Top Turkeys of 2014: Six Florida Personalities We Loved to Hate This Year

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. You know this. What you also know is that it's a day of time-honored traditions like sharing a feast with loved ones, watching football with friends, watching Aunt Edna get drunk on boxed wine, and trying to explain to your mom why you're not married yet.

Another time-honored tradition is the presidential pardoning of the turkey, which is the dumbest thing a president can ever do. But hey, traditions. So President Obama will pick a turkey and pardon it so that no one will eat it, until the Republicans in Congress shut down the government over his choice of turkey.

However, here in Florida, we too have some turkeys. And none of them should be pardoned. Because they're in their own way despicable or awful or just downright insufferable. Here's our time-honored tradition: Florida's Top Turkeys, the 2014 edition:

Jack Seiler and the Fort Lauderdale Commissioners In what has to be one of the worst public relations clusterfucks of all time, Fort Lauderdale Mayor Jack Seiler and the city's commissioners decided they wanted to keep the city clean and homeless people sanitary by not allowing them to be fed unless the people feeding them met a set of stringent rules, including providing a port-o-potty for the homeless. Yep. You can't feed the homeless in a park or a beach unless you bring a shitter with you along with a sandwich. The ordinance essentially made it illegal to feed homeless people out in public. The motivation behind the ordinance was to keep the city clean and keep feedings indoors and sanitary. Instead, it led to a sweet 90-year-old man being the face of a city's shame after he was cited several times for daring to be a decent human being and feeding the homeless.

Charlie Crist and Florida Democrats You had one job, Democrats: Unseat one of the most unpopular and despicable governors in the United States. Easy! The governorship was served up to you on a silver platter -- and no port-o-potty was necessary. Rick Scott is a known fraudster and a shady Tea Party pal who tried to pass a draconian drug-testing policy that would force people on welfare to pee in a cup before getting assistance. He's been a disaster for schools, the environment and the economy and is a man who will never give a straight, coherent answer about anything because his first instinct is to bullshit. He's a half-man, half-snake and a vote suppressor who's best friends with the NRA. So what do the Florida Dems do? They manage to actually screw up beating this guy as if by wizardry by trotting out a lame-duck ex-Republican known as a flip-flopping schemer. The Democrats could literally have picked anything else to run against Scott and won: A tree. A car battery. A baby. A tire set on fire. ANYTHING. Instead, they went with Crist and blew their best chance at getting rid of Scott. High-five, you dolts!

LeBron James As a member of the Heat, LeBron James had to endure daily intense scrutiny and arbitrary criticisms from the national media every single time the team lost. It was a relentless and unfair onslaught. But Heat fans stuck by their man. They defended him against the haters at every turn. They bought his jersey, they bought his posters, they bought his shoes, and they fought back. The Heat franchise, meanwhile, helped LeBron silence his harshest critics by helping him move past the specter of "never going to be a champion" to being a two-time NBA Finals champ and all-time NBA legend. The community embraced him when the rest of the country vilified him for no real reason other than that he wore a Heat uniform and wanted to play with his friends. The team surrounded him with everything he needed to win that elusive title. And what does he do in return? He abandons the team and the fans at the last possible minute for Cleveland and doesn't even bother taking out a full-page ad in a newspaper thanking Heat fans. LeBron treated the Heat like a man who got tired of his wife and left her for another woman. In this case, the wife is supersexy and hot, and the other woman is the epitome of cold, miserable urban decay.

Pam Bondi Pam Bondi does not like the gays. She doesn't want them to gay-marry each other and infect our state with gay-married families because, what's next? People marrying their goldfish?? What if some guy wants to marry his cigarettes? We're just going to go ahead and let him do that, are we? Oh no nonononon not on Bondi's watch! Time and again, the lady Bondi has fought off efforts to have Florida's ban on same-sex marriage overturned by the courts. Even when judge after judge after judge has declared the ban unconstitutional and even after more and more polls have shown Floridians support same-sex marriage, Bondi stubbornly does all she can to suppress the LGBT community from wanting to do nothing more than to enjoy the miserable married life like the rest of us. Because Pam Bondi is all about family values, and marriage is a sacred institution. Also, she's been married and divorced twice and is on her third husband.

Stitches He's a dude with an AK-47 tattooed on his face because sometimes that's just where life takes you. He raps about cocaine, makes scary faces, and embraces the shadowy enigma of his persona. Then New Times writes a feature exposing him as just some local kid, evaporating the scary crazy rapper character he made himself out to be. He also allegedly threatened to beat up one of the writers of that piece and then never followed through. He also allegedly offered cocaine to some concertgoers at one of his shows, which forced the venue to stop the concert. You'd think a guy who has a machine gun permanently tattooed on his face would make better life decisions.

Donald Trump When he isn't demanding Obama show his birth certificate, Donald Trump is having the most ridiculous Twitter beefs imaginable. From beefing with Buzzfeed to beefing with fellow right-wing nutter Michele Malkin to beefing with FPL and harassing a small-time rapper who wrote a song called "Donald Trump," the Donald has perfected the art of being a blustering idiot who randomly picks fights with people for no other reason than he craves the attention. He also likes to pretend he's going to run for president, which, come to think of it, would be AMAZING.


Chris Joseph
Contact: Chris Joseph