I did it again. I opened up Twitter/X again and the algorithm did it to me again. I usually just check in once or twice a day to see if I get any mentions. I still get an occasional baseball question from fantasy players and occasionally someone may respond to something I’ve said. Most of the time it is a desperate woman needing attention or something like today’s nonsense.

Innocently enough I see the little display that says I have a new mention. Hey, maybe someone said something interesting. I should have known better. This was a random conservative “journalist” that has a bombshell for us. Are you ready for this? Apparently John Kerry has been giving away Israeli defense secrets to the Iranians. He is just giving them away.

As you might imagine, there is apparently an audio recording. This journalist didn’t have it. She said the Senate “must have it” which means we aren’t even sure if they do. Plus, since no one has heard the recording that I know of, no one could verify its authenticity. So, maybe there is a recording of someone that might sound like John Kerry doing something. Sounds solid to me.

This is my favorite part. A responsible X user asked the very basic question everyone should be asking: where did you get this from? She attached a video of Maria Bartiromo reporting on Fox Business. Fox Business is where people go when regular Fox isn’t batshit crazy enough for them. Before we move on, can we spare a moment for Maria? She was somewhat of a responsible journalist at some point in her career. What does it look like when someone’s soul has been crushed when they sell it off for their thirty pieces of silver?

I have to wonder how many of those folks on conservative outlets really believe that they are on the side of the angels. Have they deluded themselves or are they cravenly just offering their services to the highest bidder? Let’s look at what this story is all about and why it exists. John Kerry used to be the Secretary of State. He was on Obama’s team when they negotiated a deal with Iran. Many conservatives feel that the deal was weak, so they put two and two together and got 27. He likes the Iranians. He had access to the information. Surely, he shared it with them.

I suppose their is a non-zero chance that its true. He could have information that would benefit them. He had spoken to them when helping to negotiate the deal towards the end of Obama’s presidency. So, the opportunity is there. Yet, John Kerry married into the Heinz family. Maybe he is just a raging Anti-Semite and we didn’t know. Maybe a lot of things.

There is a distinct pattern here and I’m clearly not the first person to see it. Every time a negative news story comes down about Trump and his many cases then we see someone run with one of these stories about Joe Biden or a prominent Democrat. He got the proverbial double whammy this week. Three of his attorneys flipped on him in Georgia and it came out that Mark Meadows has been singing to Jack Smith. Republicans have been in full on panic mode.

Just stay tuned. That evidence is coming we promise. There is a whistleblower in hiding. No one can seem to verify he exists or that anything he says is above board, but you can trust us. We’ve never lied to you before. Yup, that’s the ticket.

When considering the Tucker Carlson situation there has been a lot of things said already. Unfortunately, I was slow to the punch and let the other patrons here in the salon state their piece before I got to my keyboard. Carlson is a three time loser when you also consider his time at CNN and MSNBC. In that vain, I suppose we could possibly see him again at an OAN or NewsMax, but I’m guessing those little networks don’t have the cash or the stones to bring him in. So, maybe he becomes something along the lines of an Alex Jones or Mike Lindell and funds his own YouTube/Network venture.

I’m not here to speculate on Carlson. Enough people have done that already. Maybe it was the sexual harassment suit that got him. Maybe it was being public enemy number to Dominion. Perhaps, there was an under the radar agreement as a part of the settlement that someone would pay the piper. Maybe Murdoch and his cronies tired of watching sponsors march out the door with an increasingly racist, Russian, and nativist bent on the airwaves. It is more likely a combination of those things.

The first thing we know is that Carlson just learned the first rule of business. You are only valued as an asset as long as you continue to be a net asset. The moment you become something else, the powers that be will get rid of you. That might be the one thing he and Don Lemon have in common. They just weren’t worth it anymore. I could say that it wasn’t anything personal, but it is. When you are a prick and a jackass then you have to be worth a lot for you to stay. That wasn’t true anymore. Sean Hannity, Lauran Ingraham, and Judge Pirro should heed this warning too.

The second thing we know is that whoever replaces Carlson is likely to be worse. Bill O’Reilly was bad. Everyone was happy when he left. Then, Carlson took his time slot and suddenly Bill O didn’t seem so bad. When Glenn Beck left it seemed like a breath of fresh air just long enough to realize the crazy train wasn’t stopping anytime soon. Networks don’t make money by scaling back the crazy. They just need a different brand. I have no idea who is replacing Carlson in the long run, but I know it will be someone worse in some way imaginable.

Some stories keep coming around no matter how much you try to avoid them. This happened yesterday when it was reported that Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto tested positive for COVID-19. Being that the reporter suffers from multiple sclerosis, you’d imagine that he has already been fully vaccinated against the virus.

Fox News is a deep dive of depravity and contradiction all by itself. There has always been a schism between the hard news division and the commentary division. Cavuto comes from the hard news division. When you look at only the news division you see some examples of bias, but it doesn’t outwardly appear to be all that bad.

Then comes the commentary. Their prime time hosts rail against vaccine mandates, mask mandates, and safety protocols as if the Gestapo were marching in and strapping everyone down to the chair. Yet, news has been oozing out about Fox News themselves. Seems their corporate policy says something else entirely.

We start with the usual disclaimers and statements of concern for people like Cavuto. Like Colin Powell yesterday, he represents the moral gray area where most people reside. Sometimes it’s light gray and sometimes it’s charcoal. Yet, this gray area exists for people that know the truth, don’t outwardly speak against it most of the time, but also don’t speak against those that would distort the truth. Powell made a career of selectively speaking truth to power. His critics would say he let far too many things go in the service of gaining more power.

I don’t know Neil Cavuto. I don’t know what makes him tick. I’m guessing he enjoys cashing his paycheck every couple of weeks and that is understandable on a certain level. Yet, it is hard to take anyone seriously from a news agency that doesn’t consider itself a news agency legally. They have been taken to court before for reporting and commentary that has been less than accurate. Each time they’ve thrown out the defense that they are an entertainment company.

There is something to be said about people that know the truth, follow the truth in their own personal lives, and then speak the opposite in public. We can most assuredly add more to those that say these things for the mere purpose of garnering ratings and cultivating an audience for profit. Judas famously got his 30 pieces of silver for betraying Jesus. I suppose Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity have simply done a good job of negotiating on their own behalf.

In the old days, scholars asserted that heresy was the worst of sins. In that case, it was people preaching the absence of God. Yet, one wonders how horrible a sin it is to simply believe something different than the majority. In the case of COVID, an idiot can be forgiven his idiocy if that idiocy is his natural condition. In other words, if he really believes his rhetoric he is to be pitied and pat on the head.

What Fox News does is somehow worse than heresy. While it may be implied, the definitions of heresy do not overtly say whether the heretic actually believes the lie. Fox News definitely doesn’t. They all bask in the glow of their own vaccinations and somehow peddle “freedom” to the masses like rancid red meat you wouldn’t even feed your dog.

I haven’t read Dante lately. Perhaps he could tell us which concentric circle of hell that gets you into. There is no greater sin than to know the truth, live the truth, and then to speak against the truth for your own personal gain. There is no greater evil that exists in the world. There should be no greater punishment than what awaits you at the end. I’d love for that punishment to be on a Biblical level, but I’ll settle for a class action lawsuit.

As Ted Liu put it today, this is the best opening paragraph ever for a lawsuit:

First, here’s the good news – since the election, CNN is beating Fox News in average viewers.  Now the bad news – Fox and CNN both are losing to Newsmax.  Why?  Fox isn’t “Trumpy” enough for the red hats, but still unwatchable for normal people.  Newsmax and an even worse OAN have taken over the alt-right folks who are abandoning Fox in droves as more of their anchors have acknowledged that Trump has no chance of stealing the election from Biden.  If you’ve never watched Newsmax and OAN, don’t bother.  By way of description, if Fox News is manure, Newsmax and OAN are nuclear waste.  They have created a Superfund site of toxic and deadly conspiracy theories, gross exaggerations, and freeform lying.  And Trumpists lap it up. Since the election CNN has averaged 1.73 million viewers, more than double a year ago. Fox News Channel averaged 1.56 million and MSNBC 1.53 million viewers.  More important, Newsmax, a safe haven for delusional Trumpists to hide from gravity and arithmetic, Newsmax beat Fox for the first time ever.  Newsmax commentators, even today, continue to peddle the lies that Trump is going to prevail over Biden.

Newsmax and OAN (as well as some remaining Fox programming) engage in prodigious lying, creating toxic propaganda that has now made it impossible for normal people to engage their viewers in any kind of productive debate.  In recent days, I’ve attempted discourse with several people, and it’s like arguing with an audio recording that’s running backwards.  These folks have bought in to the Dominion fairytale, the suitcases full of ballots narrative, and even the new “Office of the President-Elect” story ignoring the decades of the use of that term.  Even talking to these folks is exhausting because you simply can’t make any progress.

Even though Trump will soon be hiding at Mar a Lago and fighting criminal and civil charges in New York, the damage he inflicted and made recovery of our democracy even more remote.  I personally don’t see a route to recovery.

Over the weekend the NY Times published a piece entitled “Tracing Guccifer 2.0’s Many Tentacles in the 2016 Election” it is a sordid tale of how Roger Stone and others communicated directly with Russian intelligence officers posing as Romanian hacker Guccifer 2.0, aggressively seeking dirt on Hillary and other Democrats. The others communicating with Guccifer 2.0  included an unnamed Republican candidate for Congress in Florida, and Lee Stranahan, a right wing radio talker and all-round shitbag.  At the time he was talking to the RUSSIANS, Stranahan was working for Steve Bannon at Breitbart and now works full-time for the RUSSIANS at Sputnik International, an online radio station run by Rossiya Segodnya, the RUSSIAN government controlled English language propaganda outlet in the US.  How sweet.

Even though Mueller’s indictment says that idiots like Stone and others might not have known they were talking directly with RUSSIAN intelligence officers, they did know that the documents being released by WikiLeaks and Guccifer 2.0 were stolen.  Them using these resources is actually no better than buying watches off a thief on the street knowing that they had been stolen from the actual owner.

My question is, at which point did obtaining and using stolen goods become legal?  To me, it makes zero difference whether Stone and others knew they were dealing with the Russians; what matters is that the KNEW they were obtaining stolen documents.  Whether it was a Romanian hacker, Julian Assange, or the actual Russians, they were perfectly aware that they were receiving stolen goods.  Isn’t that a crime in itself?  Why are they not in jail rather than spewing their bile from Fox Noise, Breitbart, and other right wing hate outlets?

Each day of this slow motion train wreck I become more and more alarmed how ONE PERSON can destroy international trade, wreck centuries-long diplomatic ties, and virtually disassemble an entire government (ours) without so much as a whimper from those entrusted with protecting us.  The speed of the destruction of the balance of power so carefully designed by the Founders is at once horrifying and breathtaking.  At this point, I only understand one thing – once we rid ourselves of this cancer (either by impeachment, indictment for crimes, forced resignation, or just voting his ass out of office), we need to seriously rethink our system of governance and the tools of democracy that are supposed to protect our democracy.  I know, I know, the invertebrates in Congress will never fix anything, but they certainly need to to be called to task by the American voter.  I’m personally writing to all of my representatives today to DEMAND that they stand up on their hind legs and do their goddam jobs.  If millions of Americans around the country would do that, it would cause a seismic shift in the behavior of the idiots sitting on Capitol Hill.

There is a place for anger, and THIS is it.