https://www.theburningplatform.com/2017/10/19/any-questions-2/
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Robert Gore
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Category Archives: Humor
The Russiagate scandal descends into total absurdity, by Alexander Mercouris
The only problem with the headline is that Russiagate has been totally absurd from day one. From Alexander Mercouris at theduran.com:
US government paralysed as frantic searches for evidence to prove scandal true fail one by one
Even as the Trump administration disintegrates – with the President publicly quarrelling with his Secretary of State, and his Chief of Staff forced to deny he is about to resign – the scandal which more than anything else has defined this Presidency has disintegrated into total lunacy.
Consider these facts
(1) The Mueller investigation
Just a few weeks ago the media was full of reports of how Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation was “closing in” on the President and his campaign team. The focus of media interest was on an early morning search in July of the house of Paul Manafort, the campaign professional who at one time acted as the Trump campaign’s chairman, with lurid headlines that he was about to be indicted, though it was never made clear for what.
Since then there has been nothing, a clear sign that the search of Manafort’s house has come up with nothing, and that the pressure to get Manafort to talk by dangling threats of indictment in front of him have resulted in nothing.
In all other respects a curtain of silence has fallen on Mueller’s investigation, a strong sign that after its failure to “break” Manafort it no longer has a clear strategy of what to do.
(2) The Senate Intelligence Committee
This held a portentous press conference recently to announce the findings of its nine month investigation into the Russiagate allegations. As a result of that press conference we learnt that
…….the committee and its staff have conducted more than 100 interviews, comprising 250 hours of testimony and resulting in 4,000 pages of transcripts, and reviewed more than 100,000 documents relevant to Russiagate. The staff, said Warner, has collectively spent a total of 57 hours per day, seven days a week, since the committee opened its inquiry, going through documents and transcripts, interviewing witnesses, and analyzing both classified and unclassified material.
The result of all this impressive activity? Precisely nothing. Here is what Senator Richard Burr, its Republican chairman, had to say
There are concerns that we continue to pursue. Collusion? The committee continues to look into all evidence to see if there was any hint of collusion. Now, I’m not going to even discuss any initial findings because we haven’t any.
To continue reading: The Russiagate scandal descends into total absurdity
Humor is Where You Find It, by Robert Gore
Looking for a good laugh? Consider the United States.
Football is a tedious game that fills three-and-a-half hours of airtime with 30 minutes of action, commercials, commentary, instant replays, more instant replays, closeups of pretty cheerleaders, and halftime pageantry. The players are paid great gobs of money but run the risk of rendering themselves concussive basket cases. The super rich owners hold up municipalities for taxpayer-funded stadiums while keeping the TV, ticket, merchandising, and concessions revenues. They’ve also climbed into bed with the federal government, accepting taxpayer money for promoting patriotism. Among other things, this requires players, who until 2009 could stay in the locker room while the National Anthem was played, to be on the field, presumably standing at respectful attention.
Presumably—aye, there’s the rub. Last season, quarterback Colin Kaepernick expressed his disagreement with certain governmental policies and practices by kneeling during the Star Spangled Banner. Since then, other players have done the same, to the consternation of many fans, including President Trump. Ratings and attendance are tanking and the crony socialist owners are caught between the rock of their payrolls’ politics and the hard place of their fans’ disgust. To borrow from Oscar Wilde, one must have a heart of stone to ponder their plight without laughing. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer group of guys and gals.
Last year’s losing presidential candidate has written a book blaming virtually everyone for her loss…except the one person who was responsible. A cottage industry has sprung up to feed this self-exculpatory fantasy, affixing on Russia as the author of Hillary’s woes. Russia “hacked” DNC computers, except technically they couldn’t have been hacked, they were downloaded, an inside job. The materials Russia couldn’t have hacked were given by someone, presumably whoever downloaded them, to WikiLeaks, which disclosed them. Doing so, it committed the cardinal sin in contemporary American governance: disclosing the truth. In classic Clinton fashion, Hillary and team never contested the authenticity or veracity of the disclosures, instead concocting the Russian story.
Efforts to keep this fabrication going are a source of endless amusement. There have been evidence-free “assessments” from the intelligence agencies, a special counsel probing the tax returns of a Trump campaign manager who served all of two months, and now there are stories that “Russian-aligned” groups and RT bought a drop-in-the-bucket worth of ads on Facebook and Twitter during a campaign in which billions of dollars were spent on advertising, not counting the unpaid “donations” to Hillary from the mainstream media, pollsters, Google, and Facebook.
The purveyors of the Russian concoction are those desperately lonely schmucks who take the ugliest girls in the bar home at closing time because they’re the only ones left. The concoction is all they have. Let’s hope they have the decency to hate themselves in the morning.
America is like that high school all-everything—sports star, class president, valedictorian—who can’t accept that at the university, she’s just another student. For a brief shining moment after World War II it had an uncontested empire, but empires are notoriously hard to hang on to. Seventy years later the US has a string of “inconclusive” (never “losing”) wars, a lot of promises to its own citizens that aren’t going to be kept, and an empire that’s slipping away. Its chief adversaries—Russia, China, and Iran—are going about their business, consolidating economic and political power in the Eurasian center of the world.
They’ve been helped immeasurably by the comedy of errors that has been US policy in Syria. The same people who championed disastrous regime changes in Iraq and Libya set their sights on Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s duly elected leader. That this entailed crawling into bed with ISIS, an offshoot of al Qaeda, the outfit that reportedly attacked the twin towers and the Pentagon, seemed not to bother anyone. Neither did the fact that while we were supporting ISIS’s rebellion in Syria, we were also supporting the Iraqi government’s effort to quell ISIS’s rebellion in Iraq. Why is it that the butt of all the jokes often ends up picking up the tab? The US wasted tons of blood and treasury, accomplished none of its stated goals, and was humiliated when, at the request of Assad, Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah came in and routed ISIS. You can’t make this stuff up.
Even the US’s supposed friends can’t stifle their schadenfreude, having been under its domination for so long. Derisive joy is tempered by justified concern: in its arrogance and desperation to maintain its untenable position, those zany Americans might blow up the world. The president recently stood before the United Nations, an organization ostensibly devoted to peace, and said he’d destroy North Korea. Maybe it was all just posturing and hyperbole in good fun, but the North Koreans, and their next-door neighbors China and Russia, weren’t laughing.
The US has become an infantile nation. Not playing well with others, it demands the world conform to its dictates…or else. That or else is basically holding its breath until it turns blue, as it self-destructively plunges further into debt and wreaks havoc globally, instilling fear and hate, prompting vengeance. Fealty to a failing government and its symbols has become the sine qua non of a ritual, insecure patriotism. Real patriotism, loyalty to America’s founding ideals, demands opposing at every turn the government’s mindless, unprincipled, and voracious quest for power, treasure, and empire. If the flag and the National Anthem mean anything at all, they stand for the proposition that liberty must be defended and fought for, particularly against that which has always been its chief nemesis—government. Now, they only serve as sad markers of how much has been lost.
AMERICA AT ITS GREATEST
Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, Humor, Politics, Society, Sports
Tagged China, Hillary Clinton, NFL Football, North Korea, Russia, Syria
She Said That? 9/16/17
Probing, honest, thoughtful, introspective, and self-critical quotes from Hillary Clinton’s latest tome, What Happened:
He Said That? 9/15/17
More from Joe Bob Briggs, The Hurricane Algorithm:
Okay, once you get your quotes, you’re gonna write one of two stories:
1. BIBLICAL PROPORTIONS.
2. SWATH OF DESTRUCTION.At first I didn’t understand the difference between the two.
Biblical Proportions is body bags. You need a high death toll. The gold standard is Galveston 1900: so many bodies they couldn’t count them accurately, probably upwards of 10,000. You need a hurricane for that headline—no tornado is ever gonna get those numbers. You can also do a Biblical Proportions story with, say, an influenza epidemic, but it doesn’t have the same punch because people die too slowly. Hurricanes are news-cycle-friendly. Without quite saying it, you write the story to imply that God smote us. The Almighty visited Four Horsemen on Texas in the form of Death, Famine, Pestilence, and Destruction. You can actually make up new names for the Four Horsemen, like Grantland Rice did in the most famous sports lead of all time, because nobody remembers what it actually says in the Bible.
But usually you don’t get a pure Biblical Proportions story. I found this out the hard way when I covered a tornado that had zero dead bodies—it actually went through a highly populous area without killing anyone—and so at the end of the day the city editor threw a bunch of notes on my desk and wanted me to write the lead, and I attempted to write a forbidden headline:
DODGED A BULLET.
My amazingly inspirational Dodged a Bullet prose failed to find any support with my boss. God pulling us all into his protective bosom was poison at the newsstands. In fact the editor was fairly peeved that I would presume to “minimize the enormous property damage that occurred.” He insisted that the lead be changed to Swath of Destruction.
First of all, what is a swath?
Has there ever been a swath of anything except destruction? What if there was a swath of wonder? What if the lead said, “A swath of wonder descended on North Texas as hundred-mile-an-hour winds ripped the roof off of a really ugly church that we’ll be able to rebuild, with better imagination this time, thanks to the insurance money.”
He was having none of it. “Swath of destruction” was decreed and swath of destruction it remained, in 60-point Bodoni Bold.
http://takimag.com/article/the_hurricane_algorithm_joe_bob_briggs/print#ixzz4snqpWafF
The Hurricane Algorithm, by Joe Bob Briggs
This should go viral. A funny take on the media and natural disasters. From Job Bob Briggs at takmag.com:
News executives love disasters. They get to act like Chuck Norris and Assemble the Squad.
“Maginnis, you cover first responders.”
“Wilson, get over to NOAA and stay on those maps.”
“Kelly, official press briefings. Work with Yurozawski to keep tabs on every emergency room within a 300-mile radius.”
“Bergram, you’re Cop Shop, but we’ll keep the aperiodic radio tracking the locals.”
“Ramstein, find that German guy who gets a hard-on for global warming.”
By the time a managing editor or a news director gets finished “covering this mother like blubber on a seal,” you’ve got thirty people who feel like they’re crammed into a D-day troop carrier, waiting for somebody to throw open the landing door and engage the Nazis. They have lust in their eyes. They’re hopped up like nekkid trance drummers at Burning Man.
You know those reporters clinging to lampposts in 120-mile-per-hour winds on the pier at Sanibel Island?
Same thing. They’re pumped. They’re wild. They’re getting all orgasmic from the needle burns on their cheeks as the gooey red juice of the hurricane danger zones envelop them in delirious wet convulsions.
I know. I was one of those guys.
I worked at a newspaper in Dallas where we had tornadoes all the time. We would have these Assemble the Squad meetings where the managing editor would hand out umpteen jillion jobs, including “Gladys, we need a Top Ten Texas Tornadoes of All Time sidebar.”
And I would stand there like the last guy to get picked in peewee football, wondering if they were gonna use me at all, and the high sheriff would finally look at me and say, “And Briggs, you do color.”
“Color” was this word for feature writing that meant “Find something to write about, preferably something with a lunatic or a bereaved person in it.”
I would always protest. Every decent story had already been assigned. I’d already done the story on the bearded backwoodsman sitting in a bass boat while a hurricane approaches, saying, “All I need is my gun and my dog, and if God decides it’s my time, then it’s my time.” There was nothing left to write about.
And so they would tell me to chase the storm.
To continue reading: The Hurricane Algorithm
