How we do love a nasty tongue!

Each year a groovy alternative newspaper from Buffalo called The Beast brings out its Annual List of The 50 Most Loathsome People in America.

Oh the dizzy glee! The wicked chortles! The semi-wood we get when reading through this cavalcade of celebrity smackdowns and Republican bashings. Think Hardball, but hosted by Mr. Blackwell. Think the best and funniest of the early 90s Spy magazine and you’ll catch the wavelength.

Let us begin with everybody’s favorite heterosexual, Tom Cruise. Last year the Most Loathsome List stirred up a shit storm when it went on about Tomcat in Love. Threatening letters came from lawyers. Apologies, disclaimers, tails tucked between legs — all were demanded. The Beast gave them none of it.

And to everyone’s surprise, Team Cruise backed down. Perhaps the thought of an army of winged-monkeys with legal briefs flying in from Hollywood to crush a satirical publication in Buffalo seemed too obnoxious even for the litigious Tom.

Still, you’d think The Beast would be skittish about deconstructing Top Gun again. And you would be dead wrong! Tom just made the new Loathsome List — and in >spectacular fashion. Please stand, Mr. Cruise, and face a jury of your peers:

Charges: Criminal narcissism … From his laughable claim of psychological expertise [see video below] to his worst acting performance ever — as a man in love — Cruise simply cracked up on camera in 2005, and a public hitherto willing to overlook his obsessively inauthentic personality and comical religious affiliation had finally had enough.

Cruise is a perfect example of a person who is simultaneously in love with and completely unfamiliar with himself, living in perpetual fear of self-actualization, and asserting a legal right to live free of criticism.

Sentence: A lifetime of forced, joyless sex with famously beautiful women, only to have his colossal gay porn library posthumously bequeathed to the Smithsonian by bitter, unloved offspring.

And there’s so much more. Savor with us these choice zingers from this year’s list of Walking Horrors:

Barbara Bush — “This unfeeling, unthinking patrician hag spawned America’s most notorious welfare child, whose every glaring deficiency has been excused or underwritten by undeserved wealth.”

Michael (”Heck of a job, Brownie”) Brown — “Second fiddle to Bush’s Nero … makes lichens seem dynamic.”

Hillary Clinton — “Claims to pray all the time, which even her supporters know is bullshit …Will probably cause yet another tragic Republican presidency.”

Paris Hilton — “… a lack of talent so profound that others become duller as they approach her.”

Oprah Winfrey — “Exhibit A: Dr. Phil.”

Karl Rove — “A greasy pig … missing the part of his soul that prevents the rest of us from kicking elderly women in the face.”

Judith Miller — “Essentially started a war with bad reporting, and remained … self-satisfied throughout the ensuing imbroglio, her mantis-like face fixed in a smile behind oddly insectival sunglasses.”

Tom Delay — “Explaining his failure to enlist during Vietnam: ‘So many minority youths had volunteered … that there was literally no room for patriotic folks like myself.’”

George W. Bush — “Often responds to questions by attempting to define the word he finds the most challenging in them.”

Dick Cheney — “Bears the crooked ugliness of a man whose entire life has been devoted to a senseless pursuit of power … So cartoonishly evil he defies parody.”

Pat Robinson — “…a demonic charlatan with the credibility of Miss Cleo.”

Read the complete article at The Beast
And for your viewing pleasure: