AIN'T NOBODY HERE BUT US CHICKENS

I knew from back when I was a child and heard my father ranting about the lies of Richard Nixon in his famous “Checkers Speech” that the man was a crook. Everything he did demonstrated it. There was nothing too bad someone could tell me about Tricky Dick Nixon.

And yet, when I read the transcripts of the Nixon tapes, the screaming racism and anti-Semitism, the admissions of crimes by him and the people around him, the written proof that these people were not as scummy as I had thought they were for the previous 20 years, but so much more scummy - it actually shocked me. We Nixon-haters weren’t crazy - if anything, we were too nice to those people, too willing to give them the benefit of the doubt!

And now we have the Faux Snooze defamation case.

That place has been a collection of obvious shitheads and ignorant morons since the first minute of the first show on the first day way back in 1995.

And yet, seeing their hypocrisy, their greed, their willingness to do anything in service of their own greater enrichment… is breathtaking. Nicolle Wallace is right. It is disgusting. It’s like stepping out of your house and finding a pile of dessicated, rotting dog shit on your front steps. Put there by your neighbor.

And as breathaking as the material Dominion released week before last, as much as those materials revealed the corrosive, corrupt, self-serving, and deeply compromised inner workings of the Fox News operations that puts the network at the center of promulgating the Big Lie that culminated in the January 6 insurrection that produced a second impeachment of Donald Trump, and may yet lead to criminal charges against the former presiden, the emails of Fucker Carlson, and the World’s Dumbest Mick (Hannity was hired by Roger Aisles from his failing radio show in Atlanta because “he’ll take orders”) to the Bitch of Belsen herself, Laura Ingraham (Jurate once worked on a show Ingraham was doing before she went to Faux, and came home that night to tell me she had finally met “the worst bitch on the planet” after 20 years in TV, a world where there’s plenty of competition for that title), in which they not only admit but revel in the fact they are lying pieces of shit, what came out today makes that garbage look like a child’s comic book.

I refer to the testimony of the Worst Person To Ever Live On The Planet, Rupert Murdoch.

Again, I’ll agree with Nicolle: the transcript of his testimony is damning.

“In fact, you are now aware that Fox endorsed at times this false notion of a stolen election?” one of Dominion’s lawyers asked Murdoch during his deposition, the court filing shows.

“Not Fox, No. Not Fox. But maybe Lou Dobbs, maybe Maria, as commentators,” Murdoch replied.

At the time, Maria Bartiromo was called a “news anchor,” not a “commentator.” But Murdoch will throw anyone under the bus.

When asked in particular if Fox News host Jeanine Pirro was among the hosts who endorsed the claims, Murdoch replied “I think so.” He said that former host Lou Dobbs did so “a lot,” and that prime-time host Sean Hannity did so “a bit.” Yet Murdoch denied that Fox itself endorsed the claims.

Translation: Ain’t nobody here but us chickens, boss.

Murdoch, when asked why he continued to allow MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell to make election fraud claims on Fox News, said it was a business decision. “It is not red or blue, it is green,” Murdoch said, according to the court documents. He didn’t want to piss off their biggest advertiser. Not after all the other advertisers who have dropped them since 2016.

The filing also offered new insight into the relationship between Murdoch and Trump's son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner, asserting that Murdoch provided Kushner with "Fox confidential information" about Joe Biden's ads, as well as debate strategy.

Murdoch spoke to Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott on January 5, the day before Trump supporters would storm the Capitol, about whether to push Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham to say something to effect of, "'The election is over and Joe Biden won,'" according to the filing. Scott told Murdoch that “privately they [the hosts] are all there” but “we need to be careful about using the shows and pissing off the viewers.” So they said nothing and the next day was January 6 - I don’t need to remind you what happened that day.

The mendacity, the malicious malevolence, of the Right is astounding, even to someone like me who has been on the receiving end of their insanity.

As bad as you think they are, they are worse. Far worse.

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