Settled, But Not Over

 

Of course, I gasped with a bit of disappointment when we were just about to hear the opening arguments in the Dominion defamation case against Fox News, and then the delay...and then the news of a settlement. I know, $787,500,000 is not chump change, and Fox News definitely settled because they did not want the trial to go on but, but...

The dragging! Where was the great, beautiful Fox News dragging? I wanted to see Fox News hosting hoisting themselves on their own petard. Where's the spectacle? Where's the schadenfreude? 

It was, perhaps, never to be in this case. Here are the details: 

Dominion's legal team pursued a "to the pain" strategy, intending to inflict maximum discomfort for Fox and its proprietors in order to secure as big a payout and as public an apology from Fox News as possible. For Fox and its controlling owners, Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, it was worth the cost to pay for the spectacle to go away. 

For Fox, what evidence dribbled out in court hearings and court documents piled embarrassment upon embarrassment upon disgrace: 

Fox News chief executive Suzanne Scott warned her colleagues against running fact-checking segments by the network's own reporters debunking lies about election fraud, even as it gave such bogus claims acres of prime real estate.

The payout was a business decision between businesspeople, not a retribution against Fox News by the Avenging Spirit of Informed Democracy.  The thing that pisses me off isn't that they settled for a Very Interesting Sum, but that Fox News wasn't expected to make things right with respects to broadcasting the truth, on their own airwaves, in various timeslots, to correct the false impression they had created. 

And yet, the SOB thing about the Fox model, and right-wing media in general, is even the correction would be seen as something being "forced down their throats" by the liberal establishment, because this is the exact kind of fuckery they did on the brains of their loyal watchers. Faith, as in the belief in things unseen, and the ability to unhear what they never wanted to know. The Fox News watchers know what they want to believe and expect Fox to give it to them.

I really feel like only an exquisite dragging of the liars and jackasses who read "news" for Fox would have really done the necessary business.

Dominion says they will go on to make suit against other malefactors, and well, good luck to them. Maybe they will financially ruin some smaller outfit than Fox (OAN? Newsmax?) but undoing a lie is like trying to get toothpaste back in the tube. 

Now, Smartmatic says they are going to finish the job. I love that for them, and us, and Fox, if that's true. I still say Fox is in trouble--because I can't convince myself the bubble has yet been created that can't eventually be pierced, and I think the docs that Fox was hiding with respect to Rupert Murdoch must be very not great for them to have been hidden. 

But perhaps I should by now know to keep my hopes lower in the stratosphere. 

UPDATE: I find it interesting that investors are concerned that the business model has some real liabilities regarding coming onto contact with the truth. 

TWGB: The Doldrums

 

I don't know if this is anyone else's experience here in the longform blog community, but my engagement stats are in the doldrums, and I think it has a little bit a lot to do with the waiting. We're waiting on the indictments we feel like we were promised. But the chief purveyor of the arrest threat against Donald Trump came from Donald Trump for his own team's clicks, likes, and of course, remunerative values, and our hopes getting up was only a sideshow. 

But I do love getting my hopes up. I never set my sights on last Tuesday. That seemed a lot like forcing a response from the Trump brethren and cistern (is that not the right term?) and not really a signal to us lefties. But I want Trump to get a comeuppance. It is about the idea of justice being for all for me, and also for his fanclub understanding that his transgressions are not some hoax or joke but are real. I follow MSNBC lawyer folks and pretend Glenn Kirschner isn't blowing smoke up my skirt that we are gonna get a "Trump gets his time in the barrel", and yet there's a planned monthly break through most of April and I can't stand it. 

Why? Tell us we aren't getting an indictment now and fucking rip the Band-Aid off, Bragg you SOB, if that's how it is! Unless, unless, unless, unless...there's more to the story.  And I can't pretend I know, and I also can see a "strategery" behind postponing an indictment for a guy who tried to force the announcement of one. To get him when he expects it least. 

Giuliani, True Believer

 

Rudy says Sean Hannity, John Solomon, Bill Barr and Mike Pompeo betrayed Trump by suppressing and helping to cover up the Hunter laptop story in 2019-2020 when he brought it to them. pic.twitter.com/VHEZSdPlCk

— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) December 13, 2022

You know, I am cynical. But take the "two watches" thing: I think there could be something badly wrong with Giuliani, and I'm not actually just riffing off of his claims that other people are actually old/sick/nuts/dying.  None of the above people named: Hannity, Solomon, Barr, or Pompeo, were actively hostile to pitching anti-Biden disinfo. From the first impeachment, we know very well that all the above-named were on board with the search for Biden dirt.

John Solomon, who was featured on Hannity with his fabulist takes, was found by The Hill to be pushing poorly sourced and misleading bullshit--that mostly came from Rudy Giuliani. For their part, Barr admitting he was accepting information from Giuliani, and Mike Pompeo disagreed with the narrative that Hunter Biden's laptop was a Russian disinfo op. 

They weren't disagreeable to what Giuliani was pushing out, necessarily. But take where Barr ended up on that score: he wasn't going to go out of his way to endorse a dodgy product. I think all of these Trump supporters realized there has to be a morning after and there's a little thread of credibility you need to keep for yourself. And maybe they didn't like what they were smelling from Giuliani. 

And also, maybe Hunter Biden just sues your whole ass off if you are wrong. 

Giuliani is all in. Other people might want to have lives after Trump. Giuliani is this guy. Some gimmick is getting Trump back in office, and maybe, maybe, Giuliani won't even be an unpaid lawyer for Trump anymore and won't have to go without a pardon in his pocket. 

A guy can dream, right? AG Giuliani in Trump's second term. Loyalty paid off. (And it will never happen.) 

And needless to say, if Kevin McCarthy wants to go all in on hearings for the intelligence community professionals who signed a letter saying they didn't think the laptop story sounded kosher--he might just be airing why people who know what they are talking about think TrumpWorld is horrific for national security by politicizing every fucking thing without weighing actual national interest and truth concerns. 

Fox News Hates Families

 

what a monster pic.twitter.com/Nmj2HZl3BO

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 11, 2022

Last night, the above screencap sums up the argument that Sean Hannity wanted to make against President Biden--he's a loving father. 

That's it. Joe Biden, the man, not the politician, understood his son was going through a rough time and offered support and unconditional love, and that was...suspicious? As if, if your child was going through troubles, was imperfect, you should throw them out? 

It makes me wonder if conservatives like Hannity are the way they are because they don't have the grace to do that, and I understand a little better why they were ready to kill their own viewers with lies about COVID-19 and profoundly damage LGBT kids with lies meant to alienate their families from them, to not accept them for who they are. 

The most horrible lie--that we are not responsible to one another, that we don't need to care for one another, not even our own families, lies at the heart of it. Suddenly the sad stories of older people watching Fox News all day who can no longer talk to their family members makes sense--their sense of connectedness was undermined in a culture war. 

There is rehab for substance abusers. How does one rehab a person who does not understand compassion? How do you walk them through the baby-steps of learning to regard another human's feelings, their life? 

Fox News attacks Joe Biden through his family not because he is a bad man, but because he is not bad. But they must attack him somewhere, so they find what they think is the softest part. I do not think they understand--it is the strongest part. Compassion is the strength to support others, and Biden has used his time after time in a lifetime of loss and confrontation with the worries of the world. 

I am aghast they this is not understood, because it seems the most human thing to understand. 

TWGB: The News Fox Doesn't WANT You! To! Know!

 

Lara Trump: “This J6 hoax. This is the biggest scam .. This is total nonsense that you’re gonna see on Thursday .. The Democrats know people do not care about this .. people are more concerned with the super high gas prices.” pic.twitter.com/o1EjRxboJ2

— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) June 7, 2022

You'd never see Elon Musk go so far to protect a bullshit investment as Hotlips Trump goes to pretend that the insurrection her father-in-law started is not a biggie at all. It is hardly worth your time, she says. There is absolutely no plot under my sheet ossifer and I am anyway holding that for a fren. Her level of sincerity is written all over her face. 

And she isn't alone--the whole of Fox News is not going to do the thing where they show news to the mushrooms down on the farm. Take a look at Hannity, getting skeert people will pay attention to that little old thing where Trump tried to steal a whole election ineptly. They really are trying to beg their regular viewers off of knowing what really happened that day, aren't they?

Wow. Do the Fox viewers even wonder why that is? Is it to them already like the Mueller investigation (which did not exonerate him) and the spectre of Russian collusion, a thing so memory-holed they can't even find a vein of concern about it? Are they as convinced that the riot of 1/6 and the threat to democracy that day are as blameless for Trump as his "perfect" phone call to Volodymyr Zelenskyy? Are they so pacified by the pablum Fox News pukes into their little birdy brain-beaks that it has not occurred to them that what Fox News doesn't want them to see is the truth? 

Because if it is what the 1/6 Committee says it is, it's the next best thing to treason, and we know because the Secret Service and Trump probably definitely did want to march with his baddies that day.  That's some insane Caesar crossing the Rubicon stuff. Also, too, his campaign totally knew about the fake electors and tried to make them real. 

Trump's election lies keep signifying even today. But they are still lies. Trump lost. He lost. He did not win in 2020, he just found a lot of people willing to lie and lie with violence. 

Fox News doesn't want their audience to know that. It's very true and very sad. Why is Fox News so evil? Why is Lara Trump also pretty evil? These are things we will be asking for a while. 

One Year Later

“Do you realize you are describing a coup?” pic.twitter.com/Sl8ANp9SoF

— Acyn (@Acyn) January 5, 2022

There really isn't a better place to start an anniversary of an attempted coup, an actual violent insurrection attempt, than with a former advisor to Donald Trump being quite willing to describe the "Green Bay Sweep" in a book put out there for the public to read, and on his sort of kind of book tour. But of course, that's almost what Mark Meadows did, as well, isn't it?  They don't seem to understand what they did was in any way wrong, and are half-confessing while also wanting to cover their own asses. 

Just to get this out of the way, as time wears on, the voter fraud claims are increasingly stupid and obviously wrong. There was no election-changing fraud in Arizona. There was no fraud that would have changed the election results anywhere. And yet, scads of GOP congress-critters decided they wanted to pull this stunt. They helped give credence to the Big Lie that caused Trump supporters to swarm the Capitol. 

That's why many Republicans never voted for a bipartisan committee to investigate the events of January 6, and why they never wanted to delve too deeply into Trump's second impeachment. They were culpable. They served the Big Lie and knew what was happening, because they were aware of conservative media--how could they not be? 

Trump was supposed to sound off about this anniversary, but bowed out, citing the bias of all the people who think insurrections are bad which would probably be a reason to speak out actually if he thought his shit was true, but go off, righteously deposed and never again to rise pretend king. 

The right is zealously pretending true things aren't true, though. Tucker Carlson is raking over Ted Cruz, of all people, for calling the events of 1/6 violent domestic terrorism. But for once, Ted Cruz is saying something quite true--what else do you call the influx, the swarm, of people who injured over 100 Capitol police officers and had various weapons to hand, and threatened the well-being of the Vice-President, maybe even his family, the Speaker of the House, and other congressional members? 

Of course, Tucker Carlson has his own narrative, which is entirely a lie. But the damage is done--if the antifa narrative Fox News wanted was demolished, of course a Deep State one, however broken, slapdash and stupid, would have to suffice for people who want to believe in the rightness of Trumpism, regardless of facts. 

The right-wing (generally) doesn't get why a coup was even bad. I genuinely think that when they poll people to determine who believes Trump actually won, or that the election was stolen, the GOP respondents are performing an old shuffle, a buck and jive. They never thought Barack Obama was Muslim or Kenyan-born, But they would absolutely say so. They don't care if they live in a lie: If it is the lie all their friends believe. So they will say Trump won, even if they have no proof at all, because it's what they are supposed to believe. 

This is what I abhor the most in all this--that our democracy hinges on our shared belief that it should exist, and our acceptance of some consensual reality. And so many do not feel the anger I do that ignorant assholes carried Trump flags and Confederate flags in our Congressional halls, and spread shit on the walls, and broke glass and ripped signs and threatened our legitimate government process. How? How is that not universally maddening? Insulting? Appalling? 

I stay mad. And I am mad about people who can't stay mad, or who never understood why this should make anyone mad in the first place. 

Tucker Carlson and the Big Box of Nothing

 

Tucker Carlson says 'damning' Hunter Biden documents mysteriously vanish in transit to Los Angeleshttps://t.co/sgQxgDzb8O

— Fox News (@FoxNews) October 29, 2020

So documents were sent by regular mail, with no back-up like a .pdf stored on a hard drive or whatever? And then somehow, some deep state operative or whatever picked this package out of all the other bits of mail and stole the documents, which definitely were not labeled "Damaging Hunter Biden info, Deep State Operatives KEEP OUT." 

And, because the lack of a back-up of any sort would be embarrassing enough in terms of how one would handle stuff you're trying to vet and report on, pretend journalist Tucker Carlson is going to go with "we had incriminating stuff and now it is gone, please believe it existed for realsies" instead of more prudently not mentioning it because the actual story he's giving us is amazingly weak? 

Sigh. Unfortunately, I've been looking at stuff like, well, this, for a long time, and have found this is actually not ineffective. For a certain type of conspiracy-minded person, lack of proof of the conspiracy is proof of a cover-up, which in itself is proof that the conspiracy is way worse and the people running the show are way more devious than you even want to know. If you think "Oh Vixen, that's bollocks" think about how Sean Hannity pimped the Seth Rich conspiracy lie because dead men tell no tales and it made the Clintons into the obvious villians. This is like the decaf latte version of that. 

If the Republicans who like this sort of thing want to know why a lot of people are not biting on this story, it's not because social media is "throttling" it. It has a lot to do with the fact that the people who are promoting it are the sleaziest people alive and the story is rickety. Tucker Carlson right here went from his usual "if Richard Spencer but with a tv job" schtick to some balls-out Alex Jonesery. I genuinely wish that meant his reputation took a hit, but....I do not expect nice things.

 You know, and I know you know, that bleach isn't a fix for COVID. But goddamn, something needs to disinfect the RW media ecosystem.

It's Almost Funny Until Someone is Killed

There is something about misogyny that even women sometimes get behind, and I don't even mean in a snotty Phyllis Schlafly full-throated sister-shafting kind of way. It's the funny joke where whenever women have spaces, it's because they have something against men. Feminists are called "Feminazis". It's assumed some are men-haters. They are feminists because they are womaning badly. The feminist is sketchy, possibly lesbian, likely fat, blaming men for her fuckups, and out for blood. Some women like the marginalization of feminism because they can show they themselves are cool and not-feminist--not weird, judge-y, man-hating, or against all things dick. It's a position with good male focus-grouping.

So, you take a guy who is just weirdly litigious for absurd right-wing/misogynous causes, like being against Ladies' Nights at bars and clubs. Huh. Seems merely eccentric and meninist. Such a person seems pretty human-interest-y, right? But now this same person is suspected of targeting the family of a judge, killing her son and injuring her husband. and also seems to have thousands of pages of hate that he has written about. Keeping in mind the carnage of Eliot Rodger and other MRA-affiliated killers, it seems pretty likely that misogyny was a big part of his intention to kill, and it no longer seems funny or eccentric.

Fox News had Mr. Den Hollander on  occasionally, which isn't a surprise, because the entire network is pretty antifeminist. Which you can kind of tell not just because of the programing, but because of the rape culture it has pretty much always been a big enabler of. Like, Roger Ailes--mad sexual harassment. Or Bill O'Reilly. Insane sexual harassment.  Or just everyday sexual harassment. Or Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson-related sexual harassment with Ed Henry being a rapist. It's just always a part of the FOX culture, apparently. And it looks as if promoting a view that women are a suspect class of potential feminazis of delinquent values might result in violence against them.

But conservatives in real life mirror these stupid, dangerous, anti-women values, as well. So Ted Yoho calls AOC a "fucking bitch".  And the Freedom Caucus thought they would beat up on Liz Cheney because she is self-confident and doesn't suck-up to Donald Trump. What if listening to women because we might not be stupid instead of lashing out at us was practiced more regularly? What if contradicting the words of almighty men was seen as our privilege and right as people who also think and have a POV?

I guess that would be different from how things are now. But I think they would be better.

This Is Not My Kind of Democrat

Tulsi Gabbard appears on Hannity and criticizes the impeachment inquiry process by saying she doesn’t know what’s going on behind closed doors and that she wants transparency pic.twitter.com/au4Zyyhv0B

— Acyn Torabi (@Acyn) October 25, 2019

Just to follow up on my previous piece--if someone runs to Fox News to distinguish herself from the other Democrats by airing out Democratic Party laundry, she is clearly not my kind of Democrat, but what's more, if she shows up on Hannity echoing Republican talking points regarding the impeachment investigation?

No. Just no. Don't talk to me about her service or any factor that is supposed to make her a viable and interesting candidate--and shouldn't her fellow 2020 Dem candidates feel a little red-assed having tried to defend her? This is her game. She doesn't want the Democratic base. She knows what she's polling at. She's in it for something else, and frankly, I don't care what it is, it isn't good.

A little while ago, we got a kind of retraction of the mistake that Hillary Clinton was claiming that Gabbard was being groomed by the Russians, and she was actually saying it was the GOP grooming her for a third party run. That's a little harder to argue about once you see her spouting Republican talking points on Hannity, isn't it?

Also, FOX Business has a big old scoop that Wall Street is fixing to see her do a third party run. Wall Street--so I guess that's great news for the people who saw her as part of the real left, right?

I'm just saying, there might be Democrats who like the way she rips so-called "Establishment Democrats" like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, but seriously consider who she performing that dance for. She's doing it for conservative eyes, to make the left look fucked up. Our fuck-ups, they are real, but not the way she represents them to conservatives for her own benefit.

And yes, she's just doing what she was always going to do anyway, with or without Hillary Clinton having said so much as a word about it. It is what it is. All anyone can do is tell it on a mountain: she's not your kind of Democrat, either. She's no one's kind of Democrat. Because the bottom line for any real left person is beating Trump, not splitting votes. And spitting on some of our successful party leaders and bad-mouthing the impeachment inquiry like she doesn't have eyes to see Trump has done any wrong tells us a real story about what she actually is.

Fox News Does the Full Monty

It's always been just a little bit obvious that Fox News was more of a political advocacy outlet than a straight news organization, but if there was any doubt, popular Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Jeanine Pirro joined Rush Limbaugh in standing up for Trump and his party's candidates this evening (right before the midterm elections). They could maybe pretend they were just there to report from a very special vantage, but let's be really honest, that vantage was earned by being propagandists and useful to the party. This is what a wholly partisan effort would look like. They also derided other news outlets, laughably, as being "fake" while making this particular obvious show. 

I think people who really pay attention have some idea who the fakes are here. Pirro, Limbaugh, and Hannity might be popular, but they surely aren't honest, and what they do has never been about straight news. Limbaugh doesn't pretend to be an honest purveyor of the tea--he stresses from time to time that he is an entertainment figure (probably not to land his ass in trouble). But Hannity and Pirro?

While they are joke figures outside of the Fox milieu, among Fox news fans, the possibility that Hannity delivers real news is apparently some kind of open question, left open, deliberately, but Fox itself. (I think the same nebulous area exists for Pirro, to the extent that she is treated as being sober as a judge when both the "sober" and "judge" portions of that assessment appear to be way off.)

I may be off base for pointing out that while Brett Baier and Chris Wallace are probably kind of good, I'd really only consider Shep Smith actually wholly a journalist in the sense of not radiating bias. (That probably radiates bias in and of itself to some of Fox's conservative viewers, for a value of bias that reflects Steven Colbert's observation that reality has a liberal bias--and maybe it sort of does.) What Fox the tv channel was set up to do for people who care about these things was be a conservative and Republican-leaning outlet. 

Now, I don't want to reinvent the wheel, discuss the hack gap, broach the problem of right-wing epistemic closure, or even just point my English Lit degree-having white liberal finger at the tribe Morlock and curse their darkness while they eat my daywalking Eloi sibs. 

I just want to point out that Trump doesn't and never has had a problem in the world with fake news. He was best-buddies with the National Enquirer guy who kept hot shit-takes on Trump in a vault and is no stranger to just making shit up or repeating ridiculous conspiracy theories from the absolute underbelly of the fever-swamps--like birtherism. 

Trump loves fake news (like Alex Jones, even!) no matter what terrible things he says about the real news being terrible and fake. But you know what? That old devil "fake news"? When Trump surrounds himself with these Fox folk, he is soaking in it!

He just likes the news that magnifies him over the kind that tells bad stories about him. Only, there are plenty of bad, real stories about, and news isn't really about what Trump happens to like to hear. 

I'd like to hope this moment had any bearing on whether future news-watchers bothered with the Fox brand in the future, but, no. I doubt it. I believe they watch for reasons wholly unrelated to veracity. 

(UPDATE: It is possibly also objectionable if Kellyanne Conway and Sarah Huckabee Sanders do these things because of the Hatch act, but really? Are we going to expect the White House to actually be the paragons of virtue, here?)

UPDATE 2: See what I mean, Vern? Does saying it's not an endorsement really "disclaimer" it?

This is Not your Father-in-Law's TrumpWorld Grab-Bag

As you might have surmised, this edition of the TrumpWorld Grab-Bag is going to feature pretty heavily on Jared Kushner, who just had his security clearance downgraded, which seems great, although there is a pretty big issue with his ever having had one in the first place. Leaving aside the obvious problem of nepotism, Kushner is crazily in debt, his family has shown a willingness to use his position to get mad unethical, and, as was revealed today, a pattern of financial insecurity and poor, naïve decision-making has made foreign countries decide he is a super great halfwit to work with.  This was kind of a no-brainer--Kushner should not have high security access because his position is really insecure.

It's also probably a no-brainer to suppose that this means he either can't do his presumed job (which is, last I checked, all the foreign policy things we're supposed to have a State Department for) or, Daddy Trump and Ivanka are going to let him crib from their notes. This is a situation of such abominable stupidity it could only be happening in the Trump White House.

But in the world of "Jared can't catch a break", he's also facing a Hatch Act violation for talking up President Trump's 2020 campaign manager, Brad Parscale, while using his official White House title. Kushner, of course, brought Parscale on to the 2016 campaign and worked closely with him, so he has a good idea about the quality of his work-product from the digital end of the campaign, but even that is darn problematic. Parscale went from being pretty much no one in politics, to being a weird 2016 success story, but the funny thing is, he's tied to Cambridge Analytica, which is tied to Steve Bannon, Mike Flynn and, obviously, the Russia investigation.  Parscale has already had a chat with Congress, and is probably going to get another one with Robert Mueller and friends. (Don't sweat, pets, there's other hang-ups this cat likely has.)

Among the things that are kind of alarming about Parscale's "genius" strategy is that it counted on using social media as a voter suppression tactic for targeted demographics. And oh! Hey! Far out! Neat! That was exactly the game the Russia interference was playing at, the Mueller has already indicted folks for. But really, who knows just how Russian assets intersected with the Trump campaign--yet? 

You know who might or might not know? Roger Stone. Apparently, it turns out he was all up in the WikiLeaks DMs (even though he tried to front like he wasn't and WikiLeaks tried to front like he wasn't) getting told to please stop telling people he was in touch with WikiLeaks. These reads are a little funky. You know who's digital back and forth I might like to know about, though--Assange and Sean Hannity. I know. This might just be a fanfic "ship" I have in my head. Anyhow, Sean Hannity recently said something kind of funny--that he was actively involved in the Trump campaign, and he never heard of George Papadopoulos.  "Actively involved"? Wow. This was a journalistic integrity half-minute with Sean Hannity.

I can't assess whether Hannity ever crossed paths with George Papadopoulos, but Joseph Mifsud, the professor that dangled Hillary Clinton "dirt" obtained by Russia to him, is missing. Is he the victim of foul play, or just ducking child support? I can't even pretend I know for sure, but if he's alive, I'm sure he has stories.

But as it must, this TrumpWorld Grab-Bag has to circle back around to Trump himself. Jared Kushner wasn't the only person whose dodgy background interfered with performance of his job--four Commerce employees just got the boot for clearance issues. There's definitely still "vetting" issues. But the poor vetting might not even be as bad as the failure of this Administration to address the Russian election hacking to any real degree. NSA Chief, Admiral Mike Rogers advised that he had not been given any order about disrupting the ongoing Russian plot. That is not good, because we know that Russia will try to affect the 2018 midterms.  We've also recently found out that the election-related systems of seven states were breached by Russian hacking in 2016.

And the GOP-lead Congress doesn't seem arsed to do much about any of it, either. (If anything, they still want to make our election systems less secure.) But if Congress doesn't seem interested in things like seeing if Trump is financially compromised due to his foreign indebtedness (which is, rather like his son-in-law's a pretty big deal, whatever Rep. Conaway thinks), Robert Mueller is, as always, on that case.

He Watched Fox News

Wow! -Senator Mark Warner got caught having extensive contact with a lobbyist for a Russian oligarch. Warner did not want a “paper trail” on a “private” meeting (in London) he requested with Steele of fraudulent Dossier fame. All tied into Crooked Hillary.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 9, 2018

So, there was a funny old thing that happened about a minute ago, where Julian Assange tried to slide some info on Senator Warner into a Hannity parody account's DM's.  Or, like, use other channels. This struck me as so hilarious when it happened that I mentioned it sideways in a TrumpWorld Grab-Bag thingy as a sign that old Jules was going batshit. But this Warner thing has apparently filtered from the Fox News mushroom feeding trough to POTUS--and it's wrong.

Actually, Marco Rubio put the kibosh on it, to his credit. This turns out to be just as "devastating" as the bombshell texts that were supposed to show that President Obama was keeping tabs on the investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails, when he was actually interested in being fully briefed about the real national security threat of Russian fiddling with our elections (a thing Trump himself apparently can't be arsed to do anything about--has WH COS Kelly talked about his lazy ass getting this situation corrected enough?)

This reminds me of a study that once showed that people who watch Fox News were actually less informed than people who watch no news at all. Trump watches Fox a whole lot, it seems.  Makes one wonder if a president of a developed nation like, well, the US, could get better information somehow. If he could be bothered to.


UPDATE: From the Washington Post: he doesn't read the daily briefing because it isn't his "style of learning".  Who knows if he gets more value from the oral briefing than from his "executive time"?

The President Believes his Own Hype

For some reason, releasing the HUUUUGE four-page memo which had been hyped to the rafters as an explosive indictment of the FBI doesn't seem to have released the earth-shattering Ka-Boom! that the President was expecting. This might have something to do with it being badly over-hyped by people who hadn't even read the thing--like Seb Gorka confidently saying that the abuses by the FBI would be revealed to be a 100 times worse than those that started the American Revolution. Really?

You might come to think that a partisan Fox News assshat was running the press on this entire debacle, and you'd probably be on to something. 

This sort of thing left the White House's designated adult, John Kelly, to try and caution that it might not do all the things that were printed on the label.  But the memo got dumped on Friday after Trump gave it what I assume was a light skimming, and determined it didn't matter at all what it actually said, so long as there was good coverage of what is was supposed to say.  The memo focuses on what were supposed to be terrible omissions of fact regarding the FISA warrant that lead to surveillance of Carter Page. The text of it lays out a case, but it is both brief and one-sided.  Consider the basic claim that the Steele dossier was part of the request--part, but not all. Carter Page has been on the radar of US intelligence since 2013. Consider also that the warrant was regularly renewed--we are supposed to be impressed by the names of the folks who signed those renewals without noting that each warrant had to have fresh justifications--in other words, the situation had to remain informative and relevant. 

And we have every reason to think it did, because Carter Page is, as a bygone tv game show might have stated, "the weakest link". There have been great reasons for Carter Page to be under surveillance because of a really weird connection to the Russian government. And we still learn fun thins about him to this day, like how he boasted that he really was a Russian adviser. To the Kremlin. Like, he was working for them. 

This is hardly the hill that I think anyone would want to go to war with a federal agency on. And yet here is Trump in the above screen-cap of a Tweet, quoting a WSJ editorial that alleges a central point of Trump's lie that the FBI tilted the election to Hillary Clinton, who lost the election. Because we are supposed to believe that the FBI always really loved Hillary Clinton. Louis Freeh sending G-men to rifle her underwear drawer for Rose Law Firm receipts going on twenty-odd years ago, in what world is that a goddamn thing? 

Trump might like to think this thing has absolved him, and that, as Hannity's godforsaken show keeps implying, the Mueller investigation should be shuttered because collusions hasn't been positively confirmed. This only works for people who can't or don't read. Among people who do read, DJT Jr's email thread regarding affirmatively accepting a meeting with a person said to be representing Russia pushing dirt on Clinton that was obviously obtained through hacking with a side discussion on (sanctions) adoptions remains a pretty good whiff of collusion, as does Trump Sr's constant signal boosting of WikiLeaks. The four page memo might make a suggestion that a better pretext should have existed for a warrant to have been granted on Carter Page (which doesn't, in hindsight, even look like that great a suggestion), but one of the larger narratives that it was supposed to feed, that the Trumpists rely on, is actually quite exploded. 

One who reads the memo learns that the Steele dossier, is not, actually, per the memo, the reason for the Trump/Russia investigation. And the FBI people who were supposedly not pro-Trump enough got reassigned. As if the FBI actually tried to make a wall between personal relationships and investigations. The memo mentions that George Papadopoulos talking to an Australian diplomat was the tip off, and Strzok was reassigned. These things actually negate some of the conspiracy theory bullshit that has been out there.

Maybe between the not as bad as could be SOTU address and this memo, his poll numbers will go up a smidge. But just between you and me and the universe--Trump is not absolved and the investigation is nowhere near over. And if he keeps this naked kind of open consideration of firing folks investigating his very own malfeasance alive, and goes on to carry it out by firing Wray or Rosenstein, this is a deep problem that should, let you all know that every piece of this Trump Russia connection story was real. And he is guilty of so many things, but believing his hype was always a big part of them.

Fox News is in a Very Interesting Place

I guess the thing I want to start with is that the cable news corporate entity formerly known on this blog as "Fox Mushroom Farm" (a moniker I am retiring as an actual Fox Farm that grows mushrooms exists, and I have decided I wish them no ill will at all and think both foxes and mushrooms are great, anyway) is a great part of my study of what Trump support is made of.  The kind of atmosphere that this network has created, by regularly demonizing Muslim people or immigrants, or black kids wearing hoodies, primes a particular kind of pump-head for Trump's act.

And this is why the idea of the Trump White House collaborating with Fox News as a propaganda outfit makes a certain kind of sense.  This outlet made Trump and sunk their credibility in him, and even if it shakes out that Trump is the most unfit person to have ever taken office--it behooves Fox to try the "Seth Rich murder was about the DNC hack" lie to let Trump off the hook, even if they are also letting Russia off the hook for hacking various US enterprises. They might be flying in the face of what actual national security experts or law enforcement officials might say, but they can just wave it off with their new line--that's the "deep state" talking! 

But since when was Fox News about national security? They are about insecurity. So when Lou Dobbs claims "the Left" is carrying out a "coup d'état" against Donald Trump, or Jeanine Pirro calls for civil war if Trump is ousted, we are seeing an insecure atmosphere being created by the "news" outlet. What fascinates me is that this is dynamic of dysfunctionality seems to mirror internal dysfunctionality.

See, the Fox News milieu is pretty damn sexist. I know this is true because of the sexual harassment that has apparently been part of the corporate culture for a very long time.  We can talk about O'Reilly and consider that Steve Doocey was also problematic,  and note that Francisco Cortes, got suspended for the same thing.  As did CV Payne, just recently.  And now Eric Bolling has been accused of sending dick pics.  This is a sign of a really messed-up culture. Harm was perpetuated because of loyalty to certain figures in the organization--which has resulted in multiple lawsuits and settlements and firings. 

Astoundingly, some Fox News fans might even think this recent disappearance of personalities due to their legal problems, might just stem from "deep state" interference, as if somehow, government agencies years or even decades back seeded the cable network with agents who would deploy sexual harassment charges at selected periods in order to "silence" the brave journos at Fox. It's sad that people are ever that far into denial that stupid media being stupid is never enough reason for why untrue things become the news of the hour. But of such is Fox News.  They aren't about informing, as much as disinforming or deforming culture. How they are doing it has become the news.

Another Trumpworld Grab Bag

I just want to point out that this weekend is another weekend where President Trump visited a couple of his golf courses to hit the links and schmooze in familiar surroundings, like he does most weekends since he became president, and Fox Mushroom Farm is being a little less than honest in pretending that he literally spent the whole weekend at the White House. There is photographic proof he did not. Just because he went to the golf course that he owns closest to the White House does not mean he worked at the White House. He smacked a little white ball around. And I get that Republicans have very little trouble with Trump always being golfing. So Eisenhower! Very suburban! Oddly, they never liked to see Barack Obama smacking little white balls around.

But you know, this is Fox News, after all, the official sponsor of saying stuff out loud that Trump doesn't want folks to know came from him, except that you do. Sean Hannity, a very special Fox News personality, got told by one Ted Koppel just what he thinks of him. He's bad. (I note that Sean Hannity came off a bit defensive and threw a "with all due respect" in there like we don't know what that means--bless his heart.) It shouldn't be anything but transparent that Hannity is not merely an opinion-journalist (if you want to call it journalism) but an extreme partisan (and if you want to call that "propagandist", in my book, you go on ahead). I am reminded of the time Jon Stewart told Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala that their version of "Crossfire" wasn't helping anything at all. Except Koppel isn't a comedian who does news, but a guy who did straight news his whole career. And if Hannity wants to pretend this is some so-called "liberal media" figure he just dissed, nope. Just nope.

Assange is Maybe A Little Disingenuous

Julian Assange claims President Obama is trying to “delegitimize” Donald Trump with hacking allegations https://t.co/tvKSelcgUm

— Salon (@Salon) January 4, 2017

It's probably my deep partisanship that makes me respond to the idea that President Obama wants to "delegitimize" Donald Trump, with the very obvious: well, who then wanted to see President Obama's birth certificate to determine if Obama was even a citizen, or called for his college transcripts, to try and find out whether he was even smart? Trump made this an acceptable play. For what it's worth, were either of Trump's parents born in the US? What does his birth certificate say? And maybe I want Trump's school transcripts because he doesn't seem so smart, either.

I also have a tendency to think, that if the GRU was peddling the fruits of their warez to Count Hackula in the Ecuadoran Embassy, they probably wouldn't have fronted as GRU or state-sponsored in any way. They used a thing called a "cut out"--pretty basic. They might have represented as a security firm.* Maybe Assange is telling the truth in stating that he doesn't believe that he was contacted by Russian intelligence resources (even if I think this is a buttload of denial). Still and all, the Gateway Pundit-level framing left no possible alternative in my mind that WikiLeaks had a certain political agenda W/R/T the US elections. I don't trust a damn thing he says anymore.

It is pathetic Sean Hannity does. But he is a propagandist by nature. Treating Assange like a major truth telling machine, when just a while ago he was the worst kind of traitor? Turned entirely on what party's narrative Assange served? Yeah., Hannity, we have got you read.


* Ah:

Reminder: #WikiLeaks is a publisher. We don't hack.
Anonymous sources submit documents on our platform.
We verify and publish.#defendWL

— WikiLeaks Task Force (@WLTaskForce) October 25, 2016

Anonymous. They don't even "know".

I Really Don't Like Sean Hannity

Question of the Day: Should the mainstream media apologize for spreading the fake news "hands up, don't shoot" lie? #Hannity

— Sean Hannity (@seanhannity) December 9, 2016

This was the testimony of many people who observed the shooting of Michael Brown.  The MSM reporters were discussing what actual people were alleging. Maybe it was right, maybe it wasn't, but sometimes reporting means hearing out people whose stories aren't always 100% accurate.

Sean Hannity knows full well that activism isn't about straight journalism, because he has never been about straight journalism himself.  What irks me about this question is that sometimes hands really are up. Maybe we can't verify the eyewitness accounts of so many people in Ferguson. But there are nonetheless accounts of police brutality elsewhere, and better vetted. But if journalism is about uncovering stories--is it not true that sometimes a story in the midst of being unraveled isn't 100% accurate? What matters is how the reporting is managed once the actual facts are revealed.

I don't think MSM reporters are wrong for covering what sparked the movement--because they had to honestly admit that something did.  That it might have been more complicated was also covered. It was not "fake news" so much as a difference of opinion. But it is still a pretty valid opinion that cops shouldn't really just shoot dead vaguely threatening unarmed black people because they can. I'm pretty much going to stick with this opinion.

There's Outrage, and Then There's The Defense of the Indefensible...

I don't agree with Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh on very much, so I really don't follow them and don't blog about "OMG, this terrible thing some pundit said!" because really? What would be the point? They have a right to express their opinions, and while I can say they are dumb opinions or how I don't agree, it makes very little difference--except for this recent confluence of exquisitely grotesque pro-abuse and pro-rape comments that made me seriously wonder what the fuck they were about.

Just to start with Hannity--

Hannity explained that he was hit by his father as a child, and he turned out just fine.

"I got hit with a strap. Bam, bam, bam. And I have never been to a shrink. I will tell you that I deserved it," he said.

"I think he went far," Hannity then said about Peterson. "But I don’t want to see this guy get a felony, I don’t want to see this guy lose his job. He deserves parenting classes."

Hannity then took off his belt to demonstrate the technique.

There are a lot of people who were paddled or whipped as kids, firmly, not to excess, and who lived and did well for themselves. But boasting that one has never been to a shrink is not that same as saying one hasn't experienced after-effects of one's abuse, and there could be an argument made that the discipline Hannity received taught him to be a punch-down, kiss-up authoritarian personality who goes out of his way to excuse power and malign the underdog. Just saying. But there's a real disconnect when someone tries to excuse the switch-beating of a four year old child that leaves cuts in his legs and scrotum. That just isn't acceptable. If Hannity can't see that this is a question not about the ability of parents to discipline, but the extent to which they carry that discipline out, then I really wonder. Can't parents carry out loving discipline that isn't harmful, and instill values by living them? Is that so preposterous? (For the record I may have been spanked, by hand, once in my life, by my parents. Never an implement.)