Fun:Really embarrassing moderates

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Moderates - depending on your perspective, they are either stoic thinkers seeking compromises between extremes, or they are unsure idiots who can't make their own damn mind up. Some centrists, given their antics, make other, saner moderates embarrassed to share the same middle area of the political spectrum. Others make us all, conservative, liberal, and patriopsychotic anarchomaterialist alike, embarrassed to be members of the same species. Here are a few particularly egregious examples:

Sexual antics[edit]

Just yucky[edit]

Criminal and disgusting[edit]

  • Cyril Smith, British politician; in 2012, following allegations of child abuse, the Crown Prosecution Service formally admitted Smith should have been charged with the sexual abuse of boys during his lifetime.
  • Daniel Cohn-BenditWikipedia, for publishing a book in which he claimed to have played sexual games with children and saying that it's a good thing. Maybe this was a result of having attended boarding school.

Criminal antics[edit]

  • A brace of Liberal Democrats: David LawsWikipedia was suspended from Parliament for fiddling expenses,[1] and former Energy Secretary Chris HuhneWikipedia was sent to jail for perverting the course of justice over a speeding ticket.[2]
  • Former Connecticut governor John G. RowlandWikipedia, who gave massive kickbacks to companies in exchange for doing work on his homes. Since he couldn't be satisfied getting nailed once, he then got himself another round of convictions for various malfeasance giving campaign advice while pretending to be working as a healthcare advisor.

Political antics beyond the call of duty[edit]

  • Joe Lieberman, for dreaming up the Department of Homeland Security and being biggest cheerleader for the Iraq War in the Senate, aside from Joe Biden
  • Joe Biden
  • Blanche LincolnWikipedia
  • Ross Perot, for dropping out of and back into the 1992 presidential race, buying half hour blocks of TV time to bore us with flowcharts and graphs, and something about his daughter's wedding.
  • Jesse "The Body Mind" VenturaWikipedia for endorsing the 9/11 Truth movement.
  • Arlen SpecterWikipedia, Switching parties twice to an extent; first to successfully challenge his Democrat former boss James Crumlish to the position of Philadelphia District Attorney, and second because he was shown to likely lose the Republican primary to Pat Toomey, and then ended up losing the Democratic primary to Joe Sestak. Not necessarily his fault, but it is somewhat ironic.
  • Andrew Cuomo again, as he was caught covering up COVID-19 deaths despite his supposedly good response to the pandemic.

Racial faux pas[edit]

  • Ross Perot, for addressing the NAACP as "you people" - to his everlasting shame
  • Eric Hoffer, the "longshoreman philosopher" of mid-20th century consensus centrism was opposed to the civil rights movement.
  • Robert Byrd, for being a member of the KKK in his youth (though he later regretted it and even endorsed Obama)[note 1]
  • The Clintons used slave labour.[3]
  • French politician Manuel VallsWikipedia for his continuous anti-Roma remarks. [4]

General media idiots[edit]

  • Michael Bloomberg, for grandstanding over guns, being unable to decide which political party he is in, being obsessed with the amount of salt in New York City food, palling around with Fred Newman and Lenora Fulani, and for pushing to overturn New York City's term limits law so he could run for a third term.
  • The Washington Post, New York Times, Time, Newsweek, CNN, CBS, ad nauseam, for confusing patronizing east coast elitism for objective unbiased reporting.
  • Various Very Serious People for using centrism to lazily make a name for themselves as "reasonable", despite their actual policy advice being terrible/useless.
  • CNN for being the posterchild of the balance fallacy if ever there was one - no, inviting a climate change denier and Bill Nye onto the same programme does not make it "balanced", and no, inviting a member of the KKK and one of the NAACP does not make it "an honest discussion on race"

Religious antics[edit]

  • Billy Graham, who expressed his tolerant, moderate, non-partisan brand of evangelicalism in a frank conversation with Richard Nixon in which the two discussed Jews having too much power in the United States.

Batshit craziness[edit]

  • Chuck Harder, whose idea of centrist populism was inviting as many cranks from both extremes of the political spectrum onto his show as possible.
  • Jimmy Carter, who once saw a flying saucer on the ground, and had a well publicized encounter with a sinister rabbit.

Genocide denialists[edit]

Thankfully genocide denialism doesn't appear to be common in the center, but if you know of any, add it.

Two tumbleweeds rolling across the screen, from left to right.

Miscellaneous[edit]

  • You, for being a wishy-washy twit unwilling to take a stand on much of anything and thinking we can all get along.
  • PUMA. Hillary Clinton supporters who bolted to support the McCain/Palin ticket once it became clear Obama would be the nominee. We're not sure how centrist they are, as many of them try to position themselves to the left of Obama, but there's really no other place to put them.

See also[edit]

External links[edit]

Footnotes[edit]

  1. How many former KKK members endorsed Obama?