Beneath Contempt

Some are born monsters, some achieve monstrosity, some have monstrousness thrust upon them, and others, while certainly not unmonstrous, nonetheless sort of…

No! Please! Enough already! What we’re trying to say is that it would be foolish to attempt a complete listing of Ivy League monsters; and writing a full-fledged entry for every monster on that complete list is, at least for this writing team, completely out of the question. Even if we wanted to do it, such an effort would have to consist of many volumes even bigger than this one! Either that, or printed in a typeface so small you’d need a powerful electron microscope to read it, which means it would be legible only to scientists in labs containing powerful electron microscopes, and, to be perfectly blunt, those people are not our audience. Our audience is you, dear, dear reader.

Where were we? Oh, right. Not to mention how long it would take and, consequently, how little we would make per hour, or decade, on the “every monster of the Ivy League, ever” project, despite its no doubt numerous personal satisfactions and social usefulness. Also, such a project, personal satisfactions aside, would kill us.

Anyway, as a compromise between what we’ve done thus far and the painful attempt to be completists, we present the following modest list of individuals we considered including but then decided: oh, fuck ’em.

Enjoy!

John Ashcroft

BA, Yale University

Attorney general under Bush Jr.; creepy religious moralizer and culture warrior, distressingly awful singer-songwriter.

Steve Bannon

MBA, Harvard University

Former Chairman of to-the-right-of-Fox Breitbart News. Now “senior counselor” to President Donald Trump. Enabler of anti-Semites and racists; right-wing hate merchant/ghoul.

John Bolton

BA, JD, Yale University

Saddam/walrus-mustache-wearing neocon; Bush Jr. ambassador to the UN who hates the UN; chicken hawk who supported the Vietnam War but sat it out: “I confess I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy.”

Pat Buchanan

MA, Columbia University

“Paleoconservative”; former boss Dick Nixon said he was not a racist, anti-Semite, or bigot, confirming he is all of the above.

George H. W. Bush

BA, Yale University

Promoted dull-normal Dan Quayle above his station; sired the Quayle-like diabolical blunderer George W.

Dick Cheney

Failed out of Yale University twice

Vietnam chicken hawk (“I had other priorities in the '60s than military service”); coauthor of the Iraq shit-show; NRA poster boy for proving it’s okay to shoot a friend in the face.

Michael Chertoff

BA, JD, Harvard University

Bungling Katrina-era Homeland Security secretary under Bush Jr.; investigator on bullshit Senate Whitewater Committee.

Monica Crowley

PhD, Columbia University (if they let her keep it)

Trump choice for senior director of strategic communications (read: liar-in-chief) of the National Security Council. Plagiarizer of multiple authors and journalists in her 2012 book, What the (Bleep) Just Happened?; plagiarizer of multiple actual historians in her 2000 PhD thesis (ironic opening of title: “Clearer Than Truth…”).

Thomas Davis

MBA, Harvard University

Former investment banker and pillar of the business establishment; provider of insider-trading tips to pay back his gambling debts; stealer of money from a charity; perjurer; in May 2016 pleaded guilty to 12 insider-trading felonies.

Wickliffe Draper

BA, Harvard University

Nazi sympathizer; Pioneer Fund founder; funder of racist, anti-Semitic eugenics “research.”

Dinesh D’Souza

BA, Dartmouth College

Producer of mendacious right-wing propaganda films; convicted felon for illegal political contributions; hypocritical moralizer caught in a hotel room with girlfriend while a) still married, and b) president of a rinky-dink Christian college; ex-BF of Ann Coulter.

John Eleuthère du Pont

University of Pennsylvania dropout

Du Pont heir depicted by Steve Carrell in Foxcatcher; threw his wife into a fireplace, choked her, menaced her with a knife, tried to push her out of a moving car, threatened to shoot her; racist; shot and murdered Olympic wrestler Mark Schultz.

Louis Fieser

PhD, Harvard University; Harvard University professor

Invented the medieval-style weapon napalm in his secret lab at Harvard; “I have no right to judge the morality of napalm just because I invented it.”

Steve Forbes

BA, Princeton University

Goofy rich guy who persistently ran for president despite all indications that no one liked him or his “flat tax” economic scheme that rewards the rich, punishes the poor.

Alberto Gonzales

JD, Harvard University

Bush Jr. White House lapdog, counsel, and attorney general happy to sign off on torture and anything else Bush and Cheney requested.

James Kent

Columbia University’s very first law professor

Slave owner; opponent of suffrage for free black people; gloried in the conquest of Native Americans: “the red men of the forest have… been supplanted by a much nobler race of beings of European blood.”

Jared Kushner

BA, Harvard University

Real estate heir, owner/ruiner of the New York Observer, husband of Ivanka Trump, consigliere to her father. A $2.5 million donation from his own daddy lubricated his acceptance to Harvard.

Bill Maher

BA, Cornell University

Dogmatic, militantly uninformed antiscience babbler who promulgates on his TV show such shibboleths of the ignorant left as: vaccines cause autism, herbs and homeopathy are more effective than medicines, and GMOs are deadly.

Reverend James Manning

BA, Princeton University; Brown University’s first president and first professor

The Philadelphia Association of Baptist Churches sent him to Rhode Island to start a Baptist college. Arrived there in 1763 with his wife and their slave. Started a college.

Megan McArdle

BA, University of Pennsylvania

“Libertarian” propagandist for corporatist scumbags; devoted fan of Ayn Rand (blogged as “Jane Galt”); maker-up of “facts”; defender of Big Pharma because “innovation”; defender of plutocracy and privilege; user of Cuisinart to aerate flour.

Michael Medved

BA, Yale University

Right-wing radio-talker and literary overachiever; prissy moralist; smarmy defender of the free market, the “faith-based” life, and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ.

Mike Milken

MBA, University of Pennsylvania (Wharton)

“Junk-bond king”; indicted on 98 counts of racketeering and fraud; paid $1.1 billion in fines and served 22 months in prison before acquiring philanthropic halo.

Grover Norquist

BA, MBA, Harvard University

Founder of Americans for Tax Reform; inventor of moronic “Taxpayer Protection Pledge” designed to make the lives of one percenters more pleasant; NRA board member.

Bill O’Reilly

MPA, Harvard University

Fox News propagandist, blowhard, bully; serial self-mythologizer; sexual harasser.

Henry Paulson

MA, Dartmouth College; MBA, Harvard University

As Bush Jr. secretary of the Treasury, he declared—in April 2007—that the economy was robust and healthy and the housing market “at or near bottom”—just before it crashed; named by Time as one of the top 25 people responsible for the financial crisis.

Mitt Romney

JD, MBA, Harvard University

Strapper of pet dog to roof of car; layer-off of many workers after his leveraged buyouts stripped companies of assets and drove them out of business while his company profited handsomely; owner of offshore accounts; insulter of 47 percent of US population; casual proposer of “ten thousand bucks!” bet on national presidential “debate.”

Donald Rumsfeld

BA, Princeton University

Bush Jr. secretary of defense; coplanner of Iraq rat-fuck; torture maven.

Stephen Schwarzman

BA, Yale University; Yale University adjunct professor; MBA, Harvard University

Tycoon-financier-businessman; chairman and CEO of the Blackstone Group; said of deal making, “I want war… I always think about what will kill off the other bidder”; said of Obama’s plan to raise carried-interest taxes that it was comparable to Hitler’s invasion of Poland.

Ben Stein

BA, Columbia University; JD, Yale University

Nixon speechwriter; maniacal Nixon defender; once-ubiquitous show-biz droner (Ferris Bueller, game shows, et al.); product shill; dispenser of far-right commentary; proponent of “intelligent design” and other crackpot fabrications; abortion opponent; defender of sexual assaulter Dominique Strauss-Kahn, because economists don’t commit violent crimes.

Donald Trump, Jr.

BS, University of Pennsylvania (Wharton)

Sport-killer of endangered African species; ardent supporter of crazed fascist president; think American Psycho; alternatively, think Uday or Qusay Hussein.

Ivanka Trump

BS, University of Pennsylvania (Wharton)

Socialite! Businesswoman! Model! Reality TV star! Author! Defendant in shoe-design-theft-lawsuit! Fervent supporter of her bigoted, deceitful, war-crazed, unhinged father!

Sandy Weill

BA, Cornell University

Financial conglomerator who put together Citigroup (which the government buttressed with more than $45 billion to keep it from going belly-up during the Tribulations); vehement lobbyer against Glass-Steagall (which limited the risk banks could take); another Time choice as one of the top 25 people responsible for the financial crisis.

Richard Whitney

BA, Harvard University

Yes, one of those Whitneys; president of the New York Stock Exchange in the early 1930s; a terrible investor and a bad gambler, he embezzled to cover his vast losses rather than trim his opulent lifestyle; served 40 months in Sing Sing.

Paul Wolfowitz

BA, Cornell University

Deputy secretary of defense under Bush Jr.; the first Bushie neocon to suggest attacking Iraq after 9/11, and the hardest-core Iraq hawk of them all; primary author of the “Bush Doctrine” (essentially “We’re the USA and we’ll do whatever the fuck we want!”); nominated president of the World Bank by Bush, then forced to resign because he had an affair with a coworker (that began while he was married to someone else), plus other related scandals.

Jeff Zucker

BA, Harvard University; “Executive in Residence” at Columbia University

Teflon-coated media failer-up and living embodiment of the Peter Principle; as president of NBC he signed Donald Trump for The Apprentice; almost destroyed NBC; now president of CNN Worldwide; current project: making CNN a permanent joke punch line.