The featured image is of Vincent Van Gogh’s painting Starry Night made of 7,067 falling dominoes. The artist is a chap named Flippy Cat. I am not making this up.
You’re probably wondering why I have dominoes on my mind. Every time I hear about the Fox-Dominion case, I get this earworm:
“You might get disgusted, start thinking that I’m strange” is a couplet in the song. Van attracted considerable disgust during the pandemic. I’m feeling disgusted by some of the falling dominoes in this potpourri post.
Roll Me Over Dominion: I know it’s “roll me over Romeo” in Domino, but earworms are uncontrollable even benign ones. In this instance, it’s the singer that’s malign.
I’ve known Van Morrison was an asshole for a long time. Who can forget the “I don’t do those fucking songs no more” quote? Ungrammatical but pure Morrison malakatude.
Let’s get back to a bigger, and more dangerous, creep: Rupert Murdoch.
Defamation cases are, quite deliberately, difficult to prove and win. Recent court filings by Dominion Voting Systems indicate that they’ve laid a strong foundation for their case against Rupert Murdoch and Fox.
For the boss of a “news” network that incessantly lies, Murdoch’s deposition answers have been blunt and truthful. Thus far, he’s been Dominion’s star witness.
Murdoch said it was “wrong” for Tucker Carlson to host conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell after the election. When asked why he continued to allow the MyPillow CEO to continue appearing on Fox News, Murdoch signaled it was a business decision. “It is not red or blue, it is green,” he said.
The CNN article I just quoted was shocked that Murdoch admitted Fox coverage was driven by greed, but I am not. Business is all about making profits and avoiding losses. Media companies are no different than the rest.
Former House Speaker, GOP Veep nominee, and Young Gun Paul Ryan has been urging Fox to kick its Trump habit. It’s not as heroic as CNN makes it sound: Ryan was Trump’s chief enabler in the 115th Congress. Tax cuts for the super-rich are the most important thing to Ryan. In a word: disgusting.
Speaking of disgust:
“Murdoch responded to one email from Ryan by telling him that Sean Hannity had “been privately disgusted by Trump for weeks, but was scared to lose viewers.”
That’s the GOP in a wingnutshell. They’re afraid of their base, which is the basest base ever.
Speaking of fearing their base, Fox’s prime time opinion hosts discussed releasing a joint statement on Dipshit Insurrection Eve admitting that Trump lost and the election should be certified. It could have made a difference.
Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham play tough guys on teevee but they wimped out on taking a stand. None of them believed the BIG LIE but they were afraid to tell the truth. It’s a concept they’re unfamiliar with at Fox. Truth, that is, not fear; they specialize in scaring their viewers of whom they’re frightened. It’s complicated, man.
It’s unclear how the Fox dominoes will fall but it’s fun to watch them squirm. Let’s put the Squeeze on them:
The Case Of The Feeble Feebs: The FBI has always been a mixed bag. They’ve done some great things and some terrible things. The bad shit is why I call them Feebs. Isn’t that special, agent?
Unlike cable news hosts, I rarely call news stories bombshells. There’s an exception to every rule and the WaPo’s insider account of how resistant FBI agents were to a surprise search of Mar-A-Lago is one of them.
Usually prosecutors are the cautious ones but that wasn’t the case here. The Feebs in question were as gullible as they were timid:
Some FBI field agents then argued to prosecutors that they were inclined to believe Trump and his team had delivered everything the government sought to protect and said the bureau should close down its criminal investigation, according to some people familiar with the discussions.
Inclined to believe the Kaiser of Chaos? Really? In a word: disgusting.
The gullible unspecial agents in the WaPo story were not teenagers, but I dig this song and it has FBI in the title:
Let Them Eat King Cake: King Cake is special because it’s seasonal. It’s only supposed to be eaten between Twelfth Night and Mardi Gras, which fell on February 21 this year. Steve Scalise claims to believe in traditional values; few things are as traditional as this.
Six days into the Lenten season, this Tweet popped up:
Thank you @SteveScalise for generously sending our office a Randazzo’s King Cake!
Happy Mardi Gras to all who celebrated over the past week. pic.twitter.com/E2b0R1JrB9
— Congressman Byron Donalds (@RepDonaldsPress) February 28, 2023
If I were handing out punishment for violations of the King Cake rules, I’d lock the Man from Metry and his fellow wingnut Byron Donalds in a room with this guy:
That’s the New Orleans Pelicans seasonal mascot, King Cake Baby. They give this creepy mascot up for Lent annually. The NBA team also seems to have given up winning for Lent. Oh well, what the hell.
Let’s circle back to the featured image. Here’s how the Van Gogh dominoes fell:
I’m disappointed that Don McLean’s Vincent wasn’t the soundtrack for that video. But I’m not using it either, so who am I to complain?
The last word goes to Genesis with a song around which I built a pandemic post in 2020.
I reckon that I am less magnanimous than you are, sir. Dominoes an artist doth not make. What’s next? ‘Lego Artists’? The only thing that I will say about Ivan Morrison that is positive is his short bit sitting on a pier in some swamp, playing the harmonica while John Lee Hooker strums and sings.
In fact, I know a Kiwi Lego artist who appeared on teevee, If Duchamp’s terlet seat is art so are dominoes.