Faded pop superstar Michael Jackson was on Friday crowned as the United States’s most foolish person in 2006, narrowly beating out trigger-happy US Vice-President Dick Cheney for the title.
The 47-year-old “King of Pop”, who is living in exile in Bahrain following his acquittal last June on child sex charges, snatched the dishonour for the fourth year running, according to a survey by a US public-relations consultant.
Sixty-nine percent of the 1 045 people polled in a random telephone survey ahead of Saturday’s April Fool’s Day said the singer had “done something foolish” in the past year that merited the title, the poll showed.
“Michael Jackson seems to have a lock on the number-one spot for the foreseeable future,” said the poll’s organiser, Jeff Barge. “If Mr Cheney’s actions weren’t enough to oust him, it’s hard to imagine what could.”
“And he hasn’t even been in the country,” Barge said, noting that Jackson was last spotted in Dubai shopping in a market wearing women’s clothing.
Cheney tied with US hotel heiress and socialite Paris Hilton for second place in Barge’s seventh annual April Fool’s poll, with 59% of Americans saying that they had done “something foolish” in the past year.
The vice-president became the focus of a media firestorm and the butt of a barrage of jokes after he accidentally shot an elderly friend in the face and neck with a shotgun while quail hunting last month.
Cheney’s boss, President George Bush, came in third in the 2006 survey, with 57% of those polled saying he had done something foolish.
Bush received a foolishness rating of only 48% in the 2001, meaning that Americans believe he has become 19% more foolish since then, Barge said.
US movie star Tom Cruise snatched fourth place in the survey, entering its ranks for the first time after leaping on television talk-show queen Oprah Winfrey’s sofa while expressing his love for his fiancée, Katie Holmes.
About 54% of those polled said Cruise had been foolish in the last year.
Fifth place was also a tie between embattled Republican politician Tom DeLay and troubled rock singer Courtney Love, with 41% of those polled voting for each of them.
Delay has been indicted on money laundering and campaign finance violations, while former Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain’s widow was in and out of court on a series of drug charges last year.
Other fools of 2006 include actor Robert Blake, acquitted of murdering his wife, pop superstar Madonna, who fell off a horse, winning her 32% of the vote, and British supermodel Kate Moss, who was caught on video snorting cocaine, the survey said.
The survey was conducted with the assistance of Opinion Research and had a margin of error of 3%.
In addition to naming the year’s celebrity fools, 50% of those polled in the survey admitted that they themselves had done something foolish, down from a high of 64% in last year’s survey.
“As a nation, America is obviously being much more careful,” noted Barge. “When travelling abroad, for example, many of us now wear maple leafs on our backpacks. Things have cooled down dramatically from the wildly reckless year of 2005.” — AFP