As if I didn’t have sufficient reason to loathe and distrust Fox News, it appears that many of the right-leaning commentators on the channel continue to back Trump even though they dislike him. In a story appearing on the CNN website, the following appears:
Carlson “passionately” hates Trump: In a number of private text messages, Carlson was harshly critical of Trump. In one November 2020 exchange, Carlson said Trump’s decision to snub Joe Biden’s inauguration was “so destructive.” Carlson added that Trump‘s post-election behavior was “disgusting” and that he was “trying to look away.” In another text message conversation, two days before the January 6 attack, Carlson said, “We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait.” Carlson added of Trump, “I hate him passionately.” The Fox host said of the Trump presidency, “That’s the last four years. We’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show for it, because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest. But come on. There isn’t really an upside to Trump.”
And it isn’t just Carlson who has been acting in bad faith by pretending to back the Trump 2020 Election barrage of lies: Other names of Carlson’s colleagues appearing in the Dominion Voting Systems’ suit against Fox News are Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Rupert Murdoch himself. All are on legal record as disbelieving Trump’s election lies yet appearing to back them night after night on the news.
It takes a special kind of person—one with zero moral compass—to be so dedicated to promoting so diligently false news in which they themselves do not believe.
It is ironic that so many people in America still see our last president not as he really is, but in the way he wants them to see him. His “Big Announcement” of last week was just another attempt to mulct the base by selling trading cards showing a set of highly idealized images of himself as a superhero.
I would like to think that the man’s powers are fading imperceptibly, from week to week, from a figure that purported to be a savior of the forgotten Americans of the Red States, to an extremely high maintenance liability known for shafting everyone who ever cared for him.
Instead of shelling out big money to support the man, I present to you a more realistic image of the 45th President of the U.S., who still thinks he’s President:
The Neverending Election: So Boring Your Ears Will Bleed!
It is now official. Donald J. Trump will run for president in 2024. He plans to bore us into submission with his endless rambling disconnected speeches, complete with antediluvian dance moves and fist pumps. When his announcement to run was made at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday, his mostly sympathetic audience was so fatigued that they tried to leave the room—but Trump had ordered the doors to be locked to prevent that from happening.
Isn’t that against the law? What if there were a fire? I would have called the local fire department from the floor of the auditorium. But then I am no friend of the Trumpster Dumpster.
Missing from the audience were Don Junior, who “missed his flight” and Ivanka, who has decided to remove herself from politics and Papa’s bedroom eyes
Compared to his announcement in 2015, when he came down the escalator like a god descending from Heaven, this was a low-energy event. The 2022 midterm elections have hurt the Trump brand, but he refuses to give it credence. Is he going to claim the 2024 election was stolen if he gets only a tiny percent of the vote?
You know, Americans are mighty fickle, and could it be that all the stuff Trump stands for is fast becoming passé? Maybe democracy will ultimately be saved because the 45th President is yesterday’s news.
Missouri calls itself the “Show Me” state. In yesterday’s session of the Congressional January 6 Insurrection Investigation Committee, it took only a few minutes to show that senator from Missouri was, after all, just another whiny little bitch with delusions of grandeur.
Early in the day, he was photographed giving a fist pump to rile up the demonstrators who were listening to the former president urging them to march on the Capitol Building. Yesterday, we saw the true Josh Hawley, fleeing from the mob he had encouraged, while the Capitol Police had to stand by to protect him and his like from the forces he helped set in motion.
As time goes on, I see the marchers and their supporters as people who are damaged into different ways. So many of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers still lived with their parents and were unable to hold down a job. Today Steve Bannon was declared guilty on two counts of Contempt of Congress and will be sentenced in October—all because he believed that he was protected by “executive privilege.” I don’t recall that argument ever working before, especially inasmuch as only guilty people seem to cling to it.
So far I have seen three of the televised January 6 congressional committee meetings. They have given me some hope that, perhaps, Mar-a-Lago Fats and his confederates will end up in the pokey.
I keep thinking of Latin American avenues and squares being named after calendar dates, such as the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires and 20 de Noviembre all through Mexico. Perhaps the access road to some of our Federal Prisons should be renamed to Avenue January 6.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – JULY 19: Former U.S. President Donald Trump leaves Trump Tower in Manhattan on July 19, 2021 in New York City. (Photo by James Devaney/GC Images)
Today, for the first time, I watched the January 6 Congressional investigation of the January 6 insurrection. While I have never confessed to liking Donald J. Trump, I now view him with utter disdain. This is an individual who clawed his way to the top using chicanery, corruption, outrageous lies, and a total lack of moral compass—with the help of a particularly sleazy set of attorneys, beginning with the notorious Roy Cohn and continuing to Rudy Giuliani.
Trump’s unrelenting plot to steal the 2020 election by forcing his Vice President, Mike Pence, to commit illegal acts, and then raising a mob to threaten his life shows the polluted sludge in his veins, shows him to be successful only as a criminal. Certainly not as a leader of the American people.
Unfortunately, there are still millions of American voters who are 100% behind Trump and his political party. We have not seen the end of the MAGA mobs, nor will we until Oxycontin and Heroin have thinned the herd and their mothers have turned them out of their basement digs.
Long before Trump is re-elected to any office, I am sure that a regiment of demons from the uttermost pit of Hell will have reclaimed their golden boy.
The term comes from the card game Blackjack when a player doubles the bid in exchange for one more card to be drawn. Politically, it means to become more tenacious, zealous, or resolute in a position or undertaking, particularly if it is risky. It seems to be ever more common, as if everyone is deathly afraid of backing down, even if the road ahead is full of traps.
I have made a number of mistakes in my life, but I have rarely been persistent in my errors. True, I might have become a soulless millionaire instead of a mere survivor. But, in my book, surviving is a good thing.
For people like Vladimir Putin or Donald J. Trump, surrender is never an option. Trump may well wind up in prison, and it is entirely possible for Putin to be forcibly escorted out of the Kremlin. But for the time being, they will remain resolute as if they were immortal and all-powerful—which they aren’t.
I cannot help but think that Vladimir Putin has made a serious misstep in his assumptions regarding Ukraine’s willingness to abide by his thuggish behavior. The Russians made the same assumptions that Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney made when we invaded Iraq in 2003: We were not in fact welcomed with flowers and candy, and, moreover, we are still there.
Ukraine has been an independent republic for some 33 years, and their independence as an idea has taken root among the Ukrainian people. Also, I don’t think the Russian army will be 100% behind committing atrocities against fellow Slavs who are also Orthodox Christians.
My guess is that Putin has also underestimated the will of the United States in opposing him after dealing with the likes of Donald J. Trump for four years. Biden may not be a genius, but compared to the Lardfather, he has a four-digit IQ.
After coming out against Year-in-Review news stories, I thought I’d contradict myself by highlighting the stupidest people of the past year. Think of it as Stupidity-in-Review, which is not quite the same thing.
NICKI MINAJ pops right up to the top of my list. During a global pandemic, she refuses to get vaccinated because of the (unnamed) cousin’s friend in Trinidad whose testicles became swollen and became impotent as a result. Well, that goes smack against the experience of my grand nephew’s proctologist’s accountant’s client who had no problems whatsoever—except for the painful anal probe when he was kidnapped by a UFO.
JANUARY 6 INSURRECTIONISTS run a close second. If most were tried for treason and executed, there would be a lot of rental units in the basement apartments of their mothers that would suddenly become available in Red States.
GWYNETH PALTROW. Speaking of Goops, there’s this actress who is actually trying to own the term without quite understanding what it means. With her belong many nabobs in the WELLNESS COMMUNITY who don’t understand that their belief systems do not deter potentially fatal viruses.
DONALD J. TRUMP who still thinks there are 70 million idiots just waiting to do his bidding. Hey, America knows how to forget losers.
QANON, yesterday’s favorite conspiracy source, has been outed thanks to an HBO documentary series, and is now running out of steam fast. (Reminds me, I need to go to the basement of the pizzeria to munch on some fresh babies.)
I returned from my last vacation in South America under a dark cloud. It was November 9, 2016. I had spent a sleepless night at the Viejo Cuba Hotel on La Niña in Mariscal watching the election returns on CNN. I could not believe my eyes. Twenty times I would shut off the television and try to drift off to sleep; and twenty times I sprang awake and turned it back on because I could not believe my eyes.
Despite my dislike for Hillary Clinton, I had gone to considerable trouble to vote for her before flying off to Ecuador. I had to drive all the way to Norwalk on the I-105 in a heinous traffic jam. And now I would have to return to the United States to see my country attempt to survive the next four years under a malicious buffoon.
I managed to compose myself enough to take a taxi to Mariscal Sucré International Airport and catch my return flight on Copa Airlines to Los Angeles via Panama City.
When I landed at LAX, though, I was conscious of being in a different country than the one I had left three weeks before. Quite suddenly, all kinds of disreputable figures emerged from their hidey-holes into the broad daylight. And now, even though the Lardfather is no longer president, I feel the ground has shifted beneath my feet. The look on my face is of a skeptical vigilance.
Puerto Rican poet Martin Espada has recently won the National Book Award for his collection of poems entitled Floaters, named after the famous photograph of a father and daughter who drowned in the Rio Grande swimming to supposed safety in Trump’s United States. One of the poems in that collection is the following prose poem:
Letter to My Father
You once said: My reward for this life will be a thousand pounds of dirt shoveled in my face. You were wrong. You are seven pounds of ashes in a box, a Puerto Rican flag wrapped around you, next to a red brick from the house in Utuado where you were born, all crammed together on my bookshelf. You taught me there is no God, no life after this life, so I know you are not watching me type this letter over my shoulder.
When I was a boy, you were God. I watched from the seventh floor of the projects as you walked down into the street to stop a public execution. A big man caught a small man stealing his car, and everyone in Brooklyn heard the car alarm wail of the condemned: He’s killing me. At a word from you, the executioner’s hand slipped from the hair of the thief. The kid was high, was all you said when you came back to us.
When I was a boy, and you were God, we flew to Puerto Rico. You said: My grandfather was the mayor of Utuado. His name was Buenaventura. That means good fortune. I believed in your grandfather’s name. I heard the tree frogs chanting to each other all night. I saw banana leaf and elephant palm sprouting from the mountain’s belly. I gnawed the mango’s pit, and the sweet yellow hair stuck between my teeth. I said to you: You came from another planet. How did you do it? You said: Every morning, just before I woke up, I saw the mountains.
Every morning, I see the mountains. In Utuado, three sisters, all in their seventies, all bedridden, all Pentecostales who only left the house for church, lay sleeping on mattresses spread across the floor when the hurricane gutted the mountain the way a butcher slices open a dangled pig, and a rolling wall of mud buried them, leaving the fourth sister to stagger into the street, screaming like an unheeded prophet about the end of the world. In Utuado, a man who cultivated a garden of aguacate and carambola, feeding the avocado and star fruit to his nieces from New York, saw the trees in his garden beheaded all at once like the soldiers of a beaten army, and so hanged himself. In Utuado, a welder and a handyman rigged a pulley with a shopping cart to ferry rice and beans across the river where the bridge collapsed, witnessed the cart swaying above so many hands, then raised a sign that told the helicopters: Campamento los Olvidados: Camp of the Forgotten.
Los olvidados wait seven hours in line for a government meal of Skittles and Vienna sausage, or a tarp to cover the bones of a house with no roof, as the fungus grows on their skin from sleeping on mattresses drenched with the spit of the hurricane. They drink the brown water, waiting for microscopic monsters in their bellies to visit plagues upon them. A nurse says: These people are going to have an epidemic. These people are going to die. The president flips rolls of paper towels to a crowd at a church in Guaynabo, Zeus lobbing thunderbolts on the locked ward of his delusions. Down the block, cousin Ricardo, Bernice’s boy, says that somebody stole his can of diesel. I heard somebody ask you once what Puerto Rico needed to be free. And you said: Tres pulgadas de sangre en la calle: Three inches of blood in the street. Now, three inches of mud flow through the streets of Utuado, and troops patrol the town, as if guarding the vein of copper in the ground, as if a shovel digging graves in the backyard might strike the ore below, as if la brigada swinging machetes to clear the road might remember the last uprising.
I know you are not God. I have the proof: seven pounds of ashes in a box on my bookshelf. Gods do not die, and yet I want you to be God again. Stride from the crowd to seize the president’s arm before another roll of paper towels sails away. Thunder Spanish obscenities in his face. Banish him to a roofless rainstorm in Utuado, so he unravels, one soaked sheet after another, till there is nothing left but his cardboard heart.
I promised myself I would stop talking to you, white box of gray grit. You were deaf even before you died. Hear my promise now: I will take you to the mountains, where houses lost like ships at sea rise blue and yellow from the mud. I will open my hands. I will scatter your ashes in Utuado.
tarnmoor 
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