Category Archives: “funny”

Tuck you, Carlson

The families of every one of the 140 Capitol and DC police officers injured by the violent mob on January 6th 2021 should sue deliberately lying, entitled patrician Tucker Carlson. Let their lawyers come up with the theory of the case.

Tucker’s got the money to pay them. He was born with a shitload of it, and is paid millions more by ancient Australian salt water crocodile Rupert Murdoch to keep the credulous watching as he simply asks provocative questions and fans their fear and hatred.

In Carlson’s telling, none of these injured officers were hurt by any member of the throng of meek and respectful tourists who peacefully entered the Capitol, legally, to express their legitimate hurt that the 2020 election had been stolen from their preferred candidate. Carlson’s recent Josef Goebbels impression is below.

According to him it’s a fact that everyone who said there was violence on January 6 is a liar who deserves no credibility.

Carlson tells his viewers that lying Democrats, and Kinziger and Cheney, would have you believe that the real crime was not the stolen November 2020 election but a peaceful assembly of concerned citizens engaging in what the RNC called legitimate political discourse (disrupting a joint session of Congress). Tucker says they were justified, and peaceful. He describes the lying Commies’ “grave betrayal of American democracy” so simply, so clearly.

They were “meek” “respectful” “sightseers” who, although rightfully angry, revered the Capitol building and law enforcement. They legitimately believed lies repeated by people like Carlson himself, who knew he was lying, while insisting on the truth of his lies in spite of all the evidence. The angry, peaceful crowd of Trump supporters knew for a fact, in spite of a vast bipartisan conspiracy against him, that Trump had indisputably won by over a billion votes.

The 30 million dollar cleanup cost to repair the Capitol building, cleaning up defecation left by some of the meek, respectful tourists who were there legitimately after presumed FBI provocateurs, heavily disguised Black Lives Matter and antifa terrorists presumably smashed the windows and overran the police who they greatly outnumbered… fake news spread by lying woke sickos. Like the 140 law enforcement officers taken to the hospital with various injuries, a bunch of America-hating liars.

If you have the stomach for it, here’s five minutes of this brazen piece of shit, doubling, tripling and quadrupling down on his version of the truth, to the sound of a cah-chinging cash register.

Both sides

Another very short reminder, if one was needed, that there are at least two sides to every story.

This doesn’t mean that both sides of a given conflict are equally true, equally based on what actually happened, equally easy to defend.  It just means that for every truthful statement of fact there are a thousand less truthful ones that can be made.  Among these less truthful versions are outright lies, motivated by malice and designed to convince people of “alternative facts” which, they argue, are just as good as those old fashioned verifiable ones captured in actual recordings, especially when deployed in an existential war between good and evil.   

Here is today’s 15 second example, from people who try their best not to lie to their viewers.   Your opinion on which people I mean will vary according to the devoutness of your faith in your deepest beliefs about reality.

Santos/Devolder/da Vinci’s office in Eastern Queens

Former Douglaston office of NY Congressman Thomas Suozzi, who retired rather than run in 2022, and whose name was still on the office, on a large sign, just a couple of weeks back. It is now the office of hard-working Congress distraction George Whatever his name is, working tirelessly for his constituency, even as they call on him to resign, while keeping the lowest of low profiles in Douglaston.

To his credit, he’s trying his best to make the AR-15 the official gun of the USA! USA!!

Remember this fuck?

The Democrats on Jim Jordan’s House committee to prove that the Democrats are actually the lying traitors who have weaponized the government against decent, good Americans (like the innocent political prisoners who legally protested at the Capitol on January 6th and were viciously treated as rioters) wrote a report on three sketchy whistleblowers, all former FBI employees, who seem to have received some payments, or employment, from Trump-related entities in exchange for their candid, partisan whistleblowing. The New York Times reports:

The Democratic report includes excerpts from depositions and evidence of conspiratorial social media posts.

It also details the ties between Mr. Trump’s inner circle and the witnesses. For instance, Mr. Patel found Mr. Friend his next job, working as a fellow on domestic intelligence and security services with the Center for Renewing America, which is run by Russ Vought. The center is largely funded by the Conservative Partnership Institute, which is run by Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff, and former Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina.

source

Yes, Russ Vought is the current advisor to the MAGA House on how to use the debt ceiling to hold the country hostage (see previous post). He is Trumpie’s former director of the Office of Management and Budget. The guy who oversaw a $1 trillion increase in the national debt in his first great year and another $4 trillion in his second.

Or as they say in MAGAland — FUCK YOU!

Nuages

A beautiful, famous tune by a genius named Django Reinhardt.

Decided to try to do this lilting number as well as I possibly could. Needed to learn the slightly odd, genius form by heart, which I don’t always do, and learn the essential parts of the original arrangement, and then be able to play the melody over it comfortably enough, and in different positions, that I could start throwing the blues over it a little bit. This one’s much of the way there (after a solid couple of days playing it a lot) though not quite ready yet. But I thought it was worth a  listen.   If you get a third of the enjoyment listening that I had playing it, it will be well worth your minute and a half.

I hope you are well, and if not well, at least not too bad. 

One nice irony of a long life

My father died almost eighteen years ago.  Not long after he died, I was finally able to disentangle myself from a long, unhappy friendship with a smart, tormented guy who’d stood in as a sparring partner for my difficult father since we were teenagers.  You can get all the details about this interesting, perplexing fellow at Book of Friedman.

When I finally admitted defeat and declared our friendship beyond saving — I’d finally reduced the eternally cavilling MF to petulant silence, in a Florida coffee shop, during a biblical deluge that turned the parking lot into a raging river — I called his mother, to explain.  To my surprise, she was not in the least bit surprised.  

She immediately relieved me of the burden of explaining, beyond a few basics of the last straw, and thanked me for hanging in there far longer than anyone ever had with her relentless demanding, endlessly negotiating son.   She understood and asked only one thing: leave the door open, if he comes to make peace with you.  I told her I would.  She also asked what I thought she could do for him.  My only idea was a serious course of therapy, something I reminded her he was very unlikely ever to do, since he believed no unhappiness in his life had anything to do with his highly idiosyncratic personality or his demands on others.

There were some frustrating email exchanges every couple of years, when he’d reach out a pseudopod in an email.   His endless paragraphs filled screen after screen, very similar to the tiny, crabbed hand-written letters I used to get from him, many pages long, inscribed margin to margin, with no breaks in the block of words, endlessly expounding, at tortuous length, amid a million caveats and troubled asides.  His brother Neal, I learned after his death, used to delete these emails as soon as he got them. I would answer each one, because I’d promised his mother and because, until very recently, I never liked silence to be my final answer.   I always hated the old silent treatment and so almost never did it to anyone else.  

One year on my birthday I got an audio CD in the mail.  The CD case was decorated with strings, at the end of each string was a tiny card, taped meticulously to the string, a plea for mercy, for common sense, for an open heart.  I don’t have the odd package in front of me now to quote them, in fact, I’m a bit tormented not to be able to lay my hand on it at the moment, have been searching the heaps around this dusty apartment I need to clean.  It was in the same place since I got it maybe 15 years back, I’d seen it countless times, close to my broken down copy of my most precious book, the Collected Stories of Isaac Babel, Walter Morrison translation (long out of print, its paperback spine long ago disintegrated).  Mark loved that book as well and one of his notes was a reference to it.   Among its peppy, oddly dangling notes “don’t be a cossack!,” an exhortation to relax my so-called principles.  

Everything always had to happen on his terms, one of the most annoying things about him, this insistence that things be done his way, which was often a perverse way.  This musical offering struck me as one more outlandish illustration of this intolerable tic.  My promise to his mother be damned, I wasn’t going to listen to the musical masterpiece he’d composed to magically solve all the issues in everyone’s life.

I never listened to the CD.  At the same time, I didn’t toss it in the trash.

I saw it dozens of times over the years, including in the days after I heard of his death of a broken heart a few years back.  I thought briefly about taking the CD out of its case and giving it a spin, but never did.  The last time I saw it, I moved it someplace, with the intention of finally listening to it.  Now it is nowhere to be seen.

“Good,” says Sekhnet.  “Now you have to clean.”

Or, dear Sekhnet, I can sit down and write this instead.  Now that it’s written, I’m going to go digging for it again, though I suspect I may have taken it to the farm… yes, that’s most likely where it is.

FOX & friends

from Julia Claire & Crooked Media—

Kevin McCarthy fascism update!! House Speaker McCarthy has granted Fox News host Tucker Carlson exclusive access to all of the Capitol security footage from the January 6 insurrection. This is…uhhh…a highly unusual (and unethical) move. (Imagine Nancy Pelosi bypassing House committees and the public to show oversight materials exclusively to, say, her daughter’s documentary-production company, so it could be turned into Democratic Party propaganda, and you’ll see the issue.) But it’s also a crystal-clear statement from McCarthy about where the GOP comes down on the Big Lie and the insurrection. Just last week, Dominion Voting Systems exposed Carlson’s efforts within Fox News to suppress accurate reporting about the 2020 election and intentionally feed the network’s audience lies. McCarthy’s here to say, Republicans love it! Carlson’s still their guy, systemic lying about the 2020 election is still their jam, and the insurrection is still all cool with them. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said he was not consulted on the release of the footage, and another source says neither was the rest of the GOP leadership. Just a big ole’ “Fuck you!” to us all from McCarthy. Meanwhile, his special pal Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) was really On One™ this weekend (even more so than usual), committing low-key sedition by calling for a “national divorce” between Republican and Democratic states, apparently angling to be a modern-day John C. Calhoun without bothering to update his talking points. Even Gov. Spencer Cox (R-UT) denounced this rhetoric as, “destructive and wrong and—honestly—evil.” Couldn’t have said it better ourselves!

Ari Melber puts it pretty well in this report: