20 Worst Americans

John Hawkins at Right-Wing News emailed me and several other left-of-center bloggers and asked for a list of who we think are the 20 worst figures in American history.
Last week he posted a list compiled by conservative bloggers. Franklin Roosevelt, Jimmy Carter, and the Clintons were on that list. And since Franklin Roosevelt is (ahem) my favorite president, you can imagine I’m not too impressed.
Rather than put Ronald Reagan on my list just to get back at them, I made a list I take seriously. I’m sure I’m forgetting a critical scoundrel, so I only submitted 19 names. I left the 20th slot open for the one I’m forgetting.
So who did I forget? Use the comments section and help me out.
Here are the 19, in no particular order.
1. Jefferson Davis, because he was the president of the Confederacy
2. Joseph McCarthy, because he was a McCarthyist
3. John Walker Lindh, because he joined the Taliban
4. Timothy McVeigh, because he was our worst home-grown terrorist
5. Charles Coughlin, because he was the grandfather of hate radio and a supporter of Adolf Hitler
6. George Rockwell, because he founded the American Nazi Party
7. Pat Robertson, because he infected the Republican Party with theocracy
8. Henry Kissinger, because, among other things, he greenlighted the Indonesian invasion of and subsequent genocide in East Timor
9. Lee Harvey Oswald, because he assassinated John F. Kennedy
10. John Wilkes Booth, because he assassinated Abraham Lincoln
11. James Earl Ray, because he assassinated Martin Luther King, Jr.
12. Sirhan Sirhan, because he assassinated Robert Kennedy
13. Richard Nixon, because, as Hunter S. Thompson put it, he broke the heart of the American Dream
14. Nathan Forrest, because he founded the Ku Klux Klan
15. William Walker, because he tried to set up his own private slave state in Nicaragua
16. J Edgar Hoover, because he was a championship asshole
17. Benedict Arnold, because he was a traitor
18. Ramsey Clark, because, among other things, he was the co-chairman of the International Committee for the Defense of Slobodan Milosevic
19. Noam Chomsky, because he defended the Viet Cong, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot, and because he calls America the world’s greatest terrorist state after September 11