, I think that “family” in this case means former CIA Director Bush’s family.
I don’t think there is a “the worst.”
The field is too big and so many of them are bad in so many different ways. It’s like comparing gymnasts with shot-putters and asking, “Who’s the worst athlete?”
The ones I cannot bear to read are Cal Thomas, Charles Krauthammer, and Rick Santorum, because of their bad writing, fact-twisting, pomposity, and general inanity.
As much as I like to pretend to have an open mind, when I see their bylines, I drive on by the lines.
Michael Smerconish would be in the running, but he shows occasional seizures of common sense and, unlike the three above, seems to have a everyman genuineness and lack of pretense that the others do not, sort of like Fred Flintstone with a typewriter.
In terms of sheer damage done and two-faced, probably intelligence-directed actions?
It’s a tie.
Robert Novak on the right and the Robert Novak of the so-called left, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga (More familiarly known as “Kos”.)
What’s that you say?
Novak is out of action?
That’s OK. His dirty work will live after him. For decades, probably.
And Kos isn’t a columnist?
Oh.
How come?
His blog is set up in columns, right?
He bloviates about politics, doesn’t he?
He has a loyal readership that is fairly large, doesn’t he? (I have no idea of dKos’s numbers, but isn’t the internet putting newspapers out of business?)
And his positions on any number of things, from free speech on his blog right through…ah hell, I rarely go there anymore so I do not know exactly what foolishness is currently appearing under his byline…right through his latest positions (because when starting from a bad position, ALL further thoughts are based on lousy premises)
are weak, entirely self-serving and thus in the long run extremely bad for the clomp clomp clomping leftiness shmoon who actually take him for someone who knows what is best for them.
In my opinion he is a Judas goat.
Other than that, I have the greatest respect for him.
So it goes.
Later…
AG
calvin doesn’t know them all, but certainly those mentioned above, but let’s not forget Michelle Malkin, Kathleen Parker, George Will, Ann Coulter and frankly any writer who turns right. I haven’t read one of them that can pass English 101 at a selective institution of higher education.