Friday Funbag #3--Extra Long Edition
Thursday teed up an expanded Funbag edition with some absolutely wild breaking news stories in an eight-hour stretch.
Over here in the Wasteland, it’s not often you see a day like today—four bonkers news stories in an eight-hour time period is legitimately rare. As such, we’re hosting an expanded edition of the Funbag today, so buckle up.
What in the hell is wrong with North Carolina GOP gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson?
The short answer is everything. The man is just, to use a phrase I came up with many years ago, fifty shades of fucked up. He makes Clayton Bigsby look reasonable. And as of this afternoon, Republican candidates are sprinting away from him. CNN ran a blockbuster takedown of Robinson’s appalling online history (those in the know already were aware of his history of ugly comments, but this is a new low). Robinson posted, using a fully filled out profile, on porn sites about his love of transgender pornography, his desire to see slavery return, how he would’ve called Martin Luther King, Jr. “Martin Lucifer Coon,” and that he was a “Black Nazi!!!!” Within an hour, GOP House candidates pulled down social media posts where they’d praised or posed with Robinson, except for my congressman, John James, who has kept this post up on his verified Facebook page (proving once again that his moderate facade is just that, a phony face on his extreme beliefs).
Robinson has vowed to stay in the race, but it’s unlikely he’ll recover from this. He’s a raging lunatic who has no self-control, and his image as a “man of Christ” is toast—two hours after the porn story hit, he was found to be an active member at AshleyMadison.com by POLITICO. It’ll be interesting to see if this ends up costing Republicans North Carolina via depressed conservative turnout.
Why would a star magazine reporter, well-respected by many of her peers and engaged to POLITICO’s senior DC reporter Ryan Lizza, have an “emotional affair” with the most damaged Kennedy alive?
Olivia Nuzzi has always been hard to pin down. Her viewpoints cross a political spectrum, from interning inside liberal Anthony Weiner’s ill-fated mayoral campaign in 2013, to a year later tweeting about “fangirling over Ann Coulter” and slamming President Obama as “the real intruder in the White House” while using the old hashtag #tcot (true conservatives on Twitter). She was hired by the Daily Beast before graduation, and four years later, at just 25, was personally invited by Trump for a Oval Office sitdown that turned into a story she wrote depicting, in excruciating detail, what a clown show his White House was. Earlier this year Nuzzi wrote about Joe Biden’s decline, with one anecdote that was simply brutal, and proved to be the last nail in the coffin that forced him out of the running for re-election.
It seems odd, then, that she would end up, a year after profiling Robert F. Kennedy Jr., admitting to an emotional affair with him, which is likely to derail her career and likely her engagement to Lizza. It also explains why recently she tweeted in support of raw milk, a stance that didn’t make sense until now. Nuzzi also tweeted, years ago, about how she hated that Hollywood, in movies like Thank You For Smoking and season 1 of House of Cards, always depicted female reporters as sleeping with sources. And yet, here she is admitting to an affair with a source. In the history of own goals, this is one of the most notable ones.
Why are pagers blowing up in Lebanon? Better question, why does anyone still have a pager?
Long story short is Israel, using its quite formidable electronics industry, built a Trojan Horse company to sell pagers and two-way radios. These devices are popular with groups like Hezbollah, apparently, because they were considered to be safe from electronic tracking. The Israelis packed 20 grams of explosives into each pager, and this week, for reasons unknown, began randomly detonating them across Lebanon. Perhaps they think they can get Hezbollah to quit fighting through this psychological warfare. As a tactical operation, it’s genius. It is impossible to deny the genius of this plan. They’ve now followed it up by bombing Beirut this morning.
Morally, though, it’s obscene. Complete disregard for civilian lives. The bombing flattened an entire high-rise apartment building, and Israel claims that they killed the Hezbollah high command, but a whole lot of innocent people were also killed. The pager attacks killed civilians who were standing near the targets at markets, schools, or in the street. Over 2,000 innocent Lebanese people are maimed for life, having lost fingers, hands, eyes, et cetera. Israel has pulled the mask all the way off. They don’t care about civilian lives. They may think it’s fine because terrorists don’t, but the whole point of a democracy is holding oneself to higher standards.
Most importantly, though, the precedent has been set, and just as it is with cyberattacks, others will follow suit. We are facing a near future where a fascistic dictator, a type like Ron DeSantis, could decide to do this to Americans who oppose their agenda. That’s not a prediction. It’s a spoiler.
Is Matt Gaetz going to finally get charged for statutory rape?
I swear, this case won’t go away. In 2017, there was a party in the Florida Panhandle hosted by a lobbyist, Chris Dorworth, who is friends with Gaetz. A number of high school girls were invited, given alcohol and drugs, and participated in sexual activities. Gaetz and one particular 17-year-old girl, who was at the center of the sex trafficking conviction of Gaetz’s best friend, Joel Greenberg, reportedly attended this party. The Department of Justice investigated Gaetz for statutory rape and sex trafficking (he was reportedly paying her through Venmo), but couldn’t quite put together enough to charge Gaetz.
Now, as of twenty-four hours ago, there are three sworn affadavits filed in federal court putting Gaetz at this party, partaking in the sexual activity. This case is a civil suit, filed by Dorworth against multiple people, including the 17-year-old girl, to try and make all of this go away. The lawyers for the girl were nuclear, got these affadavits, geolocated Dorworth and Gaetz’s phones on the night in question, subpoenaed their text messages, etc. Dorworth was freaked out by this, withdrew the lawsuit, but the girl’s lawyers weren’t done yet. They filed a motion for sanctions for what they termed a frivolous lawsuit, and then took all of this evidence and dropped it in the record.
Here’s hoping DOJ reopens the case and puts this creepy little bastard on trial.
A sheriff in eastern Kentucky walked into the chambers of a circuit court judge, argued with him, shot him five times and calmly surrended to deputies. What is going on here?
I’m not going to pretend I understand what’s going on here. The state police haven’t given a motive. The prosecutor had to recuse because the judge is his brother-in-law. It feels like something deeply personal started this, but it’s entirely possible that Gomer Pyle here doesn’t have two sticks to rub together to light his intellectual fire and he shot the judge for no good reason.
And finally, this horrifying story deserves your attention.
Kamala Harris is right, and women are dying from these abortion bans that scare doctors into not performing lifesaving procedures lest they be sent to prison for a decade. The bans need to be lifted. Judges and politicians shouldn’t decide what’s best for these women—they have neither the temperament nor the education for it.