Barack Obama, the first black president, proved to millions this year that he is either trying his best to lead the nation during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, or he is the modern-day incarnation of Adolph Hitler. One of the two.

In 2010, Obama made a number of political compromises while still trying to pursue many of the reforms laid out during his 2008 campaign. Also, he was a totalitarian monster comparable to the perpetrator of one of the worst genocides in history. He is either a president who passed a comprehensive health care measure despite staunch opposition from powerful private interests, or a radical-Islamist sympathizer bent on systematically dismantling American democracy and eradicating all human liberty. He either lowered taxes for most Americans while failing to communicate that effectively, or he is pure evil. Whichever.

Barack Obama, two of the most important people of 2010: the one who was elected to be president of the United States and execute laws to the best of his ability, and the one who murders senior citizens and hates all white people. Only history will say which he is for sure.

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The success of the MTV reality show Jersey Shore was a cultural phenomenon that could not be ignored in 2010, and no one was more synonymous with the media frenzy created by the program than its breakout star Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi. Yes, fucking Snooki. Please, just try to get through this story without thinking about the more-deserving people—there are, literally, millions of them—who should be occupying this spot instead.

Snooki’s profane antics and drunken fights drew in millions of viewers each week and propelled the 23-year-old to national fame, helping her to eclipse—among others it honestly would be too painful to bring up—the men and women behind the Large Hadron Collider, perhaps the most significant piece of experimental technology in centuries of scientific research, developed by people whose work in the field of physics this year forced us to entirely rethink the way we view the universe and, consequently, our very existence.

Snooki got punched in the face on TV.

In addition to appearing on countless talk shows this year, Snooki announced that she is currently writing a book entitled A Shore Thing. That’s right! A book. Though the reader should be advised at this point to block out all the other books of actual importance released in 2010, such as the first new novel in nearly a decade from American master Jonathan Franzen, the memoirs of former president George W. Bush, or even another Stieg Larsson bestseller, which, though not the greatest piece of literature in the history of the world, at least features complete sentences and a plot structure. Just, please, don’t think about those authors.

Or, for that matter, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton or Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke—hell, even fucking Ryan Seacrest actually accomplished something in 2010. No, this article is about Snooki, and we’re all just going to have to deal with it.

As evidenced by this piece, Snooki has also dominated year-in-review lists nationwide, which, let’s be honest, is as much the fault of readers as anyone else: those who continue to pay attention to this irrelevant, diminutive shrew in some weird attempt to feel better about themselves, thereby perpetuating this disgusting, cannibalistic media circus that you all purport to despise and yet continue to fuel. And to which we have to respond, or risk becoming irrelevant ourselves.

Had we any faith in the American public being interested in a profile of Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who won the presidential election in Sudan as the genocide-wracked nation edged further toward a split; or award-winning Japanese architect Kazuyo Sejima; or really, almost any other living being doing almost anything else, we would be happy to oblige. So don’t try to pin this whole thing on us, you fucker. We’re right and you know it.

But again, it’s probably best to avoid thinking about it too much. It’s just easier that way. Snooki, one of the most important people of 2010. Really.

The post Snooki – Just Try Not To Think About Who Should Really Be In This Spot appeared first on The Onion.

Although Julian Assange sparked a media firestorm when he revealed thousands of pages of Pentagon reports proving that the U.S. military concealed more than 15,000 civilian deaths in Iraq, that rampant corruption and negligence among private contractors there poses a profound security risk, and that the U.S. State Department continually questions the strength of Russia’s democracy, the fact remains that nobody wants to listen to an annoying little tattler.

Numerous sources have confirmed that the 39-year-old founder of  WikiLeaks should just quit worrying about what every world power is up to, and shouldn’t go squealing to everyone about how the U.S. thinks the prime minister of Italy is feckless and ineffective. While his parents probably taught him it’s impolite to be a sniveling little pip-squeak, Assange still told on America for failing to investigate reports of abuse, rape, and murder by Iraqi police and soldiers, even though it’s not his job to be the boss of this country. The whistle-blowing know-it-all is from Australia, so it really has nothing to do with him. Who is he trying to impress, anyway?

Seriously, get a life.

When Assange obtained evidence that an Apache helicopter killed 12 people, including two journalists, during a 2007 air strike in Baghdad, the whiny big mouth repeatedly threatened to tell on the U.S. Army, as if the whole military was going to be in soooo much trouble because of some stupid video footage. And though the Chinese government ordered attacks on American computer networks, it’s still none of your beeswax, Julian. You’re nothing but a big baby who wants special attention and cries all the time because world leaders call Mahmoud Ahmadinejad “Hitler” in private, but refuse to do so on the record. Boohoo! Don’t you have somebody else to irritate? Everybody wants you to go away. And you have a girl’s name. Creep.

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No one made as large an impact on how we interact in 2010 as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, whom you’ve really gotta hand it to, as much as you’d like to punch the little shit right in his smug, 26-year-old- billionaire face. Zuckerberg launched Facebook from his Harvard dorm room in 2004 and has since seen the social network grow from a few thousand college students to more 500 million users worldwide.

Smart little fucker, isn’t he?

2010 was a landmark year for Zuckerberg: He watched his net worth surpass that of Steve Jobs and of Rupert Murdoch, while also expanding his online empire to include geo-location services, high-res photo-sharing, and enhanced personalization features, all of which just proved that the redheaded little dickface has really got our number and will always have us lining up and begging for more. Goddammit.

And recently joining the likes of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett in pledging to give most his income to charity is exactly the kind of maneuver a shitwad like this would pull to make you almost respect him.

The brilliant prick’s meteoric ascent has so captured the nation’s imagination that screenwriter Aaron Sorkin and acclaimed director David Fincher teamed up to immortalize the little wiener in the blockbuster film The Social Network, released in October.

Though his power and notoriety are sure to grow in coming years, you really can’t begrudge Zuckerberg his fair-won success, even if he looks like a pimply-faced little fuckhead you could easily kick in the balls without feeling any remorse.

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In one of the biggest entertainment scandals of the year, Mel Gibson, more than a decade after the fact, still has not received the critical acclaim he deserves for his powerful yet nuanced performance in the 1999 action-thriller Payback.

Playing the role of Porter, a street-smart ex-Marine who plots revenge after being shot by his best friend and junkie wife and left to die, Gibson treats audiences to 100 minutes of pure edge-of-your seat drama, a feat that somehow failed to garner a single Oscar nod or a spot on AFI’s top-100 list. His masterful realization of the character was inexplicably lost in the shuffle, and when looking back on 2010, this travesty will always be remembered as one of the most talked-about slights of this, or any, year.

The movie’s tagline, “Get ready to root for the bad guy,” is ironic, given Gibson’s squeaky-clean public persona.

The post Mel Gibson – His Performance In 'Payback' Still Not Getting Enough Credit appeared first on The Onion.

This April, when she signed into law Arizona’s tough new anti-immigration policy, Gov. Jan Brewer bravely showed the nation that if the federal government wouldn’t take the most draconian measures imaginable to deal with illegal aliens, then she would do it on her own.

By demanding that police check any suspicious- looking individual’s immigration status, Brewer stood up for the kind of racial profiling that other politicians wouldn’t, and under any circumstances shouldn’t, have the guts to support. Refusing to bow down to sense or reason, Brewer also made it possible for citizens to sue police officers who fail to carry out the troublingly vague terms of the new law, no matter how much it might tie up the state’s court system—a bold stance the federal government simply couldn’t be bothered with.

And shouldn’t be bothered with, because it’s a really, really awful idea.

Like the growing tide of up and coming conservative politicians, Brewer understands that real change—the disturbing, almost surreal kind of change that drives a wedge between Americans, increases fear and xenophobia, and makes Arizona, and by extension the nation as a whole, seem impossibly backward—has to start at home.

The loon.

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Emulating the gallantry, adaptability, and dedication to duty displayed by English gentlemen throughout the imperial occupation of India and decades of adventurism in darkest Africa, former BP CEO Tony Hayward’s flip, and often arrogant, response to the Deepwater Horizon’s devastating oil spill this April marked, at long last, a shining, highly public return of the classic British gentleman.

Only Hayward possessed the uniquely English unctuousness and resolve to note that the spill—the largest of its kind in North American history—was “tiny in relation to the total volume of water” in the ocean. Nobly disdaining the outrage of shrimp-boat-owning commoners whose petty livelihoods were foundering in muck from the Macondo well, Hayward, like the dukes and regents of yore, dutifully took time off to attend a yacht race, expressing the bitter regret proper to his station in life when his yacht did not win.

As public uproar grew, Hayward refused to lower his standards, and in a moment that perfectly encapsulated the British byword “Keep Calm and Carry On,” he declared, without a hint of irony, “I’d like my life back.”

A more classic example of British compassion and grace under pressure could hardly be imagined. When little people whose homelands were devastated for generations to come overreacted by demanding Hayward be fired, he put the Americans, Mexicans, and other colonials in their place after his forced resignation by saying that, perhaps if he’d earned a theater degree instead of one in geology, there would have been less outrage from a hostile public. In an era that has seen the U.K. become synonymous with social conscience, humility, and perspective, Hayward represents a remarkable hearkening back to a proud, centuries-old British tradition.

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As the first Sikh elected to India’s highest office, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has helped change the face of…okay, just so we don’t get too ahead of ourselves here, we should probably explain what a Sikh is.

So, a Sikh practices Sikhism, which is a monotheistic religion that is based on the teachings of Guru Nanek Dev Ji and was founded in 15th-century Punjab. That probably raises more questions than it answers. Anyway, before we get into all that, we should say right now that Sikhism has nothing to do with Islam. They’re completely different faiths. Got it?

Oh, right, just to be clear, Punjab is a geographical region on the border of India and Pakistan, which includes both the Indian state of Punjab and the Pakistani province of Punjab. We might get back to that later, but first let’s explain that Guru Nanek Dev Ji’s major philosophy was that God is formless but can be found manifest in all religions. It’s actually a bit more complicated than that, but for our purposes here, that should suffice.

(Monotheism, by the way, is the belief in one singular God. If you already know what monotheism is, please don’t be insulted. We just want to make sure everyone’s on the same page here.)

Okay, here we go: In India, 80 percent of the population is Hindu, and, you know what, let’s talk about India before we get into any of that. India is the second-most populous country, behind China, and is also the world’s largest democracy. Just real fast, democracy is a form of representative government where power is derived from citizens; one could argue that many so-called democracies are actually republics, but that’s neither here nor there.

Actually, why don’t we slow down for a second and get back to India. India is a country in South Asia, and Asia is the world’s most populous continent. A continent is one of seven large landmasses on Earth, which is where we all live and is also the third planet in the solar system. Our solar system is composed of a sun and eight planets, or nine, depending on whom you ask, and is located in the Milky Way galaxy. Galaxies are massive, gravitationally bound systems of stars, gas, and dust that combine to form the universe, which is the totality of everything in existence.

Okay, where were we? Ah, yes, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was important this year.

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