Dianny’s Ten Most Tiresome People of 2023

The annual year-end tradition continues…

I started the Ten Most Tiresome People feature in 2013 at the now-defunct conservative blog All the Right Snark and have continued the tradition every year since.

It is never easy narrowing the list down to ten. You’d be amazed at how many people seem to go out of their way to dance on my last nerve every year, and this year was no different. It took me the better part of a week to winnow the list down to ten, but I managed it.

But then, as I was putting the finishing touches on the column this morning, I made a last-minute change, removing one of the original ten in exchange for someone I had initially rejected. That rarely happens. And no, I won’t tell you who got removed. I’d rather keep you guessing.

Anyroad.

Here is my list of the Ten Most Tiresome People of 2023.

10. Karine Jean-Pierre

Karine Jean-Pierre must not have a single friend in the world.

Friends care enough not to want to see you make a pillock of yourself on national television.

Only a friend has the confidence to say, “Karine, honey. You really suck at this job.”

Then again, sucking at her job is incidental. For Democrats, incompetence is often a resume-enhancer, especially if you check the right boxes.

The Biden administration was so determined to hire and appoint people based solely on skin color and who they sleep with that America is now stuck watching an incompetent muppet struggle to answer questions every day while furiously rifling through her binder of crib notes.

It’s gotten to the point that I can’t endure watching video clips of Karine ineptly evading questions by burping out the White House’s approved talking points. It’s as agonizing as an elementary school production of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

Love her or hate her, you have to admit that Jen Psaki was damn good at her job. She knew exactly how to avoid giving reporters a single answer without looking like she was evading their questions.

Karine hasn’t a clue.

The dozy sod is so far over her head that I almost feel sorry for her.

Townhall’s Spencer Brown compiled a series of video clips featuring Karine’s most embarrassing responses in 2023. I had to stop after March because repeatedly cringing when one has Lupus is never a good idea.

What was the hiring process? Did the White House communications director loiter in a lesbian bookstore and wait for a black woman to walk through the door?

“Hey, you! You obviously know how to read. Would you like to be the historic first black lesbian press secretary?”

There’s a reason Jesse Kelly refers to the hapless muppet as Karine Diversity-Hire.

I keep waiting for Karine to announce her imminent departure. But since the Biden White House is where people go when they aren’t qualified to work anywhere else, I expect Karine to hang around until Biden leaves office.

Unless she starts stealing luggage from airports.

9. Nikki Haley

Nikki Haley has irritated me ever since she caved to the left and removed the Southern Cross from the South Carolina state flag, securing her place in the Surrender Caucus.

Aside from the millionaire donors who want more immigrants for cheap labor, are there any actual Republican voters clamoring for a Haley nomination?

Nikki Haley has the appeal of Jeb Bush and the verbal skills of Kamala Harris. Sorry to break it to the donor class, but that’s not a winning combination.

Nikki’s insistence on adopting the language of Democrat women only makes her even less appealing. The whole “I am woman, hear me roar” claptrap isn’t any less grating coming from a Republican than it is coming from the likes of Kirsten Gillibrand or Elizabeth Warren.

I about fell out of my chair the other day when Nikki unironically uttered the phrase “my truth.”

Who the hell is advising this woman? AOC?

Just run for the Democrat nomination and be done with it, you vapid cow.

I would sooner suffer through a press briefing with Karine Jean-Pierre than subject myself to Nikki’s “Look-at-my-heels-I’m-a-tough-as-nails-woman” twaddle.

Nikki has constructed her entire presidential campaign on “Look! I’m a girl!” Sadly, that doesn’t mask her inability to think on her feet and answer the most softball questions on the cause of the Civil War.

After that particular gaffe, Nikki released a gajillion-word clarification that was too long to read. I took one look at the “War and Peace”-length statement and said, “Yeah, I’m not reading that.”

If you’re explaining, you’re losing, Nikki.

Nothing about Nikki Haley inspires me to vote for her.

She bills herself as a foreign policy genius. Why? Because Donald Trump made her UN Ambassador?

Big whoop.

I saw a tweet from a Nikki Haley supporter who claimed that the speeches she read at the UN were proof of her foreign policy expertise.

Making speeches does not make you good at foreign policy. It makes you good at public speaking.

You know who else made good speeches? Barack Obama. And that guy was second only to Joe Biden as the worst foreign policy president in history.

So why is she even running? That’s simple.

Wealthy Republican donors want an anodyne squish who isn’t a threat to the status quo, and Nikki fits the bill.

Like Kamala’s disastrous 2020 presidential campaign, Nikki’s is a consultant-driven campaign filled with bumper sticker bromides and poll-tested “policy” positions, occasionally seasoned with one-line zingers about her footwear.

She isn’t just tiresome. She’s flat-out dull.

8. Elon Musk

Elon Musk didn’t make himself tiresome. He had tiresome thrust upon him by corporate media reporters furious that he took away the cool kids’ table at Twitter and by the right-wing bloggers who discovered fairly quickly that posting articles with Musk’s name in the headline boosted their engagement.

I’m convinced that most right-leaning or populist blogs have someone assigned to the Musk Tweet Beat, just so they can exploit his every random thought for clicks.

Elon Musk’s name in headlines is engagement gold, and by God, these guys are going to mine every ounce of gold they can, no matter how inane or non-newsworthy it might be.

Musk suggests that Twitter advertisers can go f*ck themselves, and every single right-leaning Trump blog, from Breitbart to the Post Millennial, publishes an article about it. But since there is little meat to the story beyond “Musk told advertisers to go f*ck themselves,” most bloggers spend the rest of their posts recounting all the other times Musk said something that they reported on (complete with links to the articles, you know, to boost engagement).

It’s exhausting.

When you’re not particularly interested in treating Elon Musk like the right-wing Meghan Markle, the constant barrage of Musk clickbait headlines is exhausting.

Elon Musk is an accomplished innovator who has transformed the automobile industry, space travel, and communications. There are plenty of reasons to be impressed by the guy.

But the media’s oversaturation of Musk has left me longing for the days when he was not a household name.

7. Joe Biden

I rolled my eyes when Joe Biden officially announced his reelection campaign.

Joe has always been incapable of seeing himself as he truly is, which explains the idiotic aviator sunglasses.

In Joe’s eyes, he is a swaggering matinee idol with the toughness of Clint Eastwood and the boyish charm of Cary Grant.

He’s neither.

Joe is an 81-year-old political back-bencher who stumbled into the White House only because the Democrats didn’t want Bernie Sanders depriving them of their comfortable sinecures in the federal government.

As a result, the future of the Republic and our standing in the world rests on the shoulders of a guy who can’t make it up the steps of Air Force One without a winch and pully system.

The disaster at the southern border, coupled with the promotion of lunatic leftist domestic policies and a timid-to-the-point-of-deadly foreign policy have taken all of the fun out of watching clips of Joe Biden’s gaffes and pratfalls.

Grandpa Joe isn’t in charge and has no idea what goes on in his administration. It isn’t that he is asleep at the wheel. He isn’t behind the wheel at all.

On Joe’s 81st birthday, his Twitter account unironically posted this picture:

(Okay, I added the talk bubble.)

Talk about metaphor overload.

In one image, the Biden White House succeeded in summing up the Biden presidency and, despite the flaming glow, not in a good light.

Watching Joe Biden age before our eyes during another presidential election won’t just be tiresome; it’ll be downright agony.

Then again, something tells me the Biden campaign plans to dust off the basement strategy and keep the old fart hidden as much as possible. I’d be shocked if there was a single general election debate in 2024. If I had to guess, I’d say Team Biden will only agree to a single carefully stage-managed town hall aired on CNN with a friendly, sycophantic host.

Biden might be able to coast to reelection under those circumstances, especially if the GOP nominates the only candidate Americans despise more than they do the Biden presidency.

6. Kari Lake

My write-up on Kari Lake nearly consisted of only two words: “GO AWAY.”

Throughout the 2022 midterms, I barely gave a thought to Kari. I remember my brother texting me several months before the Midterms to ask if I had seen any videos of her talking to reporters. I hadn’t. I told him I don’t pay much attention to gubernatorial races on the other side of the country. Besides, any Republican candidate who is promoted by the likes of Steve Bannon or The Gateway Pundit isn’t someone I’m particularly interested in getting to know.

But after Lake lost the Arizona governor’s race to Democrat Katie Hobbs, the luxury of ignoring her was dashed on the rocks of her Stolen Election rubbish.

As soon as Kari realized that the key to getting more attention from Trump supporters was to cry Election Fraud, she embraced Team Sore Loser with gusto.

The more she whined, the more attention they gave her.

Failure might be a resume-enhancer for Democrats, but nothing elevates a person’s status among Trump supporters like losing an election, especially if the loser refuses to concede and starts screeching about fraud.

And it worked.

Despite her lack of experience and inability to win, Trump supporters started floating Kari Lake as a possible running mate for Donald Trump if he won the nomination.

In the hopes of getting the nod, Kari ingratiated herself with Trump so much that she got a room in Mar-a-Lago to make blowing smoke up Trump’s ass more convenient.

I had hoped that Kari’s mission to wedge her head firmly up Trump’s backside would keep the dizzy suck-up too busy to run for the Senate in Arizona.

Alas, I was wrong.

We will never be rid of this dozy fishwife, will we?

5. Alina Habba

Two of the worst things to come out of the multiple indictments and court cases Donald Trump faced in 2023 were the set of boobs chosen to serve as his legal spokeswoman.

Alina Habba’s over-exposure far outstrips her skill as an attorney, as is evident every time she and her cleavage appear at a press conference.

It wasn’t Habba’s resume that Team Trump was scrutinizing when they decided to shove her boobs in front of the cameras.

Jessica Rabbit’s cup size and skimpy blouses more than make up for her skimpy resume, especially in the ogling eyes of her client, whose obsession with being surrounded by beautiful women rivals that of Gadaffi and his all-girl bodyguards.

Naturally, the Trump fans love Alina. She was even a featured speaker at the most recent Turning Point KKK USA event, where she boasted about getting sanctioned by a judge and fined $1 million for the frivolous lawsuit Trump’s legal team filed last year against the DNC and Hillary Clinton.

Who brags about being bad at her job?

I about fell over laughing when I saw a headline from Raw Story:

Good grief. Alina is Michael Avenatti with hair … and cleavage.

But Alina and her boobs know their audience. Team Trump revels in loss. It’s like mother’s milk to them. And if you’re going to suck at the teat of defeat, you may as well choose the flashiest set of teats you can find.

4. Vivek Ramaswamy

Vivek Ramaswamy is close to taking the title of the most vapid politician in America from Kamala Harris.

Though, he’s getting some stiff competition from Nikki Haley.

After the first GOP primary debate in August, I referred to Vivek as Vivek Kamaswamy, the new master of the Word Salad.

I’m not entirely sure why Vivek is in the Republican primary. It isn’t as if he wants to be president. Then again, I never understood why Kamala Harris ran for president in 2020. Democrat primary voters didn’t understand either, which may be why Kamala dropped out two months before the Iowa caucus.

Vivek is strictly an online presidential candidate, programmed to appeal to those who get their news from right-leaning blogs and can’t go a day without logging onto Twitter. This is why Vivek changes his positions as frequently as most people change their socks. Flip-flopping is required if you want the approval of Trump supporters, who also change their positions with alarming frequency.

Vivek will take a firm stand on China and Taiwan on Tuesday. Then on Thursday, he will take the opposition position. By Friday, Vivek is denying ever taking the position he took on Tuesday.

He does this with every policy position he takes.

As I wrote in August:

Listen, I despise vapid political hacks who waste everybody’s time running for president. They suck all the oxygen out of the room and offer nothing in return.

It’s all showboating nonsense designed to appeal to the stupidest and most gullible among us.

Hacks like Kamala and Vivek have no underlying foundation of deeply held beliefs or principles. And it shows every time they speak.

3. Kamala Harris

Kamala Harris has appeared in every Ten Most Tiresome People list since 2019. I never tire of finding her tiresome.

She’s been the Vice President for nearly three years now, and so far, Kamala’s on-the-job training hasn’t borne much fruit. She’s just as vapid and unimpressive today as when she was hijacking Senate hearings by screeching about how she would not be silenced.

It puzzles me that the White House keeps assigning Kamala to one Kamikaze mission after the other. After her failure as Border Czar, the Biden team thinks putting Kamala in charge of abortion messaging will help win voters to their cause. After all, polling shows that most Americans want abortion to remain legal, at least under certain circumstances. However, Team Biden failed to take into account Kamala’s widespread unpopularity. Making her the face of “reproductive rights” is a surefire way to win voters to the pro-life movement.

The thing about Kamala is that almost every American is tired of her.

She’s a vapid, incoherent demagogue with the political savvy of a mollusk.

Every Kamala interview or speech provides Republicans with endless fodder.

In May, the RNC released a compilation video of all the times Kamala used the phrase “unburdened by what has been” which pretty much sums up just how incapable this woman is at independent, original thought.

I wrote at the time that Kamala has transformed into a “living, breathing embodiment of AI-generated predictive text.”

There’s no “there” there.

My New Year’s resolution is to teach myself video editing just so I can put together a compilation video of Kamala using her favorite phrase “In terms of.”

Here’s the thing. Team Biden will never jettison Kamala, no matter how unqualified or unpopular she is.

Biden is stuck with her.

And so are we.

2. Matt Gaetz

Pro-Trump bloggers and podcasters love Matt Gaetz, don’t they? To them, Gaetz is a “fighter” who “stands up for the American people.”

Yeah, I don’t see it.

Matt Gaetz is a preening peacock in a pompadour – a self-aggrandizing rooster who struts around the Capitol hoping to catch the attention of reporters.

Matt Gaetz is such an attention whore that he could sniff out a news camera faster than a cadaver dog could sniff out a corpse.

It’s impossible to take this guy seriously.

As I wrote in October:

Whenever I see Matt Gaetz’s ridiculous mug, I harken back to the nickname Rush Limbaugh gave former North Carolina Senator John Edwards.

The Breck Girl.

With his shiny suits and bouffant hairdo, Matt could easily be mistaken for the owner of a seedy Vegas strip club.

That stunt he pulled in October to oust Kevin McCarthy from the speakership had nothing to do with “fighting for the American people” and everything to do with Matt’s ongoing fight for self-promotion.

As I wrote in my column “House of Tards:”

Gaetz wanted to punish Kevin McCarthy for working with the Democrats to pass the continuing resolution. So what did he do? He worked with the Democrats to pass a motion ousting McCarthy from the speakership.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t that make Matt a RINO and a member of the so-called “UniParty?”

If you make common cause with Marxist Squaddies like Ilhan Omar, you’re not a “conservative firebrand” or “America First.”

After all the drama and turmoil he unleashed, the House ended up with a new Speaker who made the same deal with Democrats that prompted Matt’s idiotic fatwa against McCarthy.

Matt Gaetz is a time-wasting clown more interested in Twitter engagement and hits on cable news than he is in “fighting for the American people.”

It would be so nice if Republicans would rally behind elected officials who accomplish something more substantive than posting hot takes and viral videos on Twitter.

It’s almost as if some voters on our side want to keep losing.

1. Donald Trump

Over the last three years, Donald Trump’s descent into madness has been quite a spectacle.

On the plus side, now that I am tired of Trump, I am no longer obligated to rush to his defense every time he belches out lunacy or steps on his own pud.

Let him rant like a subway vagrant. Nowt to do with me.

I was sick of Trump about two weeks after the 2020 election, and it has been downhill ever since.

Trump’s fixation on losing to Biden in 2020 wore me out long before he made the grievous tactical error of speaking at the “Stop the Steal” rally on January 6, 2021. By the time Trump prematurely announced his 2024 do-over, I had been off the Trump train for two years, feeling footloose and fancy-free.

Unfortunately, the media is determined to make Trump the GOP nominee because it would all but guarantee a second Biden term while killing the chances of down-ballot Republicans.

To that end, the media will never shut up about the guy. Every court filing, every ALL CAPS RAGING Truth Social post, every loathsome remark, and every whining complaint about loyalty make headlines.

My paying job is as a freelance writer, primarily writing about current events and politics. I’m Trumped out. I can’t get through a week without having to write about the guy. If Donald Trump hadn’t lost his mind on November 3, 2020, maybe I could tolerate it. But now? Who wants to lift that rock, let alone write about it?

At this point, I’m convinced that Trump’s madness is contagious. How else do you explain his die-hard fans like Laura Loomer? My word, that guy attracts crazies like flies to a turd.

You’d have to be more than a little doolally to shell out nearly fifty bucks for a T-shirt with Trump’s mug shot.

And don’t get me started on the cranks who taught themselves AI graphics just so they could create AI images of Trump as some Top Gun Über Mensch or, heaven forbid, Jesus walking on water.

While I am a cynic at heart, a part of me is still holding out hope that Republican primary voters are equally tired of Donald Trump sucking all of the oxygen out of the room while dragging the Republican Party into the toilet.

As I wrote in my column, “Victory of Poisoned Chalice?”:

I’m entirely indifferent to Trump’s fragile pride, not to mention the sputtering indignation of his super fans.

None of that matters. Only victory matters.

Unless Republican voters want to spend the next generation relegated to the back bench while Democrats run roughshod over the country, we need to stop bellying up to the bar for another swig from the poisoned chalice.

Aren’t you tired of losing?

~~~

As we bid an exhausted farewell to 2023, I wish you all the best for the New Year!

Here’s hoping that better days and fewer tiresome people await us in 2024.