Lists of top good and bad appear near or at the end of each year, and usually bear witness to how crappy things are, or how how even-more crappy things are.

This week, The Buffalo Beast presented a list of the 50 most-loathsome people in America for 2008 — and it doesn’t leave out President Obama (he’s #50), noting “There’s nothing more loathsome than a likable politician.”

And the list also includes “You” dear reader, average American, listed at #43: “You are shallow, inconsiderate, afraid, brand-conscious, sedentary, and totally self-obsessed. You are American.”

(Illustration found here).

And the Numero Uno of loathsome people from last year?
Yes! Sarah Palin:

• Palin’s unending emissions of baffling, evasive incoherence should have disqualified her for any position that involved a desk, let alone placing her one erratic heartbeat from the presidency.

Palin should be sentenced to “Hand-to-hand combat with Vladimir Putin and a pack of wolves.”

A great list and a very funny, good read — there’s all kinds of assholes between Obama and Palin, like the Clintons (#18); Joe the Plumber (#20); Keith Olbermann (#37); even the recently-departed John Updike (#38), charged with “Being foolishly wrong about absolutely everything for about a thousand years and counting. Getting rich applying faux gilt, and guilt, to the dull, pointless, overstuffed lives of New Yorker readers.”

I guess there’s no one good when everywhere you look it’s all bad.
(h/t to AlterNet).