I bear an intense affection for people who say precisely the wrong thing at the wrong Time in the wrong place. I may disagree with the content of what they’re saying, but I gather golden bushels of joy from the sheer inappropriateness of it. Here, then, are some of my favorite “Beloved Assholes.”

EARL BUTZ

In addition to having a quintessentially Beloved Assholian name, Earl Butz was Secretary of Agriculture under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. In 1976, his resignation was demanded after he allegedly told this joke to reporters while flying on Air Force One: “I’ll tell you what the coloreds want. It’s three things: first, a tight pussy; second, loose shoes; and third, a warm place to shit.”

BOBBY KNIGHT

The “Raging Bull” of college basketball. He and his legendary temper led Indiana to three national champlonshlps.

ON WRITERS: “All of us learn to write in the second grade. Most of us go on to greater things,”

ON SEXUAL ASSAULT: “I think if rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it.”

ON HIS TEMPER: “I’ve always been too confrontational, especially when I know I’m right.”

ON ONE PLAYER’S BAD PERFORMANCE: “I told him to take a picture of his testicles so he’d have something to remember them by if he ever took another shot like the last one.”

ON ANOTHER PLAYER’S BAD PERFORMANCE: “We put his dick in a vise. I twisted it. We stuck a red-hot poker up his ass and poured hot water down his mouth and I told him if he promised to play well, we’d quit all that.”

HOWARD COSELL

When Nixon resigned in the mid-70s, the nasally well-endowed toupee-sporting sportscaster Howard Cosell was left with no serious competition for the title of Most Hated Man in America. What do you call the part of the psyche that filters out possibly inflammatory comments and makes a man bite his tongue every so often—the superego? Howard Cosell was born without one. Erudite and Jewish beyond all possible reason, his caustic comments angered American sports fans for years until he finally called a black running back a “little monkey” and was gradually phased off the air. It didn’t matter that he could prove he once called a white player a “little monkey,” too—everyone was merely looking for an excuse.

In my opinion, Cosell was the most exciting and talented broadcaster EVER. He could read the ingredients off a pill bottle, and it would be absolutely THRILLING. His verbal jousting with Muhammad Ali over the years comprised some of the most amusing filmed interactions between two humans in history. I miss you, ya big fat old Jewbag.

QUOTES:

“I’m just telling it like it is.”

“What’s right isn’t always popular. What’s popular isn’t always right.”

TED NUGENT

AKA “The Motor City Madman,” Ted embodies the impenitent fish-out-of-water aspect of Beloved Assholism better than almost anyone. He’s a squirrel-slaughtering, drug-hating, kill-the-Arabs conservative who has chosen a career behind the politically hostile enemy lines of those commie-fellating rockers.

He’s also adept at highly assholian comments, such as when he called Patti Smith a “sperm-bank queen” to her face in the halls of a Philly radio station and the time he claimed to be a better guitarist than Jimi Hendrix.

I’ve pointed it out elsewhere, but “Cat Scratch Fever” is a better song than anything his more-revered Detroiters the MC5 or Stooges were ever able to muster.

FRANK RIZZO

AKA “The Last Big Man in Big City America,” Rizzo was the giant scowling Wop Hippo who served as Philadelphia’s Gestapo-like police commissioner during the riot-happy late 1960s and the city’s mayor from 1972-1980.

In college at Temple University, my avowedly communist black sociology teacher told us that mere blocks from the campus, you were still able to see the bullet holes in a brownstone building allegedly occupied by Black Panthers in the late 1960s. The holes were reputedly put there by Frank’s boys in the police force, who were said to have received orders to do a DRIVE-BY SHOOTING there.

There’s a longstanding anarchist bookstore in Philly called the Wooden Shoe, and back in the seventies they used to carry a slim volume called The Sayings of Chairman Frank, or I Never Saw My Mother Naked, by Frank Rizzo. The book was composed entirely of Rizzo’s trademark gruff populist comments, the sort of which make bookstore-owning anarchists shit themselves.

A Democrat, Rizzo had the balls to support Nixon over McGovern in the 1972 prez race. After having alienated blacks for years (hush, Los Angeles—you haven’t SEEN an abusive police force until you’ve come to Philly), Rizzo tried to ape George Wallace’s “I’m a changed man” tactics during a failed reelection bid in the early ‘80s. I remember one TV commercial showing him dancing joyously amid a crowd of fat black women.

Rizzo was indeed the last of a now-dead breed of politicians, one who achieved power almost exclusively through the brute force of a larger-than-life personality. Sadly, if anyone knows him at all now outside of Philly, it is because the Jerky Boys used his name during one of their prank calls.

Here are two sample comments, the first of which we’ve all probably heard in one form or another:

A conservative is a liberal who got mugged the night before.

The streets are safe in Philadelphia. It’s only the people who make them unsafe.

KHALID ABDUL MUHAMMAD

So fucking extreme, he was kicked out of the frickin’ NATION OF ISLAM! He died of an aneurysm in 2001 at age 53. He will be missed. Sample quotes:

“[Jews are] hook-nosed, bagel-eatin’, lox-eatin’ impostors…You see, everybody always talk about Hitler exterminating 6 million Jews….But don’t nobody ever asked what did they do to Hitler?”
—Kean College, NJ, November 29, 1993

“The old no-good Pope…somebody need to raise that dress up and see what’s really under there.”

“Who let this Negro out of the gate?”

—In reference to black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates

“I say you call yourself Goldstein, Silverstein and Rubinstein because you [sic] stealing all the gold and silver and rubies all over the earth…we call it jewelry but it’s really Jew-elry, Jew-elry because of your deiving [sic] and stealing and rogueing [sic] and lying all over the face of the planet earth.”
—Baltimore, MD, February 19, 1994

“The practice of those freakish Rabbis [circumcision] is that they place their lips on the penis of these young boys and after they have cut the foreskin back, suck the blood from the head of the penis of their own young boys…”
—San Francisco State University, May 21, 1997

“There are no good crackers, and if you find one, kill him before he changes.”
—West Chester University, PA, February 17, 1992

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