Bastards. Miserable, vicious, antisocial, lying bastards.
Has anyone, even that maladjusted little dork Zuckerberg over at Facebook, done as much to undermine Western Civilization as Goddamnable old fiend Rupert Murdoch? His vast media empire has lately been at the promotional forefront of almost every pernicious development that bids fair to ruin our lives, and, increasingly, kill us outright, from Trump and Trumpism to vaccine skepticism and COVID denial. His lie-spewing cockroaches on Fox News are going at it nightly, with the latest crusade being to paint the January 6 insurrection as a “false flag” operation executed by malicious Liberals in order to ground a specious “domestic war on terror” that aims to unjustly persecute good patriotic Americans (i.e., White people) for being conservative. Tucker Carlson, somehow managing to outdo even himself, just helmed a whole documentary that Fox has broadcast, making this very claim:
It’s so dangerously, rabble-rousingly full of shit that two of the channel’s most stalwart neo-conservative talking heads, Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes, have resigned in protest, but Rupert’s just fine with it. Tucker’s got a right to his opinions, OK? Last time he looked, there was still this thing called the First Amendment, all right? Meanwhile, he’s got the op-ed page of the Murdoch-controlled Wall Street Journal – once a sleepy sort of broadsheet concerned mainly with the pecuniary interests of the 0.0000001%, and read mainly within a 400 yard radius of the New York Stock Exchange – repeatedly stirring up the shit and carrying Donald’s water. Hence the headline pasted in above, merely the latest abomination in the paper’s recent history of truth-crucifying MAGA-mania.
When Trump was still clinging to the edges of the Resolute Desk, the WSJ party line was that COVID wasn’t so bad, Dear Leader was doing a great job at containing it, and reports of new surges in infections and death rates were vastly exaggerated mainstream media fictions, bordering on hysteria. In June 2020, they had Mike Pence himself – remember, he was then the titular head of Trump’s Coronavirus Task Force, though there’s nothing to suggest that the new role distracted him much from his primary job of watering the West Wing’s potted plants – author a guest editorial, and I swear to God, this was the title:
Maybe Pence was more or less right, in that you could argue there wasn’t a “second wave” so much as one long, continuous first wave that had periodic peaks and troughs.
Now that Orange Idi is out to pasture – for now, anyway – the narrative has shifted. COVID is out of control! And it’s all Biden’s fault! Donald left us sitting pretty, with vaccines that wouldn’t even have existed if he wasn’t such a stable genius, and then Biden dropped the ball, and now look! Americans are dropping like flies! Bad Joe Biden! BOOOOOOOOO!!!!
Well, Americans are still dropping like flies, between 1,000 and 1,100 most days, and why is that, do you suppose? Is it maybe because about 40% of the lunk-headed U.S. population refuses to get vaccinated? And is that, in turn, maybe on account of the tireless efforts of the Murdoch media empire, aided and abetted by Trump and his many Trumpanista Governors, like those pricks Abbott of Texas and DeSantis of Florida, not to mention all those assholes in Congress, too numerous to list, who’ve all exerted themselves to the nth degree, fighting tooth and nail against public health measures to control the spread of the virus, while promoting vaccine skepticism and general pandemic denial at every opportunity? Is it perhaps because Rupert Murdoch somehow perceives it to be in his dirty little antisocial interest to stoke epic idiocy like this?
This moron, Ian Smith, proprietor of Atilis Gym in New Jersey, is Murdoch’s kind of guy, and Rupert’s little minions have done what they can to give him a megaphone:
With all this pro-pandemic propaganda, there’s barely time for the stories on the Russia Hoax and the patriotic heroism of Kyle Rittenhouse.
But yeah, this is all Biden’s fault.
Lying bastards.
It’s becoming pretty clear, isn’t it, that no matter what he does, Biden can’t win for losing. The right wing propaganda machine is too powerful, and the supposedly liberal media does too little to set the story straight. Just the other day, Ted Cruz was on Meet the Press touting the Big Lie that Trump actually won the election – why give him the platform? Why even talk to the evil troll? There’s a story going around now, circulating so widely, and repeated so often by the usual MAGA suspects, that it’s become a thing that Dr. Fauci was part of a scheme to torture beagles as part of his vile vaccine research. That’s right – Fauci murders puppies!! Republican Senators, like Susan Collins, are demanding an investigation. Outstanding economic news is being drowned out by hysteria over gas prices, and a global spike in inflation, and Biden’s policy efforts to address the issues – loosening up the strategic petroleum reserve, coordinating with other nations to get them to do the same with their own reserves, and so on – are barely mentioned. World oil prices are now on the decline; as Paul Krugman notes wryly over at the Times, the headlines in two weeks will be Gas Prices Plummet: Why This is a Problem for Biden. Democratic policies poll well and are widely popular, but not the “out of touch” Democrats who enact them. Nobody knows what’s in the Build Back Better bill – all they know is that the Democrats fight among themselves, and are thus incompetent. That 1.2 trillion dollar infrastructure bill? Never heard of it. The 1.9 trillion in COVID relief, with the cheques, and the child tax credits and all that? That was a GOP initiative wasn’t it? Didn’t Donald do that? That’s what Senator Whatsisname said. As the recent Gubernatorial election in Virginia seems to show, Republicans aren’t even going to pay a political price for being rabid Trump-worshipping insurrectionists without any ideas of their own. That thing about the violent coup attempt last January? Boring. It’s even possible Trump will be back soon, and meanwhile, what with the nation being gerrymandered and voter-suppressed to within an inch of its life, true democracy is all but dead in broad swaths of America, and a return to Republican control in Congress seems the inevitable outcome of next year’s mid-terms. Anyway, aren’t the Dems the monsters who closed down schools, and want to turn everybody into the moral equivalent of Jews in the Third Reich with their mask mandates and vaccine passports?
Thus the idiots, cheered on by everybody on Rupert Murdoch’s payroll, won’t wear masks, won’t social-distance, and won’t get vaccinated. Those vaccines, they’ve got funny stuff in ’em, you know? Little computer chips is what I heard, so they can always find you. And they turn you magnetic! Like, shoot, you walk into the garage and a crescent wrench flies off the pegboard and sticks right to your forehead! Not taking that stuff. Nossir, can’t make me. FREEDOM!!!!
You know what the big news story is today? It’s that Kamala Harris, now universally despised, went out and used her own money to buy ballpark four hundred bucks worth of high end cookware!
She bought a nice pot!!??? That lousy bitch! Why does she hate America so much? Hey – when she was in the store, did she happen to be wearing a tan suit?
{Note to self: remind Kathy that four hundred bucks for a guddam pot is an outrage. Woman had me convinced it was just what the things cost these days, if you wanted the quality stuff. Ha!}
Jesus H. Christ. What’s poor Joe Biden going to do about a country as broken as this, with an electorate as profoundly stupid and militantly ignorant as America’s? What could anyone?
Today on Fox:
the needlefish 