With so many annoying people out there, it’s difficult to compile one’s own list.  Others have engaged in this exercise, each with his own conception of who is annoying and and why. This is The Burning One’s contribution, but feel free to add your own in the comments section.

Number one on anyone’s list should be Joe Lieberman.  Every time I see him on television, pontificating in his slimy sanctimonious manner, I cringe.  Where did this malicious troll come from?  How he has succeeded in politics is beyond comprehension.  His hypocritical piety is enough to make one ill.  Somehow, he got through both Yale and Yale Law School.  They invited him to join Skull & Bones.  Am I missing something here?  We have to endure him for two more years before his term expires and he retires from the Senate, but I can see him getting appointed to some major position like Secretary of Defense.  There is just no getting rid of him, one of the great mysteries of American history.

My number-two spot goes to David Brooks, the unctuous New York Times columnist who manages to be wrong about everything. This total opportunist started out on the left at the University of Chicago until William Buckley offered him a job at National Review. Buckley had read a satire of himself written by Brooks.  In no time flat, Brooks was waxing conservative in his smarmy prose as a pundit.  His columns for the Times elicit enraged letters to the editor pointing out his contradictions and inaccuracies, but he remains at his pulpit with no end in sight.

Ann Coulter has got to be high on anybody’s list.  This anorexic termagant has become a total parody of herself as she spouts her humorless clichés of right-wing babble. She was once funny, but that was long ago.  Her act has grown stale yet she plods on, her long blonde hair and manner of dress incongruous now, as though she is condemned to be an ever-aging undergraduate. The drivel that comes out of her mouth that passes for wit is insufferable, yet she, too, endures.  Is there some kind of conspiracy to inflict these people on us?

Barney Frank makes it onto my list.  He had his moment in the sun during the financial crisis and managed to offend just abouteverybody.  He got his name on the financial regulation bill aimed at stopping the very policies he urged, yet he remains a hero of the liberals.  Barney’s insufferability lies is his sense of entitlement to keep his seat in Congress forever, confident that his district will never turn him out. What are they thinking?

Charlie Rangel is so insufferable that even the Democratic Party turned against him when the Democrats in the House all voted to censure him for his corrupt activities.  He is a monument to mediocrity who holds up his heroism in the Korean War as a defense for all of his arrogant behavior.   Challenged in a recent primary, he trounced his opposition and handily won reelection.  We will be rid of him only when they carry him out of Congress in a box.

Glenn Beck stands out for his annoyingness.  With his puffy lips and watery eyes, he lectures on topics about which he knowsnothing, while scribbling on a blackboard as though he were a learned professor.   You can read right through him as he panders to the dumb goyim who watch his show, hanging on his every word.   This total nobody commands an audience in the millions and has gotten rich by virtue of the stupidity of vast swaths of Americans, yet he remains even more annoying than his followers.

Rush Limbaugh, the obnoxious fathead, who bellows for hours on the airwaves while waving his arms, is annoying to such a degree that he is in a class by himself.  Every day in hysterical rhetoric he warns of the coming Communist takeover by the liberals.  Given a chance to be a television football commentator, he claimed that the only reason the Philadelphia Eagles made Donovan McNabb their quarterback was because he was black.   I am bewildered constantly by his power and its source. He manages to have a voice as fat as his body; he paid Elton John a million dollars to perform at his latest wedding; he lives in a gigantic, ugly mansion, eats and drinks to excess and smokes expensive cigars even as he denounces the poor for dragging the country down.

The last name I will add for now is Sarah Palin, without explaining why.  If you can’t figure out why she deserves to be on this list, you believe in the proverbial tooth fairy.