this week in stupid: July 22 edition
Sporky's on the level, Fox News funds the devil, and so much more ...
as another stupid week comes to a close here in America, let’s look back at some of the highlights.
monday: Congresswoman Sporkfoot records a Biden campaign ad
on Monday, a miracle happened: Marjorie Three Brain Cells Greene wrote a campaign ad for Joe Biden.
of course, she didn’t mean to do that. what Marge intended to do was scare the living fuck out of everyone by equating Joe Biden’s agenda with the evils of FDR’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.
there was just one teensy problem: the laundry list of “evils” that Her Sporkness compiled was actually a list of everything good that’s happened in America in the last hundred years.
you know, stuff like Social Security and voting rights and ending poverty. things Republicans hate but are actually super popular with the American people.
the Biden campaign took notice:
say what you want about Joe Biden, but his comms people are pretty awesome at their jobs.
tuesday: welcome to stupidville. population: every Republican
Tuesday was the day Trump announced that he’d gotten a target letter from the Guy Who Indicts War Criminals in The Hague, and the entire Republican party fell all the fuck over itself in a mad dash to see who could have the stupidest take.
I wrote a whole thing about it.
it was a day for the Stupid Hall of Fame.
wednesday: Donald Trump is a man with a plan to have a plan about a plan and it’s going to be a great plan, maybe the greatest plan ever
Donald Trump is a low-wattage moron, but I’ll give him credit for this: the man is a master bullshitter. here he is, being asked a simple question about the environment, and he barrels right into his answer, right up until the point (15 seconds in) where he realizes that he has no idea whether he’s supposed to be for the issue or against it, so after the briefest pause to recalculate, he drops right into some standard “it’s going to be amazing, you’ll see” word salad.
what a brilliant idiot.
thursday: Fox News knows who the real racists are
are you sitting down? you’d better sit down for this, because you’re about to have your mind blown. ready? here it goes:
someone wrote a country song and it’s super fucking racist.
I know, right? it’s just so unlikely.
Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town” is a nostalgic look back at those golden days of yore when you could lynch a black person just for looking at you funny.
decent folks are outraged, and the song and video are being pulled from distribution, and so naturally, Fox News is fighting back the only way they know how: pure unadulterated whataboutism.
friday: we report, and we also give money to satan
one thing that never fails to amuse me is how the extreme right hates Fox News every bit as much as we do.
and so they never pass up a chance to take potshots at the cable channel that committed the unforgivable crime of calling the 2020 election for Biden.
which brings us to The Blaze. they’ve gotten into the imaginary whistleblower game, and you’ll never guess what imaginary whistle they’re blowing today: Fox News is funding the Satanic Temple.
Insiders have revealed to Blaze Media that Fox will subsidize some of the very activist groups that despise and seek the ruin of the network's viewers, evidencing a “complete disregard and hatred” for its core audience.
welcome to When Stupids Collide.
saturday: ?
hey, it’s still morning as I sit here writing this. but give it time, I guarantee you that some dipshit wingnut is going to do something stupid before the day is over. you can set your watch to it.
have a non-stupid weekend, everyone.
Re Trump and bullshit.
A key to understanding Trump is to understand that he's not a liar. He’s a bullshitter.
In his book, “On Bullshit,” recently-deceased Princeton Philosophy prof Harry Frankfurt explains the difference:
“It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false.
“For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.”
Of course, Trump doesn't just spew bullshit. He weaponizes it. This may, in fact, turn out to be his most lasting legacy: to ratchet up bullshit to an entirely new level, and to make himself the standard by which all other bullshitters will forever be measured.
I don’t know how much more Stupid I can take.