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April 19, 2005
Leave history to the historians
I'm no genius, but this item really burned my canoli. The Discovery Channel and America Online conspired to create a list of the 100 greatest Americans, and look at some of the notables who appeared on the list:
Barbara Bush
George W. Bush
George H.W. Bush
Laura Bush
Bill Clinton
Hillary Clinton
Tom Cruise
John Edwards
Brett Favre
Mel Gibson
Rush Limbaugh
Madonna
Dr. Phil McGraw
Marilyn Monroe
Michael Moore
Richard Nixon
Now look, I don't want to criticize what some of these people have done, but do their accomplishments warrant them being listed as the one hundred greatest Americans, ever?
The very fact that the first George Bush and Richard Nixon are on this list leads me to wonder. It doesn't matter what you think about Bush's politics, but what exactly did he do? Nothing important that I can recall. I mean, he was Reagan's vice president, I guess that counts for something. Then there's Richard Nixon. Whaaaaa? Boing boing boing!
They also list Brett Favre. Favre sure did a lot for our country. I remember that time he and the Packers won the Super Bowl. That singlehandedly brought down communism AND fixed the national deficit. But getting dumped at the end of There's Something About Mary surely hurt him.
I'm really hoping this list is some kind of joke, because Tom Cruise, Mel Gibson, Rush Limbaugh and Michael Moore do not belong in a list of 100 greatest Americans. Are they great Americans? That probably depends on who you voted for last November, but there's no way in h-e-l-l that they are among the greatest. I am pretty certain that fifty years from now, Limbaugh and Moore will be mere historical footnotes, an artifact of our current peculiar times.
Posted by oz115 at April 19, 2005 09:43 AM