Bill-O
And Other Bozos
There’s a lot to cover this past week, so let’s get right to it...
Bye-Bye Bill-O! The news that has been a long time coming has
finally arrived.
Bill O’Reilly, aka Bill O’Fraud, aka Bill-O The Clown, aka Bill-O The
Diva, has
finally been terminated from Fox News, aka FoxSpin, aka FoxHype, aka
FoxHysteria, aka the GOP “Ministry of Truth”.
The fact that FoxSpin has finally pulled the plug on Bill-O caught me by
surprise, because FoxSpin normally backs up their talent, especially Bill-O,
who was the first egomaniac they hired for their network twenty-one years
ago. (By the way, for the
record, my column still pre-dates Fox News by six months.) They would normally endure any boycott for
their talent, knowing that sponsors are temperamental and hypersensitive but
they eventually come back after a while.
Remember the hysteria over Glenn Beck?
They kept him going, didn’t they?
Boycotts didn’t matter. Public
outrage over his antics didn’t matter.
Fox News kept paying his salary and kept him on the air. It wasn’t until he stopped bringing in the
ratings that they finally let him go.
All the boycotts in the world didn’t shut him up; it was his own ego
that did him in.
And the same applies here. Bill O’Reily
has nobody to blame for his downfall but himself and his own goddamned ego.
Now I know that the cons and neo-cons are whining like the spoiled babies
that they are over this and they’re saying “it’s about money. It was just about money.” And that’s to be expected from a group of
entitled sociopaths that have no morals and no ethics and no standards. They really don’t know about right and wrong
except when they are the ones dictating it to others. The only things that they comprehend are
money, power, and control.
And that is precisely why Bill O’Fraud was allowed to be in the position
that he was in for twenty-one years. He
amassed power over the mindless myrmidons that watched him every weeknight
through a cable channel owned by a billionaire with money to burn, and that
gave the GOP a level of control that hasn’t been seen since Walter Winchell. As long as he brought those mindless
myrmidons in, they didn’t care what he did off-camera.
Of course, it didn’t hurt to have someone like Roger Ailes as his boss
either. It’s easy to tolerate predatory
behavior when your boss is leading the way.
So, yeah, getting rid of Ailes also meant that Bill-O had nobody to back
him up. And Rupert Murdoch’s kids
apparently didn’t like the negative attention FoxSpin was getting over the new
rash of sexual harassment allegations after they purged Ailes. Was it about money? Probably not.
It was probably because they were sick and tired of hearing brand-new
allegations of the same old story involving the same person.
But don’t think for a moment that somehow things will be better because
Bill-O is not there. FoxSpin will
continue to serve as the Orwellian “Ministry of Truth” for Trump. They still have plenty of soothsayers and
propagandists to turn to.
And don’t worry about Bill-O either.
I’m sure that he’ll
find new avenues to keep his mindless myrmidons strung on his political
opium, because they don’t think he really did anything wrong. And that’s really the scary part that people
should take notice. It’s not just about
one abusive and predatory person; it is about a groupthink that believes that
this is perfectly normal for someone like him.
The Root Cause. With all of the talk about Bill-O and
FoxSpin, you’ll notice that the talk will not touch on the root cause of the
problem of sexual harassment. The
salacious elements of the subject always take center stage, and people begin to
look at who is being harassed and why they are being harassed and whether or
not it’s legitimate, but no matter how it turns out, the root cause of sexual
harassment will always go ignored.
I’m talking about the unchecked ego.
It doesn’t matter who it is, if it’s Bill O’Reilly or Roger Ailes or the
small business owner in your town, that’s the one common element with all of
them when it comes to sexual harassment.
It’s about the perpetrator having an unchecked ego. It’s about a sense of entitlement that comes
with being put in positions of power with no accountability and then using that
power to leverage it over others.
Because the truth of sexual harassment is that it is not about sex at
all. It’s about power and control. And when you are in an environment where you
can do no wrong, and you are allowed to do whatever it is you think you need in
order to meet your goals, then the only thing that stops a person in that
position from preying on others is their ego.
But, of course, that doesn’t get touched on, because people in power are
supposed to already have the wisdom of Solomon automatically instilled in them,
like it just came with the position.
Barista Bitch, Please! So
Starbucks had a brand-new special limited available “Unicorn Frappuccino” this
past week, and everyone had their personal say on whether or not it was
good. The self-appointed Food Nazis were
quick to throw their tantrums over how much sugar is in these confections and
warning people not to have any.
I’ll let you in on a little secret, Food Nazis… the more you people bitch
about sugar and calories, the more that people like me want to find these
things just so we can metaphorically shove it into your pompous faces, with the
only regret being that we can’t do it literally to you.
But then some of the baristas started bitching about the popularity of
the drink and how complex and complicated it is to make it. One of them in particular, a
snot-nosed barista named Braden, screamed at people through social media to
not order any more of the drinks because that’s all that he’s been doing during
his shift and that his fingers are sticky and he has blue dust in his hair.
Tell you what, Braden, I’m sure at this point that your bosses at
Starbucks have already had a nice and long talk with you about affecting their
business and that you made an ass out of yourself and Starbucks and your fellow
baristas on the Internet. Whether or not
you still have a job with them is questionable.
But I promise you this: there are millions of Americans out there that
have had to go without jobs for years. I
know because I used to be one of them.
And if you had to choose between having sticky fingers and blue sparkles
in your hair every single day versus not having a steady paycheck for a few
years, I’d bet even money that you’d pick the Unicorn Frappuccino every time.
Seriously, a barista complaining about how hard it is to create this
supposed “magical drink” is like a stripper complaining that she has to take
her clothes off when guys give her money.
It’s called doing your job.
That’s why you’re getting paid.
Real work is not easy. I’ve worked
fast food jobs when I was your age. I’ve
struggled working minimum wage. I’ve
done temp work. I’ve had to sweat
through manual labor in factory settings working six days a week sometimes in
the middle of summer with the temperatures over 100-degrees and no air conditioning. And that last part was recently. If you still have your job after your
meltdown, suck it up and be thankful not only that you’re doing that job but
that it is the only part about it that sucks.
There are worse jobs out there.
Where Are The Meats, Arby’s?
Speaking of limited availability, Arby’s have been doing a special “traditional
Greek Gyro” sandwich which has lamb in it instead of their usual roast beef
or turkey. I’ve enjoyed their gyros and
have always wondered what it would be like to have theirs done the right way.
Sadly, though, I still have not had that opportunity. Because the Arby’s restaurants in my area all
ran out of lamb.
And because some of us actually work for a living (are you
listening, Braden?) I don’t have the time to go find a place that
would still have the traditional lamb gyros.
Yes, I’ve complained to Arby’s and they gave the mealy-mouthed apology
and promise to have it “back”, but they wouldn’t say when.
You let me down, Arby’s. You
didn’t have “the meats” like you promised!
Wiki-Whoops! Poor Julian Assange! Last year I was speculating whether or not
the founder of WikiLeaks, aka Wiki-drip-drip-drip-drip, was aiming for a pardon
for helping tip the 2016 Farce in Trump’s favor with all of those
drip-drip-drip-drip leaks about the Democrats.
Well if Julian really was hoping for a break, he’s not going to get it.
It seems that Attorney General Jeff Sessions is
getting ready to bring Julian in for those leaks. Because, you know, now that Trump is in
power, he has to treat things like this as his enemy.
Guess what, Julian? You got
Trumped! Don’t worry, you’re not the
first and you won’t be the last. It just
means you’re finally being recognized as part of the media.
Trump’s 100 Days Of “Winning”
– Here’s a little tidbit to the orange-skinned-wacky-man in the White House: if
you play brinksmanship with North Korea, you damned well better make sure that
your ships are heading in the right direction!
For instance, if you’re telling the world that the USS Carl Vinson is
heading to stare down North Korea’s shoreline, it had better be there and not
on the way to Australia. And it also
does not help South Koreans any that you’re telling them that
they used to be part of China, or that stopping the spoiled panda bear is
“not easy”. You remember South Korea,
right? Those are the people we’re trying
to protect from the spoiled panda bear.
And now they have no trust in Trump or in the United States.
Funny, isn’t it, how everything seems to be “not easy” for Trump? And just a year ago, everything is “so easy,
so simple” for him. Repealing and
replacing the Affordable Care Act would be “so easy”. Fixing the tax code would be “so easy”. Solving the problems of the world would be
“so easy”. It would be such a nonstop
cavalcade of “wining” that we would be sick of it. That’s what he promised.
Tired of “winning” yet, America?
This coming week marks the 100-day benchmark for the Cult of Trump. All those things Trump promised would be done
by that time... aren’t. And now, of
course, Trump is saying that it
really doesn’t matter, that the 100 day benchmark is artificial. That’s just typical narcissism.
Oh, here’s one more: this coming Friday, Day 99, is the end of the
continuing budget resolution in Congress.
You know how the GOP-controlled Congress refused to pass a budget at
all... ever... and has been doing everything in their power to not pass a
budget at all... ever... for years?
Yeah, the latest continuing resolution ends at midnight this Friday. If they can’t get either a budget or a new
continuing resolution passed by then, then the federal government runs out of
money and is in shutdown.
Now I know that a quick-and-dirty fix would be to just get another
continuing resolution passed, but I want you to think about this for a moment...
here we have the President of the United States who claims to have a winning record
as a businessman, with corporate chairmen and chairwomen in his cabinet, with a
GOP-ruled bi-cameral legislature, and with a supposed master budget architect
as Speaker of the House as a bonus, and they
still can’t get their act together to keep the federal government running?
Let’s get brutally honest here... that would not just be a “fail” on their
part. That would be a clear sign of incompetence! And not just for Trump, but for the whole GOP
as a national political party!
These guys have done nothing for the past eight years but whine and wail
and moan and bitch about how they never had the means to do what they wanted in
terms of passing a budget. Eight long
and painful years of blatant partisan obstructionism.
Well now the GOP have everything that they ever wanted, everything that
they complained they did not have under the previous White House tenant. They control the whole process. The Democrats are dickless failures in
Washington, so they really can’t be used as scapegoats, and, even if they had
any power to screw with things, they can’t because the GOP have changed the rules
or outright broke those rules to get everything that they wanted. So they have no excuses whatsoever if they
can’t get what they want done, especially when it comes to the budget! That is supposed to be the specialty of Speaker
of the House Paul Ryan, and if he can’t manage to pull it off, then he really
has no business being there!
We’re on the verge of really seeing what kind of person we hired as
President; whether we hired an exaggerated but credible administrator, or an
over-glorified con artist. I seriously
hope that we have the former, because we’re going to have a really hard time in
the next few years if all of this is just one big flash-and-fail straight out
of CNBC’s “American Greed”.
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