Fun:Really embarrassing moderates

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

Just yucky

• Der Gropenator, Arnold Schwarzenegger
• Bill "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" Clinton
• Andrew Cuomo

Criminal and disgusting

• 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-Bendit, 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

• A brace of Liberal Democrats: David Laws was suspended from Parliament for fiddling expenses, and former Energy Secretary Chris Huhne was sent to jail for perverting the course of justice over a speeding ticket.
• Former Connecticut governor John G. Rowland, 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

• 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 Lincoln
• 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" Ventura for endorsing the 9/11 Truth movement.
• Arlen Specter for awitching 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

• 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)
• The Clintons used slave labour.
• French politician Manuel Valls for his continuous anti-Roma remarks.

General media idiots

• 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.
  • In particular, anyone who blames totalitarianism on the Enlightenment (and, implicitly, on science) despite the well-attested fact that totalitarians rejected Enlightenment beliefs and preferred other philosophies.
• CNN for being the poster-child 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

• 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

• 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

The worst examples of Centrists tend to downplay any genocides or connections that their (usually liberal, western) nations had to more recent atrocities while condemning and grandstanding about human rights abuses only when it advances the national interest of their country or as part of a story about how their country has now improved and made up for past crimes.

Examples include the way American centrists will acknowledge past genocides of natives, war of aggressions against Mexico, and racial slavery, but oppose policies in the present day to right past wrongs that would upset current distributions of wealth or social structures.

German guilt over the Holocaust is weaponized by all but the most fringe parties to deny the genocides of African German subjects, or other victims of the Holocaust such as the Roma or LGBTQ+.

Centrists in the American context are the major bulk of supporters of Israeli projects in the West Bank and Gaza to seize and colonize Palestinian land and policies that base access fundamental human rights such as movement within a country, voting, and right to due process upon ethnicity and religion.

Miscellaneous

• 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

• Fun:Really embarrassing liberals
• Fun:Really embarrassing conservatives
• Fun:Right wing bastards
• Fun:Left wing bastards
• Fun:Really embarrassing Australians and New Zealanders
• Fun:Really embarrassing Brits