Barbra Streisand Political IQ Award for
Celebrity Vapidity
Winner
“I’d
like to tip off law enforcement to an even larger child-abusing
religious cult. Its leader also has a compound, and this guy not only
operates outside the bounds of the law, but he used to be a Nazi and he
wears funny hats. That’s right, the Pope is coming to America....If you
have a few hundred followers, and you let some of them molest children,
they call you a cult leader. If you have a billion, they call you
‘Pope.’ It’s like, if you can’t pay your mortgage, you’re a deadbeat.
But if you can’t pay a million mortgages, you’re Bear Stearns and we
bail you out. And that is who the Catholic Church is: the Bear Stearns
of organized pedophilia....The Church’s attitude: ‘We’re here, we’re
queer, get used to it,’ which is fine. Far be it for me to criticize
religion.”
— Bill Maher on HBO’s Real Time, April 11. [59]
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Runners-up:
“Is
Cheney a goon? I don’t mean that to be like a smart ass, but he seems
like he might be a goon....My feeling about Cheney — and also Bush, but
especially Cheney — is that he just couldn’t care less about Americans.
And the same is true of George Bush. And all they really want to do is
somehow kiss up to the oil people....Is there any humanity in either of
these guys?”
— CBS Late Show host David Letterman interviewing former White
House press secretary Scott McClellan, June 11. [43]
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“If
you can read, you can walk into a job later on. If you don’t, then
you’ve got the Army, Iraq, I don’t know, something like that. It’s not
as bright.”
— Novelist Stephen King at an April 4 Library of Congress event for
students, later shown on C-SPAN2. [29]
“We’ve
been redefined for seven years now as a war-mongering, far-right,
intolerant nation who’s raping our own atmosphere and demonizing the
poor and letting the banks rob us blind. I think if — any incremental
move away from that would be a godsend. And I think Obama will, at the
very least, put the brakes on this madness and in some ways heal it....I
think the rest of the world, if they see that America elects a man of
color, I think they’ll breathe a big sigh of relief and not think that
we’re this war-mongering, rich white guy country.”
— Actor/comedian Richard Belzer on FNC’s Geraldo At Large, March
2. [19]
Winner
