The greatest scam artists of all time are listed below in their latest new rankings based on the sheer grandiosity and jaw-dropping audacity of their larger-than-life swindles, defraudings, embezzlements, and downright scams.
1. Donald J. Trump
In a major upset of the former World Champion Scammer -- Carlo Ponzi -- who had topped the list of truly great and legendary scammers for most of the last century, His Sleaziness Donald J. Trump has emerged to go from nowhere on the list to the very top of Mount Grifter. Known in prison cells and torture chambers around the world as "The Donald", Trump has pulled off das Unding of breathtaking, instantly legendary scams -- the theft and embezzlement of an entire U.S. Presidential election. Alas and a-shame, there will never be a postage stamp of Carlo Ponzi or of Bernie Madoff, but Donald "Grab-em-by-the-pussy" Trump will gloat and leer from U.S. postage stamps forever. There is no Carlo Ponzi Memorial Library and no Collected Papers of Robert Vesco, but the Donald Trump Presidential Sex Offender Library in Florida will draw an annual pilgrimage of ex-cons and castrated felons even greater than the holy treks to Mecca and Medina. On their knees and shedding tears of admiration, the missing-finger members of the Yakuza in Japan, the made members of the Mafia sworn to omerta in La Cosa Nostra, the cooks of Polonium Salad from the Vory in Russia, and the white-robed Grand Wizards of the Ku Klux Klan will achieve their grandest dream and bucket-list finale by entering the shrine and sanctuary of the Shahanshah of Scammers, the Ne Plus Ultra of Sexual Predators, the World Fraud Center of Trump-and-Dump Scammers, the Library of Highway Robbery, the Trump Towering Inferno. Movies will be made until the end of time about Donald the Scamgod, the Swindler King, the Con Man of Coney Island, and the Sexual Assaulter of Beauty Pageant Contestants.
2. Carlo Ponzi
Once the highest scammer of the land and the giver of his own name to Ponzi Schemes everywhere, Carlo has yielded the top spot to Donald Trump.
3. Bernie Madoff
Although Bernie bilked his friends and neighbors out of billions, he is nothing next to the founder and namesake of Trump University, who swindled not only trusting students out of their life savings, but an entire nation out of its right to elect their own president. Do not make Trump angry by tweeting #NotMyPresident, or the day may come when you see machine guns mowing down protesters in front of the White House -- the future home of that great new scam by Donald Trump to be known and billed as White House University.
4. Robert Vesco
The swindler Robert Vesco did not want to spend his ill-gotten gains or his retirement years at Club Fed, so he ran away to Cuba.
5. Sgt. Ernie Bilko
Sergeant Bilko was an imaginary scammer on television -- just like Donald Jubilee Trump -- before Trump decided to run for avarice. Whereas Bilko was a friendly scammer whom everybody loved, Trump was a sexual predator who scarred at least a dozen women with deep psychological injury to be borne in pain for the rest of their lives. Imagine the horror of turning on the TV set and seeing your sexual assaulter leering at you from the presidential desk in the Oval Office at the stately Mansion turned into the Faculty Club of White House University. Imagine the fear and terror of women in the military who experience sexual assault and try to file a complaint to be carried up the chain of command -- up through the captains and colonels and generals until it reaches the Oval Office desk of the Sexual-Assaulter-in-Chief. If Trump does not like your picture in the file, he will scribble "Fat Pig" or "dog" and order you to be raped all over again. Justice will be served, because Trump feels that it is his just right to assault any nearby woman and to yell "You're going to jail" to a former First Lady.
Self-sufficient or other-wise ... by Mathew Schmitz on firstthings.com
When Trump met him, Peale was already famous as the author of The Power of Positive Thinking, a book that would go on to sell some five million copies. Peale occupied a position at the center of the establishment, though this standing was endangered in 1960, when he joined a group of 150 Protestant pastors, including Billy Graham, that wanted to keep Kennedy out of the White House. The group issued a manifesto asking whether a Catholic could be trusted as president when Rome had shown such “determined efforts . . . to breach the wall of separation of church and state.” Peale led the public presentation of the document and faced an immediate backlash from Union Theological Seminary’s Reinhold Niebuhr and John Bennett, who accused him of “blind prejudice.” The embarrassed Peale apologized and from then on sought to distance his teaching from the harsh realities of politics.
...
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.
If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!
del.icio.us
Digg
Google bookmark
reddit
Simpy
StumbleUpon
Furl
Newsvine
Technorati
Tailrank