The entire time Ron DeSantis was on his whirlwind five nation tour, he looked as if he was a big, stupid hound at a strange dog park. He knew he had to be there but didn't know which dog's ass to sniff. It was capped off in London, where DeSantis was there ostensibly to meet with British business leaders to sort of, kind of shore up trade relations between Florida and the UK.
Let's just say GINO (Governor in Name Only) DeSantis left the Big Business bigwigs a little... underwhelmed. Forget the fact that the bulk of the UK's US trade relations are being conducted with Biden's White House or that DeSantis isn't even a declared presidential candidate at this point. For more sheer awkwardness, you'd have to look at this guy and his lonely little photo op before Number 10 in 2012.
No, there weren't any embarrassing photos of DeSantis eating blood pudding with three fingers,
but there was still plenty of faux pas to go around for the international
media. He'd just flown in from Jerusalem, in which he'd yelled at a
reporter for asking him questions about his advocacy of torture when he
was a shyster at Gitmo. He'd just sued a fictional mouse and Ft.
Lauderdale was still underwater, which he still hasn't even mentioned.
Those who'd seen DeSantis said he'd looked "spent", as if he was at the end of a state trip, which he was, even if the state is Florida. Others said he looked bored and stared at his feet because, gosh darn it, Ron still hasn't adjusted to the fact that he sometimes has to share space with other carbon-based life forms. Another described him as looking like a state-level official because, well, he is.
Basically, what a small chunk of the world saw was what they got- a tuckered-out, overrated bureaucrat at the end of a long road trip that never should've been taken. What they didn't get was a statesman-in-waiting, a serious politician moving up in the world.
Maybe next time, GINO should wear his Dallas Cowboys cheerleader boots. Maybe he'll get more serious attention.
Nobody
pays nearly a million and a half bucks to two companies to research
whether Italian satellites and Hugo Chavez's corpse threw the election
unless you've swallowed the lies hook, line and sinker. This doesn't
prove criminal intent but it does prove Trump is crazier than a
shithouse rat on fire.
Yes, she actually said this. In public. In Congress, in fact.
"Are you going to be free again in the next 35 to 40 years?"
Better to deal with the Devil you know than the Devil you don't? Hey, guys, here's an idea: Stop dealing with the fucking Devil.
So,
let me get this straight- He molested a little boy who was hardly more
than a toddler, after the family buried one of their relatives, and he's
literally going to walk without seeing the inside of a jail cell? What a
country!
Wow, who knew that the guy who sued a fictional mouse would be such a fan of torture?
The
NC Supreme Court screwed the pooch by reversing itself and said hyper
partisan right wing gerrymandering is fine with them, after all. And finally...
(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari)
Some things should never be sequelized or attempted to be improved upon. New Coke. Speed 2. Or Trump's latest campaign. And Trump's 2024 bid for president, his fifth, is the Speed 2 of presidential campaigns.
The original Speed, with Keanu Reeves, was indisputably one of the greatest action movies of the 90s. But when Reeves, before he decided to reprise virtually every role he ever played, decided not to appear in the sequel, the producers should've known better than to cast Jason Patric and just trust that Sandra Bullock would carry the movie. Not even her beauty and Willem Dafoe's bug-eyed theatrics could salvage that wreck.
It was obvious from the gitgo that the entire movie was made just to show the ocean liner crashing onto shore at the end. It was, after all, part of the Speed franchise. And it seems Donald Trump is taking the ending of that abortive effort to heart, whether or not he knows it, because his campaign is essentially doing the same thing as the ocean liner- Crashing its opulence into a neighborhood whether or not it wants it.
This is the Trump Train, permanently off its rails, preventing people from leaving when they saw the wheels were no longer on the rails. The crash comes every time Trump posts something on Truth Social, namely a video. These tend to be third rate guerilla marketing projects if done by middle schoolers. They're always off-script. In every one, there's a few seconds of alleged edginess shot by camera two, making it look as if Trump's looking into the wrong camera.
Today's video was a masterclass in full-blown megalomania, with him spending literally the last half referring to himself in the third person, even referring to himself as "him". Another half minute of that drivel, he would've started using the definite article and referring to himself as "the Trump." Honk, hoooonk, here I come. There goes another neighborhood.
But it's not the same this time around. The man who'd once mobilized thousands to the Capitol on January 6th, 2021 couldn't muster more than a half a dozen to assemble in front of Trump Tower right after his indictment was announced. It could be said most of his fair weather supporters didn't want to meet the same fate as their J6 predecessors. It could even be said they didn't want to get injured or killed over Stormy Daniels.
But the plain fact is no one wants to get arrested, injured or killed over Trump, any more, especially when they're very mindful that he pardoned not a single rioter. He's lost his mojo. The groove is not coming back to Orange Stella.
So he gives withered versions of his 2016 rallies, depending heavily on tight shots and carefully-assembled human scenery in the background. Being black and seen at a Trump rally is guaranteed to get you a spot so you can see Trump's fat ass and the back of his ridiculous combover for the next two hours.
"But as for Wednesday, Donald is expected to celebrate Melania if his schedule allows him to be in Mar-a-Lago... Despite what you hear, the Trumps are a close family."
A lot of ink, both real and virtual, is going to be spilled about Tucker Carlson getting personally fired yesterday by Rupert Murdoch. While some may think it's newsworthy and represents an important paradigm shift in television journalism, I don't. Carlson is the very poster boy for the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
Carlson's career in television should've ended when he was epically taken down by Jon Stewart nearly 20 years ago. Indeed, just months after Stewart's appearance on CNN's Crossfire, Carlson was dumped. It would be the first of what would lead to Carlson's one singular greatest and unique achievement- Getting fired by all three major news networks.
"You're as big a dick on your show as you are on any show," Stewart told Carlson right before a commercial break. That was October, 2004, just days before the election, By January 2005, Crossfire was history (although it did make an ill-conceived and ill-fated comeback). Thanks to Jon Stewart, people had finally tired of the "Jane, you ignorant slut" format of debate shows.
Then Carlson claimed he voluntarily left CNN (just as it's claimed he left Fox voluntarily) and migrated to, in one of the worst hiring decisions in television history, MSNBC, which thought he'd make a fine addition to their stable of talent. They fired him, too.
When Donald Trump began his nightmarish ascent in 2015, comparisons were being made between him and Larry "Lonesome" Rhodes, the Andy Griffith character in his debut film, A Face in the Crowd. It was a ground-breaking film made in 1957 by Elia Kazan and Budd Shulberg that sought to be a cautionary tale as to the corrosive effects of television influence on the American public. It was released to mixed reviews in its time and, while it launched Griffith to stardom, the film was never a big box office draw. It was, simply, a film whose time had come yet was underappreciated by the people who'd missed that cautionary tale.
Since then, it's found another audience and fresh appreciation for its prescience. It's since joined the pantheon of movies that also strive to warn us of the danger of the unchecked power of personality such as Network and Elmer Gantry. But the post-cautionary tale taught to us by A Face in the Crowd could more seamlessly be superimposed over the likes of Tucker Carlson than Donald Trump.
1950s rural America was ripe for a character like Lonesome Rhodes and Kazan and Shulberg were savvy enough to spot that and to take steps to prevent us to feel compelled to ensure that a such a character would be invented to fill that void.
Lonesome Rhodes is first discovered in a drunk tank in Arkansas by radio journalist Marcia Jeffries, who invites the reprobate to expound on matters and play his guitar. His appeal is immediate and quickly leads to him getting his own radio show then eventually a TV show.
Unlike Rhodes, Tucker Carlson was born to wealth and privilege yet somehow was able to fail his way up the television food chain. But both men are cut from the same rotten piece of whole cloth. Both are self-interested sociopaths who innately loath anyone who isn't them. Like Rhodes, Carlson had denigrated his show's sponsors, his viewers, his colleagues and even the stuffy right wing politician he'd decided to prop up and turn into an Everyman.
When a mattress sponsor threatened to pull out, Rhodes sent his supporters to the store and burn mattresses in the street. He realizes that his words have power and that power was intoxicating. That was the moment that Rhodes transitioned from being merely a popular radio personality to a dangerous "demagogue in denim", as Walter Matthau's character had described him.
But secret recordings that today are all the rage proved to be Rhodes' downfall. Tucker Carlson's downfall, or part of it, came in the form of text messages.
Here's the crucial difference between the movie and real life- While Kazan and Schulberg plausibly relied on the self-interest of Rhodes' viewers to turn on him when the tapes came out, no such thing happened to Carlson. Even after the texts came out about how much he hated Trump and how he looked forward to the day when Fox could finally move on from him, he kept his three million viewer fan base. Trump, even, in contrast to Rhodes' Senate hopeful Worthington Fuller, not only never lashed out at Carlson but even defended him on Truth Social.
Carlson, at least for now, hasn't lost his fan base, if yesterday's antics on Twitter are any indication, even though it hasn't dawned on them that if Carlson hates Trump so much, his opinion of his voters can't be any kinder than his thoughts on certain M&Ms. Unlike the viewers in Kazan's movie, Carlson's viewers are too stupid to know they've been had any more than Trump's voters (essentially the same people) are unfazed by how disgusting he thinks they are ("How stupid are the people of Iowa?", anyone?).
This curious lack of self-respect would've made the ending in Kazan's movie absolutely impossible. How it did end was a powerful bit of film-making, with Rhodes demanding the love of those who worked for him when he realizes the walls are falling down around him. As he screams at a nearly empty room, only one sound engineer remains playing canned applause as the woman who literally raised him from the muck and mire walks out for good.
And, as with Carlson, it's speculated that Rhodes will land another gig somewhere on television or radio but will never again reach the heights he once had.
Television should've left him in the mud of the wayside after Stewart verbally butt-fucked him on his own show. But it didn't. MSNBC chose to hire him, then Fox and, in his 14 years on that network, he was once again allowed to climb to the top of the food chain, essentially running the MAGA movement, hence the modern-day Republican Party.
But now Carlson can't hold that movement together under a show. No one will be sending him any more insurrection videos for him to cherry-pick. Orban may still have him over in Hungary but it'll be purely a social call. Carlson may pop up in subsequent CPACs but, again, without a top-rated show, what's the use?
I guess it could be said that there's finally some accountability in MAGA world but there's no serious indication of that. Fox has already promised in its press release after the Dominion settlement that they're still committed to giving the American people the same right wing propaganda it's been giving them since 1996, with or without Tucker Carlson...
(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari)
I suppose what happened today to Tucker Carlson should've been looked upon as inevitable. He privately said one thing then went on the air and said the exact opposite. He was skeptical about the Big Lie then went on his show and promoted it, anyway. He hated Donald Trump yet sucked up to him whenever he had him on his show, including recently. Now, his former staffers are the ones dancing on hjs vocational grave.
But this is Fox News we're talking about here, the place where truth gets sent to the slaughterhouse in the name of corporate profits.
In a way, if one has an exceedingly, even insufferably generous, disposition, one can even feel a little sorry for Tucker. After all, he'd advanced the Big Lie and helped bring about the riot at the Capitol on January 6th because Rupert or at least his surrogates told him to. Then Rupert unceremoniously felled the axe on Tucker's well-fed neck in the name of corporate survival.
That's a nice fat one up the bum, eh?
Now would be a nice time to compare Tucker to his quasi namesake, Preston Tucker. Preston Tucker, of course, was the visionary behind the Tucker Torpedo, an automotive thing of beauty that Detroit thought was too far ahead of its time. Preston Tucker was the very delineation of the old phrase, "Fake it until you make it". There's that famous scene in which Tucker unveils the Torpedo for the first time. It's barely able to stand on its own wheels, an oil pan had to be placed beneath it to catch the oil that was dripping from the crankshaft. But, if you didn't look too closely, it was a scene reminiscent of Botticelli's Venus.
Preston Tucker was no con man. He sincerely meant to change the auto industry but the industry had other plans, plans that included ruining and bankrupting him.
Tucker Carlson is a true con man if ever there was one. No one knows what he stands for, unless one has access to his text messages as Dominion had in its successful lawsuit. But Dominion's suit was just the first brick to fall in the wall that had ably protected Carlson and his time slot. There was also Ray Epps' recent turn on 60 Minutes and, just before that, the first salvos in Abby Grossberg's own lawsuit against Fox.
To even a mummified war horse like Murdoch, all those were bridges too far to justify keeping Tucker on the payroll. In a way, it was a risky thing to do on two fronts- Number one, Carlson had the richest real estate not only on Fox but on all of cable television. Number two, Murdoch risks the wrath of the MAGA base that still makes up a significant portion of that crucial 25-54 demographic that he and senior management feared losing to OAN and Newsmax from the time of the 2020 election.
Now, it's all too easy to imagine Maria Bartiromo, who has the richest real estate among Fox's weekend shows, wandering in her dressing room, mouth agape as usual in confusion, wondering when she, too, will get called on the carpet. In his deposition to Dominion's attorneys, Murdoch had already proved that he was only too willing to throw Bartiromo, and Hannity, under the bus, while tacitly omitting that they lied to their viewers under the strenuous behest of people like Murdoch and his Fox CEO, Suzanne Scott, who screamed about market share.
Canceled in the USA
That was the self-pitying name that reanimated Neanderthal Danny "Bongos" Bongino chose for his show that finally became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Bongino left Fox just before Carlson, advancing a cover story that he and Fox couldn't come to terms for a contract extension. In other words, "They wouldn't pay me what I was worth". In reality, Bongos' low-rated show, which, if Fox was a city, would've been, at best, given midtown if not Lower East Side status, made Fox realize they didn't need to sign him. After all, his bloated portrait was never put up on Seventh Avenue. But Bongos is trying to position himself as leaving voluntarily.
But if Tucker can be so unceremoniously shown the door without a moment's notice, then it could happen to anyone. That includes Fox's True Believer, Maria Bartiromo, a lunatic who gave oxygen to an election-denier who actually admitted she got her electoral epiphanies from astral projection and time travel.
Yet, what Murdoch is doing is at once hypocritical, desperate and shameless. He essentially fired Carlson for doing exactly what he was ordered to do. If Murdoch was ever interested in doing the right thing, he wouldn't have fired the head of Fox's political desk, Chris Stirewalt, after calling Arizona for Biden on Election Night, which enraged both Trump and his MAGA lunatics. After all, as Murdoch said in his deposition, he never saw "red or blue but green".
So, yeah, like a major sports franchise in a major restructuring phase, Fox is willing to let go of its biggest talent no matter how well and reliably they bring in the advertising parishioners in the holy name of salary dumps. And, as said, after Carlson, no one is safe from the chopping block.
It can't even be said that Murdoch is even overly worried about losing money from settlements. The Dominion settlement represents about 28% of Fox's market cap and does little more than put a dent in its liquid capital pool (about four billion). Plus, as people with more experience in these matters tell us, a good chunk of that $787.5 million settlement will land on the American taxpayer.
This is good old fashioned corporate fat ass-covering at its finest, dressed up as a necessary function of doing business.
But there are no good guys in this story, so try not to look for one. Rupert Murdoch is the quintessential corporate cunt who couldn't conceive of doing the right thing unless there was a financial incentive to do so. Tucker Carlson is another type of corporate cunt who will dance like Pennywise in a Brooks Brothers suit whatever jig or waltz his boss tells him to dance. Ray Epps was at the Capitol like tens of thousands of other rioters. Abby Grossberg chose to work and to continue to work for both Bartiromo and Carlson despite being subjected to a hostile, anti-Semetic work environment.
And it can't be said even Dominion is the good guy here. They got four times from Fox what their own market cap was. Their goal was never to save democracy or the First Amendment but to get recompensed for whatever Fox cost them with their lies. This could have been a teaching moment, an object lesson as to what happens when a so-called news organization lies to its audience. But those idiots wanted to be lied to.
And now, they get to defray the cost of Rupert Murdoch's settlement for being fed the lies they demanded. What a country.
Now
you can add, "Fired, Effective Immediately" face.
Yes, Tucker Carlson is now out of a job and can now only boast "Swanson
Heir" to his list of current gigs and side hustles. According to news
sources like the LA Times, Tucker's abrupt fall from grace was
not only abrupt, it came from the top, namely Rupert Murdoch himself. Murdoch,
fresh from abruptly firing his own fiancée,
apparently saw the light, albeit belatedly, and saw Carlson for the rotting
albatross that he is and saw that Abby Grossberg's lawsuit, coming hot on the heels
of Dominion's own successful lawsuit, was the straw that broke the camel's
back.
I guess this means that Carlson will start angling for a job at
OAN or Newsmax, not that that would be a wise career move, or he'll do a neo
Nazi podcast like Steve Bannon's so they can fight for endorsements for anti
Bud Light Koozies.
He
was out on bond after attacking a woman with a fucking sledgehammer.
Because, yes, this is exactly the type of guy you want to put back out
on the street ASAP.
More
right wing rat-fuckery exposed. Trump operatives not only tried to
decertify the presidential election but also the two Senate elections
that were won by Warnock and Ossoff just two days before.
Anyone
unwilling to entertain the very real possibility that these are done
through extraterrestrial means should get their head examined. These
aliens can do surgical procedures beyond our technology's capabilities.
These
crooks always seem to forget the lesson imparted to us by Watergate-
That the coverup is always worse than the original crime. And finally...
Fucking fools. If you think mask mandates designed to keep your children
alive threaten you more than a deadly virus, then you deserve to be
chemically castrated and forbidden from parenting.
