Tag Archives: Sean Hannity

Prove It Was Just “one bad night” Joe, and Do an Interview with Sean Hannity

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How Far Will Sean Hannity Go? - The New York Times

Allow me to start with the bottom line and work back from there. This particular election is much bigger than Joe Biden. Much bigger. This would not be like losing to Mitt Romney. We, meaning Democrats, are not a cult. The feelings and ego of Dear Leader are inconsequential in this election.

Okay, back to the top.

I’ve consumed way more post-debate punditry than even I thought possible. Here (redundancy alert) is a feeling of the consensus.

Joe Biden has lost the confidence of the mainstream-to-liberal media, the political intelligentsia and, less certain here, the top tier donor class, post-debate fundraising claims withstanding. In order to regain that confidence he has to demonstrate in a public, unscripted way that last Thursday was just “a bad night”, to quote team Biden.

How to do that? Well, do this:

Consent to an interview with some prominent right wing personality. Like say Sean Hannity. And do it … this week. Biden’s utter, inexplicable failure contest any of the entirely predictable bullshit thrown up by Trump last week powerfully suggests he is not capable of prosecuting a case against the pervasive histrionic nonsense motivating Republicans today. So … prove to the consistent 70% of likely voters who think you’re too old that you can play mentally adroit hardball in this age of malignant Tik Tok glibness.

Spend an hour jousting with and rebutting a MAGA sycophant live on camera.

A taped and edited 15 minutes with Lesley Stahl is not the same thing.

Then … do it again … live … in a couple town halls open to any citizen who wants in.

One of the more revealing anecdotes I’ve heard in past few days was MSNBC regular John Heilemann discussing reactions from big time Hollywood donors after a Biden fund-raiser in some mogul’s no doubt palatial home. These would be people fully committed to Biden. People he should be utterly at ease among. The kind of audience were a confident politician happily back slaps, offers candid thoughts on important matters and has to be pulled away.

But, no, says Heilemann. According to his sources in the room, Biden arrived and spent 15 minutes … reading from a Teleprompter. Those in attendance were startled. Point being; Biden is so stage-managed by his handlers (his wife being foremost among them) that they don’t risk even standard issue politician camaraderie with his most devoted, trusted and lucrative audience.

(I’m eager to hear a similar report from the weekend’s bash out in the Hamptons on Long Island.)

Moreover, as we’re hearing from all corners largely muted until now, this is how its been since 2020. The clear inference being that the persistently incoherent Biden we saw Thursday night is a not an anomaly. He may be capable enough among advisors in the Oval Office, but he can not perform in the rude and routinely disrepectful modern political arena. What he projects is anything but reassuring and confidence-inspring.

As we speak the Biuden family is at Camp David having their picture taken by Annie Lebovitz and no doubt resolving to fight on, 70% of the voting public, once supportive media, intelligentsia and panicky donor class be damned.

His most loyal supporters, most of them close personal friends and hardened Democratic activists, are selling the line that bowing out and permitting a two month Hunger Games to select a new nominee would be a kind of death wish for the party against Trump in November. I could not disagree more. I don’t know about you but the sense I get from the public regarding this race is a strong, pervasive desire for … someone new. Someone young enough to know how to reboot a computer and confident enough they’d relish the opportunity to eviscerate a clown like Trump.

And my view, FWIW, is shared by no less than David Plouffe who ran Barack Obama’s two successful campaigns. In a podcast interview post-debate disaster Plouffe who until Thursday night believed firmly that Biden was the only game in town, said he believed a new Democratic candidate, not even discounting Kamala Harris, “would win a walk”. Why? Because the general public is so weary and unenthusiastic about both Biden and Trump.

Team Biden will try to string this current phase for as long as it can, narrowing the window for any option. That’s a cynical, wholly self-serving strategy that places him personally above the far greater interests of the country. A country (and world) facing the restoration of a lazy, corrupt fool.

So yeah, if Thursday was just “one bad night”, prove it to everyone Joe, including your wife, and sit down with an easily rebutted meathead like Sean Hannity and let’s see you take him apart.

If you can’t or won’t that firmly settles any questions we may have left.

Their “Biden Crime Family” Case Implodes in Their Faces After Years of Hype. Hannity and the Usual Suspects Ignore it.

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Robert Reich

If you get your news from almost anywhere other than Falun Gong’s Epoch Times or Rupert Murdoch’s FoxNews you are aware of the arrest a few days ago, (in Las Vegas FWIW), of Alexander Smirnov, the key informant in the constantly, aggresively and loudly hyped “investigation” into Hunter and Joe Biden. You may also then be aware that MAGA Republicans’ case against Joe Biden has essentially exploded in their faces in a putrid, cringey mist.

The collapse of this case is so total you’d be embarrassed for someone — looking at you Sean Hannity — if they weren’t so completely insulated from embarrassment and shame.

(BTW — 50 Dickens Points for Smirnov’s name. Can’t make it up. Have a double, Sean.)

There are dozen different ways to examine this story, but for some reason the face of a guy I used to work for kept popping up in my head. He ran a small media operation here in Minnesota and was constantly struggling to walk what is known as the “false equivalency” tight rope, a style of footwork that required him to regularly tut-tut “the extremes” of modern media, to be specific the FoxNews and MSNBCs/CNNs of the world.

As he tried to sell it to his staff of quasi-journalists, the two ends of the spectrum (as he saw the spectrum) were equally reckless and irresponsible. The proper (i.e. safer) course was right there square in the middle where you never developed or argued an opinion on anything that mattered, other than maybe how yummy the brioche was at some new restaurant/possible advertiser.

Having a few Jewish friends and some familarity with street level Yiddish, every time I saw this guy the word, “Putz!” flashed before my eyes. And I wonder what (if anything) he’s thinking today watching Fox, with its latest long-running act of reckless hysteria-mongering, faceplant on the sidewalk like a career drunk?

On a matter more specific to journalistic integrity, there’s the as-stark-as-you-can-get issue of honesty in the way the two “extremes” are currently handling this story.

As Media Matters, The Washington Post, USA Today, the Department of Justice, Slate and others have all reported — (none of whom are funded by a looney Asian religious cult or a company that just got done paying almost $800 million in damages for its last long-running carnival of lies and bullshit) — the “FBI informant”, Mr. Smirnov, arrested by the Trump-appointed special counsel, is an almost cartoonish joke. He’s so farcical any respectable journalist could check him out in an hour. No news organization with any respect for facts would have tolerated him as the foundation for so much coverage. Not for an hour, much less for years.

But such is the seal of the bubble around America’s MAGA conservatives today. Almost nothing intrudes on what they so desperately want to hear and believe. They offer the Epoch Times, the FoxNews/Hannitys/Jesee Watters/Lauta Ingrahams of the world their embittered credulity and those “sources” exploit it.

Biden is a weak, frail, cognitive mess: Sean Hannity #biden - YouTube

But despite the demise of any basis of fact with the arrest of Mr. Smirnov, The MAGA Credulous are not getting anything remotely like an apology or a correction from their most trusted purveyors of truth.

My apologies if you’ve already heard this:

From The Washington Post … “… no one on Fox News invested more heavily in the ‘Biden bribe’ story than Hannity. An analysis from Media Matters determined that he has covered the allegation in at least 85 segments since it first emerged in May 2023. On Thursday night, he had nothing to say about the new development. Instead, he began by focusing, once again, on [Atlanta DA Fani] Willis. Viewers who tuned in at 7 p.m. had, by 9:30, gotten an hour and 40 minutes of commercial-interspersed discussion of the hearing involving the Georgia official.”

Said Media Matters, ” … Hannity alone aired 85 segments promoting the claim, including 28 monologues. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump estimates that Fox News mentioned the claim about 2,600 times in the last 12 months.”

Two thousand six hundred mentions — including 43 on camera, primetime interviews with MAGA’s beknighted committee chairman, James Comer — about assertions, that Fox and Hannity knew were just assertions, but they nevertheless presented as “bombshell” facts. Assertions, (the official-sounding “1023s” Hannity referenced so often are in fact just that, a statement of as yet uninvestigated assertions), in no way, shape or form verified.

James Comer Pretty Sure Biden Did Something Illegal; Maybe - MeidasTouch Network

And to date this morning, three days post arrest and implosion, there has not been a peep of remorse or apology from anyone at FoxNews. Not that any of us in this “extreme” bubble are surprised, of course. Reckless assertions and the unapologetic peddling of … well, lies … is built into the Fox business model. We expect no more. And much less.

My point here is the contrast. The contrast a value-free “putz” and anyone on America’s new MAGA right refuses to make between the two allegedly equivalent “extremes”. The Fox/Epoch/Mark Levin/name your favorite MAGA mouthpiece and, the CNN and MSNBC “extreme.” For simplicity sake think of it as a Sean Hannity v. Rachel Maddow battle of “extremes.” (Lord, I’d love to watch a debate between those two. At The Sphere in Vegas. $500 a pop!)

Had either CNN or MSNBC engaged in anything as high-profile, bombastic, persistent and egregiously fallacious as what Hannity and FoxNews have done they’d be fired on the spot and faced with reputational ruin. At best they’d be a laughingstock.

But you and I know the Hannity engine — from the basement of his Palm Beach mansion – will plow on without the slightest wound of consequence.

Immunity from shame may be the biggest benefit of operating within that “extreme” bubble.

“They” Have Good Reason to Fear Taylor Swift

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The 'Taylor Swift Psyop' Freaks Need to Go Outside | National Review

I don’t think it’s my imagination. I really don’t. Not when every day it gets tougher and tougher to believe today’s Republicans have an ounce of respect for the intelligence of the average rube. Their average rubes. Not when in the course of a single week we had …

1: A dozen Colorado Republican congressional candidates — including “Beetlejuice” groper Lauren Boebert — being asked how many of them had ever been arrested? And half of them proudly shot up their hands … to the delight of the crowd that commenced hootin’ and hollerin’ in delight … at the sight of, you know, such bona fide maverick Wild West independence … or something.

2: Minnesota’s 8th District Congressman “Coach Pete” Stauber, a guy sent to D.C. solely because he can talk hockey to the marginally literate of the far north, boasting to his fellow puckheads about how he “advocated” for the billion dollars of federal money to rebuild the giant Blatnik Bridge to Superior. When in fact he … oh damn, you already knew the punchline … he caved to MAGA group think and voted against all those high-paying construction jobs.

And 3: And now, a whole host of once-upon-a-time Republican presidential candidates, (pseudo-intellectual/inflamed hemorrhoid Vivek Ramaswamy), Fox, NewsMax and OAN anchors and pundits plus … plus! … the guy who did so well selling the story of Hillary Clinton eating babies in the basement of a pizza parlor … that has no basement … freaking out about Taylor Swift rigging the the Super Bowl and the next election.

I freely concede I live in a bubble where this kind of stuff strikes me as … mmmm, what’s the word I’m looking for? … well how about “stupid” until I can come up with something better? (“Batshit” has been worn thin describing this crowd.)

But the Swift thing, besides so vividly demonstrating how afraid the MAGA-nauts are of one cute, fabulously wealthy young lady, is interesting because her influence over her fans, most of them young to young-ish women is both extraordinary and immense. Any of us who have followed pop culture for decades have to admit we’ve seen nothing — nothing — like her Eras tour or the devotion her fans have to her.

The still on-going tour has been a campaign across the globe that made her a billionaire because in large measure she was selling joyful community via high professional standards. (Ok, and high prices, too.) Point being, all her songs about relationships gone wrong withstanding, her affect is of someone who respects her audience and holds herself to standards respectful of truth (sometimes hard truths) and decency towards others. Fans may shriek and sing along and wave their flashing Swiftie bracelets without giving a lot of explicit thought to such virtues, but they feel it … and in Swift’s case, based on what we and the MAGA crowd can see, she lives the virtues she sings about.

Including the virtue of not being a sap for the bastards of the world.

Therein lies the fear she strikes into the (mmmmm, gotta come up with a new word) cynical thought leaders as they contemplate what she might be able to do with a political endorsement later this year.

Being a (very) shrewd businesswoman, Swift no doubt calculates the impact of “coming out” for say Joe Biden might have on her remarkably unblemished celebrity. Sure, there’s a percentage of her fan base that would react negatively. Certainly to an overt endorsement. But what percentage would you put that at? 10%? 15%?

She has 534 million social media followers. She can lose 50 million and still be a goddam force of political nature … if she wants to be.

The sense she’s giving at the moment is less about doing something as heavy-handed as popping up on the Jumbotron at the Super Bowl and telling all Swifties everywhere to “Vote for Joe”. It’s more — and this is savvy and wise in so many ways — simply making the persistent case to, “Vote and vote for the right thing. Vote for racial justice, gender justice, honesty and intelligence and respect for everyone, including yourself.” Presented that way, the average Swiftie — a lot of them smart young ladies — has very little difficulty discerning who of the two strange old geezers running for The Big Job embodies those virtues best.

Ms. Swift is an unprecedented phenomonon, in no small part due to her masterful manipulation of social media. She gets her message across. Instantly. And by virtue of her … well, professional virtues … her message has startling credibility with her millions of fans, (unlike, say Ted Nugent or Kid Rock), a large portion of whom may never have voted before and wouldn’t now other than she — their gold standard for fun and decency — says it’s important.

And for that reason Sean Hannity and the usual collection of incel folk heroes are rightfully terrified of her.

Heh.

Lights! Camera! Places! The Trial of the Century!

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How the Fox News hosts show up in the Dominion lawsuit documents

With apologies to Johnny Depp, Amber Heard, Gwyneth Paltrow and O.J. Simpson, the trial of the century, or the past 100 years begins Monday in Delaware. That’s when FoxNews, the prime purveyor of misinformation into our modern marketplace of ideas, has to explain why it was OK or “newsworthy” to defame Dominion Voting Systems in order to keep its ratings and revenue up.

I am not the only great legal mind baffled by the lack of a settlement in this case. Given the astonishing disclosures in the deposition/pre-trial phase, with popular Fox hosts chattering about how they “hate” Donald Trump, how “insane” the idea of a stolen election is, and how they have to keep up the dense screen of smoking bullshit to mollify their (none too bright?) viewers, how does anything get better in a court room when all the redactions are lifted and Sean Hannity … Sean Hannity … is put under cross examination?

I heard someone compare this trial — which may or may not be televised – more on that in a moment — to the 1925 Scopes/Monkey trial, where the legal system had to make a seismic judgment on the validity of evolution. (I can only imagine Hannity’s thinking on something as woke and science-y as that.) It’s a fair comparison.

There’s always a danger in over-blowing the importance of any legal event. But whether Fox is found guilty of recklessly and deeply cynically promoting a storyline lacking any evidence whatsoever — and certainly amplified the kind of rabid thinking that led to a deadly riot on the U.S, Capitol is, you know, kind of a bigger deal than if Johnny Depp was a drugged-out bastard or Gwyneth failed to get out of the way of a dude on a ski slope. This case is a bona fide cultural moment.

Theories and histories and courses are already being written and taught on the role Fox and other forums of right-wing transgressive entertainment have had on American culture. This trial, with Fox dealing from a very weak hand, has the potential to fully expose the shameless, naked cynicism of a wildly lucrative and influential enterprise … to those who choose to hear it.

As of today, Saturday, no decision has been made on media requests for the trial to be televised, a la Depp v Heard, or the People v O.J. or Derek Chauvin. It will be a startling decision if the request is denied.

I mean, could the people involved, from Rupert Murdoch on down through Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Maria Bartiromo and … Sean Hannity … be any more prominent public figures inspiring any greater legitimate public interest in how they defend what they presented … on television … to millions of credulous viewers? The answer is “no.”

The presiding judge has already made things more difficult for Fox by declaring that they can not argue that the near hourly infusion of steaming offal was “newsworthy” and therefore a legitimate journalistic effort on their part. (You know, let’s hear from both sides. You first and foremost, Rudy Giuliani.) The judge has also registered displeasure with Fox playing cute about Rupert’s role as some kind of out of touch figurehead of the operation with no day to day authority over what went on. (The judge has also ruled that the prosecution can’t draw lines from Giuliani and Sidney Powell, the Kraken lady, and what happened on January 6.)

As part of my prep work, reading up and listening to (abundant) punditry on the trial, I can offer the following.

1: It is likely it is Dominion, not Fox, who is refusing to settle, on the grounds that this case is so strong and that actual malice is so clearly evident. “You want to negotiate, Rupert? Our number remains a firm $1.6 billion, plus an on-air apology from Tucker Carlson.”)

2: If Fox loses this case, it will almost certainly keep on appealing, all the way to … wait for it … Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh and the rest of the Supreme Court. The thinking being that this so clearly a defining, precedent-setting moment in First Amendment litigation and the privileges of journalism that it requires full and final judgment from … the highest and most incorruptible court in the land. (Expect Sam Alito to quote something from the Code of Hammurabi.)

3: Just as Fox is saying almost nothing about Clarence Thomas’ sleazy relationship with a billionaire, expect that the name of Bill Kennard will come up often, in court and on Fox’ prime time entertainment shows. Kennard is partner in the private equity crew that owns a majority share of Dominion Voting Systems, along with being a former Ambassador under Barack Obama, a contributor to both Obama and Bill Clinton as well as a board member for AT&T and a couple other mega corporations. Fox will not be able to resist trying to sell the idea that Kennard’s presence exposes just another woke, deep state, radical socialist, George Soros-inspired, ultra liberal attack on hard working truth tellers.

4: If Rupert Murdoch can’t get himself out of testifying based on his age and fragile health he’ll be key to dropping the guillotine blade on … others. I mean, the poor guy. He’s got to still be emotionally drained after e-mailing wife #3 that their marriage was over and dumping potential bride #4 for her religious zealotry. A guy like that can get on a private jet, hell, does Delaware even have a cement runway? But if he testifies, he will almost certainly spin the argument that those “others”, namely Maria Bartiromo, Jeanine Pirro and Lou Dobbs actually believed the stuff he’s called “crazy” in conversations with Fox execs. How much do you figure those three are spendiong in legal fees these days?

5: Sans settlement, the trial could last several weeks. Weeks that the Fox audience will see precious little relating to the shameless perfidy of it’s most popular hosts, and plenty about how the justice system is rigged against free speech. Various scattered pundits, desperate for a contrarian angle on the progress of the trial, will clutch pearls and fret about the precedent this sets. Wild lawsuits against honest operations who try as best they can to get the story right, report accurately and quickly apologize for any inadvertent errors!

Ignore them. Those people are fools.

What makes the Fox – Dominion suit so fundamental and profound is that no other major television news corporation in history has gone so rogue with the journalism basics of truth telling as Fox News. They are a stark and colossal outlier to fair-mindedness and good faith.

If you’re in the news game, the only precedent you need to observe is not acting with malice in pursuit of making a buck, or a billion and a half bucks …annually … for years. … from an audience that doesn’t care if you’re lying to them.

The Number of White Teachers About to Get Fired is Exactly … Zero.

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Anytime there’s a school or teacher flap in the news it helps to have an expert right here on the premises. Ladies and gentlemen, I offer you The Lovely Mrs., a veteran of 37 years teaching senior high English in the great state of Minnesota.

If you have a Trumper in your social orbit you no doubt heard bone-on-bone caterwauling the other day about the Minneapolis school district going “full woke radical” and laying off white teachers regardless of seniority. I certainly did, without quite understanding what ignited the outrage that was built into the new contract language months ago.

But lordy, lordy! A quick Google search of “Minneapolis … white teachers … fired first” found more than 30 “news reports”, the most-trafficked from Murdoch-owned operations howling about the blatant “racism” in the radical socialist hell hole we know as Minneapolis. (Gotta love the sources for their reporting.) And if you need video, there were selected black folks on Sean Hannity’s show railing against the injustice to … mmmm … white folks. Teachers, to be specific.

Color me very confused.

i ask you, “Who in the hell is getting fired? Or laid off? Or in the coagulated verbiage of the Teachers Union’s contract, “If excessing a teacher who is a member of a population underrepresented among licensed teachers in the site, the district shall excess the next least senior teacher, who is not a member of an underrepresented population’.” (“Excessing?” … for chrissake, who writes shit like that?)

The short answer to the question of which Minneapolis teachers are getting canned and forced to work at the Wendy’s drive-through is … exactly … no body.

That’s because every day there are a half dozen other stories reporting the 200, 300, pick-a-scary number of teachers the Minneapolis district needs to … hire … right now … in order to have enough to educate our little savants this coming school year. So no. The answer to the Pop Quiz: “How many patriotic white men and women are going to be cruelly axed to satisfy woke liberals?” is … zero. Certainly today and for as far into the future as any actual education expert can predict.

But, you know, when you’re in the outrage business, woke liberal blue state racists destroying the careers of decent white people is absolutely irresistible. Get it in the “A” block and sell it!

But back to The Lovely Mrs, who has no end of horror stories of incompetent faculty colleagues and incompetent school administrators. The latter being guilty of failing to do their job, which includes culling out the lazy, lazier and laziest regardless of color or seniority. The crowd as she often says who “laminated their lesson plans 20 years ago and haven’t updated anything since.”

This unfortunately connects to stories of administrators perpetually conniving to run off people who they simply took a personal disliking to.

Human nature. It’s a bitch.

But, no. Just no. Exactly like the outrages over Critical Race Theory (get a furious Trumper to even explain what he thinks it is), the IRS kicking down the door of your trailer to collect back taxes or Ilhan Omar mandating Sharia Law on the Iron Range, this one has no connection to a real and imminent reality.

But, don’t let me ruin your fun. Howl away.

If Now Isn’t the Time to Assess Blame When Is?

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In every American crisis there’s a moment like the one after the 2018 Parkland High School slaughter. A woman found her way into an exclusive Republican fund-raising event on toney Key Biscayne across the water from downtown Miami. She wheedled her way through the crowd of politicians and big ticket donors until she found Paul Ryan, then Speaker of the House.

Polite and deferential to start, she eventually asked Ryan if he was, “Here celebrating the death of 17 children.” At this point the silver-tongued Ryan waved her off saying that despite being the star attraction at a political fund-raiser he, “didn’t want to talk politics”. The line is a variation on the tried and true, “Now is not the time to talk [insert whatever the crisis of the moment is all about.]” (Here’s a few more examples of the same thing.)

There’s an amusing but deadly dark tussle going on amid the torrent of COVID-19 news. This, in case you’ve been distracted by the rapidly escalating death toll, the administration ordering thousands of body bags and dodging basic questions like when will it produce enough tests to moderate the near total lockdown of American society, is the matter of suing FoxNews and other key members of the right-wing disinformation network. For what? For their culpability in the spread of the contagion.

Sharp-witted and sharp-elbowed tech columnist Kara Swisher launched into Sean Hannity in her Tuesday column, using her 80 year-old mother, a Hannity super-fan as an example of the very high cost of the crap (a polite word) regularly spewed by Hannity to his millions of credulous listeners and viewers.

“Facebook was not my mother’s source of misinformation (in fact, the company has been trying to improve in this area). It was not the fault of Dr. Google, which has at least pushed out more good information than bad. And my mom doesn’t use Twitter. Instead, it was Fox, the whole Fox and nothing but the Fox. Many children of older parents have come to know this news diet as the equivalent of extreme senior sugar addiction mixed with a series of truly unpleasant and conspiracy-laden doughnuts.”

While a lawsuit over Fox’s role in feeding Donald Trump and TrumpNation ludicrously erroneous and arguably lethal misinformation, to the point that Fox-Trumpers continued on with activities that led to the infection and deaths of god knows how many others is a delicious thing to imagine. A kind of Scopes Trial for the Trump era. Another sweaty courthouse lawn somewhere. Perhaps Palm Beach in July. A trial of not just Trump, but the larger network of astonishingly cynical interests that have enabled and invested in him.

But that, as Swisher writes, isn’t going to happen. Modern America doesn’t work that way. Nevertheless, Hannity has gone ballistic, calling Swisher every name he can use on air (and Twitter) while – of course – failing to disprove any of the accusations of naked mendacity she posed against him.

He’s sweating. He can feel the first draft of history’s dim view of what he’s done.

TrumpNation is up on its arthritic hind legs, snarling and hissing through the few good incisors they have left that liberals are exploiting the pandemic to undermine Trump. It’s a more personalized, cultish variation on, “Now is not the time … to assess blame for how bad this pandemic has become in the richest and most technologically advanced society on the planet.”

But it very much is. Now is the time to make damn certain there is no doubt in a fat majority of Americans’ minds why this is as bad as it is, and why it could have been much less worse. Fewer infected. Fewer dead. Fewer livelihoods destroyed.

Given everything that is known and provable — just at this point in the crisis — of what Trump knew, what he was told by our intelligence agencies, by the likes of the CDC’s Dr. Nancy Messonier and what he then failed to do, what diametrically opposed “untruths” he told his gullible, credulous fan base about the likelihood and lethality of what was coming is nothing less than a catastrophic failure of character and duty.

And as much as I wish I could say that is hyperbolic. It’s not. Look around you.

Among the Usual Sage Heads of punditry and establishment media there’s this attitude that it’s est to wait. “This will all get sorted out once the crisis is over,” and “there will government hearings.” Please. As with any meaningful response to our weekly gun slaughter, “Now is not the time … ” is the all-important first step to … doing nothing. To letting the perps skate, and enduring the same tragedy all over again.

If you’re out there rattling your phone lines, your e-mail, your Facebook postings, your Zoom meet-ups, your Twitter accounts and your socially distant dog walks with your neighbors pounding the point that this is, verifiably and conclusively, the worst failure of an American president in the country’s history and that it is still failing, good on you. That’s informed citizenship. That’s a sonic wave with potentially critical vibrations.

In order to defeat the virus, fraud and incompetence have to be brought under control … now. Not a year from now in some musty D.C. hearing room with Devin Nunes cross-examining Anthony Fauci.

Governors and mayors and first responders have their hands (too) full because of Trump (and FoxNew’s) malfeasance and mendacity. Support them every way you can. But don’t mistake the importance, right now and for weeks and months to come, of seizing this moment.

What moment? The moment to write history. To establish beyond any doubt who fcked up and how badly. As you may have heard, history is written by the victors.

Good Luck, Portland.

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So it’s “Portlandia v. Trumpistan” this Sunday in Oregon. Organizers of the June 10th rally against Sharia Law, without question the most imminent threat to free-range espresso sipping Oregonians anyone can imagine, has been cancelled. But Sunday’s “Pro Trump free speech” rally is still on. Because … well because free speech is still a thing around here, at least in the uber-holistic paradise known as Portland.

As you may have heard, the Mayor and the cops aren’t too thrilled with this. But a court refused to revoke the permit on the grounds that the organizers got it fair and square. Nevertheless, the potential for some kind of telegenic mayhem is very high, since every affiliate satellite truck and crew for 500 miles is going to be scanning the scene for the slightest hint of confrontation between Trumpers and pissed off lefties eager to show the country that skinhead/tinfoil goobers are not representative of their misty green city.

Except of that they are, just as they’re representative of increasingly emboldened factions everywhere else in ‘Murica. Which is why I get more fascinated (and concerned) every day at the thought of what this “pro-Trump free speech” crowd will do when, as I believe, Trump himself inevitably disintegrates and is replaced.

At the moment, living in separate bubbles as we do, the impression in mine is that the 60 million who voted for The Donald last November have been cowed back to a fraction of that number — to only the most whacked-out goobers — and that forces of reason have gained the upper hand. But in the other bubble, the one that holds “the failing New York Times” and “the Clinton News Network” and pencil-necks like Rachel Maddow, Ezra Klein and David Frum in utter contempt, and suckles at the addictive teat of Breitbart, NewsMax and Sean Hannity, the hardening perception is that the election of the guy (Donald) for whom they waited their entire lives is being invalidated and revoked in front of their eyes by exactly the domineering snobs who have oppressed their friends and them for generations.

So … I don’t see them sitting still for The Donald’s shall we say “deinvestiture” by the same corrupt urban elite pencil necks. They will certainly be encouraged by their, uh, “thought leaders”, to rally and rage more vigorously than ever before as they see Trump being castrated by the “administrative state” they sent him to DC to blow up. And by “vigorously” I mean physically, as though they’re the last militia between “freedom” and “tyranny”.

The guess is this is what has Portland’s Mayor and cops spooked about this “free speech” event this Sunday. If you are prone to worrying about a face-to-face clash between the farthest right and the farthest left in the country today, both eager to make a defining statement, well, here’s leafy, piney Portland for test run #1.

It’s worth remembering that when Richard Nixon waved goodbye and disappeared into that chopper 31% of the country still supported him. But that was back in the day when even the gnarliest redoubt Republican had some exposure to the likes of Walter Cronkite. Today, the “pro-Trump free speech” base, literate really only in the Second Amendment, has very little if any routine contact with mainstream news (i.e. reality), other than being told by the likes of Breitbart and Trump that it’s all “fake.”

This crowd is running on a much higher octane mix of delusion than the Republicans of 1974.

Mix gas like that and a wildfire of stoked rage and we’ve got a bigger problem than the cops in Oregon.

What Spawned Who … Among the Body Slammin’ GOP?

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NEW BLOG PHOTO_edited- 3With Greg “The Body-Slammer” Gianforte’s unequivocal victory in Montana last night there’s a lot of hand-wringing talk about how this is the latest example of “The Trump Effect”, “the fish rotting from the head down”, yadda yadda. And with the statistically demonstrable upsurge in anti-Muslim activity around the country, compounding what is already an intolerable level of racist attitudes by authority figures, it’s hard to make a case that The Donald’s success hasn’t unleashed something pretty sick and unevolved in our “shining city on the hill”.

But come on. Donald Trump, essentially an ideological illiterate, a guy whose trademark is exploiting weaknesses, financial, political and moral, to his personal advantage hardly invented the pig-headed brutishness displayed by Republican candidate Gianforte or his Big Sky supporters, (many of who possibly voted for him before he smacked that “aggressive liberal journalist” to the ground.)

I’ve been on a couple “Fake News” panels in recent weeks and my now standard line is that “fake news”, with all the demagogic recklessness and viciousness attached to it is part of an established, profitable and electorally successful  continuum from — to pick a recent start point — talk radio in the early 1990s, FoxNews in the mid-to-late ’90s, all the crackpot websites of the mid-aughts to Trump’s victory last fall. Point being, Trump exploited the grievance-saturated messaging of all that came before him to draw out a crowd that had been sitting on the sidelines for years and propel him to victory. Whether he personally believes any of what he bellowed at them hardly matters. (In sales, it’s often the bullshit — the not caring if something is true or false — that closes the deal.)

Trump is the product of every “conservative entertainment complex” huckster and every Republican politician who kow-towed to … a collection of radio jocks. They are the head of the rotting fish. Trump is just a guy who applied full caricature to the extant mob mentality and got himself appointed grand marshal of their parade.

This “Anyone Who Kicks Ass on A Pencil-Necked Liberal East Coast Faggot Reporter Is My Kinda Guy” moment in Montana comes simultaneous with Sean Hannity’s on-going, obnoxious exploitation of a young guy’s murder in D.C. — in his cynical, fevered mind a clear connection to Cruella de Vil rat-bastard Hillary Clinton and everyone trying to blockade The Donald’s visionary conservative plan to make ‘Murica great again. While even FoxNews has reversed course on the story, Hannity has persisted, despite repeated pleas from the kid’s family to stop the aggravation of their suffering.

But the carefully strategized, generation-long interplay of low information news, shameless delusion and naked grievance — and oh hell, through in a fat dose of barroom clodishness — has worked so well for Hannity (and FoxNews under Roger Ailes) that it’s impossible to resist. Junkies to the next meth hit, my friends.

By the way, hat tip to pal Jim Leinfelder for alerting me to this classic Matt Taibbi screed at Rolling Stone on the passing of Ailes and culture, of Gianforte-style Republicanism.

Says Taibbi at one point, “[Ailes] is on the short list of people most responsible for modern America’s vicious and bloodthirsty character. We are a hate-filled, paranoid, untrusting, book-dumb and bilious people whose chief source of recreation is slinging insults and threats at each other online, and we’re that way in large part because of the hyper-divisive media environment he discovered. Ailes was the Christopher Columbus of hate. When the former daytime TV executive and political strategist looked across the American continent, he saw money laying around in giant piles. He knew all that was needed to pick it up was a) the total abandonment of any sense of decency or civic duty in the news business, and b) the factory-like production of news stories that spoke to Americans’ worst fantasies about each other. The onetime Nixon operative has created the most profitable propaganda machine in history. Inside America’s Unfair and Imbalanced Network. Like many con artists, he reflexively targeted the elderly – ‘I created a TV network for people from 55 to dead’, he told Joan Walsh – where he saw billions could be made mining terrifying storylines about the collapse of the simpler America such viewers remembered, correctly or (more often) incorrectly, from their childhoods.”

Taibbi is a modern master of cathartic rants, and that was one of the most invigorating hits of pure oxygen I’ve read in a while.

The takeaway though is that fundamentally, Trump (and Body Slammin’ Gianforte) are products of what Ailes and Rush Limbaugh and all the other self-interested purveyors of grievance and rage have created. They’re the people who primed his audience.

So let’s give credit where credit is due.

The Donald’s Lost Twitter Rampage

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NEW BLOG PHOTO_edited- 3Apparently 12 million Twitter followers and the press were so flabbergasted by The Donald’s graveyard shift rantings Thursday night they missed all the good stuff that followed. Fortunately, I’ve captured everything since, including misspellings

8:35 am … Wheels up on classiest plane ever. Chik-Fillet brunch. First class company w/first class people. Mayor Rudy telling very funny Mexican joke. #CrookedHillary still eating krumpets? Let’s see those cankles! #NoCanklesOnMelania.

8:46 am …  Saw no ratings @MorningJoe  w/#RiggedMedia calling ME crazy!? Where did Mika spend the night? @Joe’sPlace? Lots of people say so. Must be true. So many low class #DyingNewYorkTimes  “experts” Not!

8:52 am …  #PuckeredForDemocratsCNN “amazed” by me calling out #CrookedHillary for getting duped by #SexTapeMissU. Know what’s amazing? #ClintonNewsNetwork still in biz. Loser TV for losers!

8:55 am … Bloomberg TV. Show some kohonays and watch #FatTrampMissUSexTape. Total trash!!! WORST MissU ever!!! Couldn’t do sit-ups when I sat on her. Will fix Bloomberg problem when in WH!!!

9:01 am … #BestInBizFox&Friends says it like it is. #BlubberButtMissU Clinton Democrat. People say in 1996 too. Probably true. #Brilliant Steve Doozey in better shape than #FlabbyArmsMissUWhiningDemocrat. #NoFlabOnMelania.

9:06 am … Got call from #ShouldBeOnSupremeCourtSeanHannity saying #RiggedMedia unfair as usual. Watched #AlwaysBloatedThirdWorldMissUSexTape. Says it proves #AlwaysRightDonaldJTrump was against Iraq war in ’96. #CorruptRiggedNYTimes will ignore. Unfair!!!!

9:11 … #CrookedHillary still not showing cankles! Why hiding? Hobbled on stage at empty rally. People saying she has gout and Alzheimers. Must be true. WHO is “unhinged”?????? Did #OneGuyYouCanAlwaysBelieveDonaldJTrump give LON WET KISS to ISIS? No. #RiggedMedia will not report.

9:14 am … #NoRatingsChannelsABCNBCCBSMSNBC still saying I lost debate! Total losers! #TrustBreitbart says #DonaldJTrumpInKnockOut cleaned #CrookedHillary’s flabby clock. #DrudgeBest poll said so BEFORE DEBATE WAS OVER!!!! #MelaniaClockNotFlabby.

9:22 am … #PatheticSenateRepublicans “embarrassed” by #ReallyNastySoDirtyYouGottaSeeItPorkyMissUSexTape. So many losers. Have you seen their wives? Reason why. #MelaniaStillRockingBikini.

9:33 am … Just got note from #BrilliantWillBeOnTrumpSupremeCourtRogerAiles. Says #CrookedHillary paying off #RiggedMedia. Roger very misunderstood. Very unfair what #LowRatingsDyingMedia saying about him. Smart viewers like blondes. Everyone knows. #EvenThoughMelaniaNotBlonde.

9:41 am … #OldFlabbyThinksShe’sFunnyDemocratSenatorMcGasket says I should have daily “weigh in”. Ask Dr. Oz! 236 pounds! Great stamina!!! Ask #NoBodyFatMelania. So many lies!!! SO UNFAIR!!!  America wants change. #VeryStrongDonaldJTrumpWillJailFlabbyDemocrats.

10:03 am … Landed for #HugeEnormousRally. People say crowd lined up since July. Must be true. I don’t know. Three miles long. Sounds right. Democrat fire marshall refused so many. Very unfair! #DemocratFireMarshallsWillBeFired.

10:17 am … Fabulous reception in #GreatestAmericanCityEastBogaloosa from #OnlyGreatAmericansWantDonaldJTrump!!!!  Great looking “Bikers for Trump” supporter w/Trump’sNoPussy face-tattoo said it best. “Save Us from Crooked Cankle Bitch!” So many good-looking people!

10:44 am … Called out #LousyCrummyRatingsRiggedMediaReporters at back of rally! Really unfair!!! So biased.!!! #PutinRealLeader knows what to do. Not like #VeryWeakKenyanWithPeopleStillSayingNotRealBirthCertificate. So many not so great looking girl reporters. #JealousOfMelania. Many with #ButtAsBigAsFatSluttyWorstMissUEver. Disgrace!!!!

11:13 am … Wheels back up. First class lunch on #World’sMostFabulousAirplane. Chickenfingers. Gravy. Coke. Best in world American food!!! #MelaniaSickInToiletButStillHotterThanRosieO’DonnellThatPig.