Stacey Dash, she is this idiot whose antics some people find funny. She was in the hit film Clueless, playing Cher’s best friend Dionne, and now she is running for Congress as a GOP idiot in California’s 44th district, which includes such Los Angeles neighborhoods as Compton and Watts, so yeah, good luck with that, Ms. Dash. (We are sure she did things in between Clueless and her congressional run, but much like the missing years of Christ’s life, we are not aware what they are. Perhaps Wonkette has written about them, oh God, we just clicked to brush up, she is GODAWFUL.)
Point is, Dash went for her first TV interview Thursday after announcing her “run” for “Congress,” and um … well, it really went downhill when MSNBC’s Ari Melber decided to commit the sin of asking questions. Here, have a video:
Question and answer time, Stacey Dash!
Number one! What do you, potential California congresswoman Stacey Dash, think about the war brewing between Jeff Sessions and the state of California over immigration law enforcement?
DASH: Well, I think, you know, we have to respect law enforcement. And we have to respect laws.
Melber was like … “Go on?”
DASH: That’s it.
Melber noted that most of the undocumented immigrants in question haven’t committed crimes, and therefore many believe they shouldn’t be ICE’s targets. Back to you, Ms. Dash:
DASH: Do we know that they are the focus of law enforcement?
Melber all “MM HMM.”
LET’S TRY ANOTHER! Gun control, that is a big issue! Does Stacey Dash support Prop 63, the gun control measure that passed in California?
DASH: I support … The Bill of Rights! That’s what I support! [pause] You know, but I also do not like the tragedies that are occurring in our country.
Stacey Dash: Pro Bill of Rights, Anti Tragedy! She continued by saying blah blah about “moral integrity,” because she believes that “runs from family.” You know?
DASH: You know? Family is the key. And parents. Parenting.
Yeah?
DASH: And being aware of mental illnesses, and taking care of those issues.
But not gun laws. Gotcha.
Let’s try Obamacare? Yay or boo, Ms. Dash?
MELBER: Should Obamacare be fully repealed?
DASH: Yes.
What about people who lose their health insurance?
DASH: Well they’ll get, I mean there’s, of course there’ll be another solution. But Obamacare is not working. We know that.
What solution?
DASH: Well that’s where I’m gonna go and listen and pay attention and have a dialogue, to come up with a solution.
Can you tell us what that solution would be?
DASH: No.
Whew boy!
OK, ready for a fun one? Ready for a REALLY EASY QUESTION for a black candidate who would like to be elected to represent COMPTON?
What do you think about that time Donald Trump said there were good people “on both sides” in Charlottesville, including on the white supremacist side?
DASH: I think he’s absolutely right!
[Ari Melber’s entire jaw detaches from the body so it can hit the floor as fast as possible.]
DASH: There were two extreme sides. And here’s what it boils down to: our right. They had a right to assemble. Both sides had a right. But they were both extremes. And here’s where I said at the beginning: We have to listen to each other. If we do not listen, there will be no solutions.
Melber was like WAIT HOLD UP, who was the “hate” on the opposing side from the white supremacists?
DASH: Well no I’m not saying that there was not, there was hate on the other side, or that I’m justifying the hate on the other side, what I’m saying, what their Constitutional right was, they were exercising that, there should be no hate at all. Hate is not the answer. For anything.
Whaaaaaaaaaaa …
Dash went on and on about the hate and the violence and who did the violence and how Donald Trump was right, and every word of it is impossible to transcribe, so just watch it for yourself. She ended with this grand proclamation:
DASH: I’m not here to judge. The only one who can judge is God. Do I know everyone in the neo-Nazi party, if they have a good heart or not? No I don’t. Do I know every member of a gang, if they have a good heart? Do I know the heart of a man in prison? No I don’t. I’m not here to judge.
She is not here to judge!
Except one thing. Melber asked Dash, at the end of the day, if she is a Clueless person, or if she is a Legally Blonde person, and she issued her judgment:
DASH: Of course I am a clueless person!
Well played, Melber. Well fucking played.
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For the past few years, the Right has been trying to work a new schtick about “Guess WE’RE the free speech defenders now, liberals!” — and more people than I’d like to admit have bought into it.
Their rules have not always made sense. For instance, it is an expression of free speech to say something racist, but a violation of it to say that the person who said it is a racist. Because that’s “silencing” them, and “silencing” someone is the very worst thing you can do. Richard Spencer should be able to speak at any college he likes, but all celebrities must shut up about politics forever (unless they are James Woods or Tim Allen or the Duck Dynasty people or Scott Baio or Ted Nugent or …) — as must all teenagers, when said teenagers disagree with them.
It is not enough, they said, to merely let the Nazis speak. It is not enough to not send them to jail. We must listen to them as well, we must hear them out. We must not block them when they pop into our social media yelling about “the Jews.” Stop being afraid of controversial views! they cried, we must allow everything into the marketplace of ideas.
Oh, how they would cry and cry when Charles Murray got booed everywhere he went, by all those intolerant SJW liberals who didn’t like the fact that he believed black people were not as smart as white people for some reason. The only way to preserve the right to free speech, they claimed, was to patiently listen to what bigots have to say. Otherwise you are 1984. Obviously.
Booing people you disagree with is bad and they would never do it. Unless, of course, that person was someone who was saying something bad about Donald Trump and Roy Moore.
This weekend, oddly enough, that person was loyal conservative Mona Charen. Charen was taking part in a panel called “#UsToo,” which was supposed to be about how all the mean liberal feminists don’t even care when conservative women are sexually harassed or assaulted. This is not a thing. Several of the women Roy Moore was a creep to were actually Republicans. One of them, I recall, said she voted for Trump. As one of those mean liberal feminists, here is a thing I wrote about how it was definitely not OK for Al Franken to have acted the way he did towards Leann Tweeden, also a conservative woman.
If any conservative women would like to talk this over with me, I would welcome that — because I actually really don’t ever want any woman to feel like no one would care if she were sexually harassed or assaulted. I would care, and so would any other liberal feminist I know.
That being said, Charen explained, in a New York Times op-ed, that she didn’t actually feel like talking about liberal hypocrisy on Sunday, or about liberal women not having their backs, she felt like talking about conservative hypocrisy and feeling like conservative men don’t have their backs.
But this time, and particularly in front of this crowd, it felt far more urgent to point out the hypocrisy of our side. How can conservative women hope to have any credibility on the subject of sexual harassment or relations between the sexes when they excuse the behavior of President Trump? And how can we participate in any conversation about sexual ethics when the Republican president and the Republican Party backed a man credibly accused of child molestation for the United States Senate?
I watched my fellow panelists’ eyes widen. And then the booing began.
Charen was booed aggressively, by people who very likely would have considered it a horrible violation of the First Amendment if someone like Charles Murray or Milo Yiannopoulos were booed. By people attending a function where the far-right Marion Maréchal-Le Pen was speaking. As Charen points out…
Ms. Maréchal-Le Pen is a member of the National Front party, and far from distancing herself from her Holocaust-denying, anti-Semitic and racist grandfather, she has offered him a more full-throated endorsement than her aunt has. “I am the political heir of Jean-Marie Le Pen,” Maréchal-Le Pen told the Washington Post last year. “He was a visionary. He was right about a lot of things.”
Clearly, this time, it was the Right who could not handle a controversial viewpoint. Had the Left behaved like this to a speaker who said the opposite, every pundit on the Right would have been screaming their head off about how the Left loves censorship.
This is important. For a long time now, many on the Right have tried to play both sides. They don’t agree with the Nazis, they say, they don’t agree with Alex Jones, they don’t agree with the people who are out there saying all the really bad stuff — but they love free speech so much, they are so comfortable with controversial statements, that they are willing to tolerate them. They were not, however, nearly as willing to politely listen to Charen’s condemnation of Trump and Moore’s behavior. This is because their goal is not “free speech for all!” or a lovely lesson in hearing out the views of those who disagree with you; their goal is to move the Overton Window to the Right. Even if they don’t “agree” with the Nazis, they feel they can put them to good use. If conspiracy theories and anti-Semitism become more mainstream, their views are going to look far more moderate and reasonable by default.
The Right has never championed free speech, they have bastardized its meaning for their own purpose, and with this one incident, they have shown their true colors.
Trump in the Oval Office we mean his bedroom eating snacks
Philip Rucker and Ashley Parker have a new story in the Washington Post that’s not exactly new. Breaking news! The entire Trump presidency is, at heart, based on seething contempt/white-loser weak-dick resentment/jealousy of Barack Obama, and Donald Trump is obsessed not only with undoing everything Obama did, but also with proving — to others, but mostly to his own wounded, undeserving self — he is bigger than Obama.
Rucker and Parker write about how Trump is trying to convince everyone he’s been “tougher on Russia than Obama,” because “just look at the facts.” Uh huh, OK, sure. Was the Obama administration a little slow on the uptake when it came to addressing in real time the Russian interference in the 2016 election? Certainly. They admit that. Do we wish they had said fuck it and shouted from the mountaintops that Russia was trying to install Trump in office? We sure as shit do. Do we wish Obama had told Mitch McConnell to fuck himself with his turtle mother’s shell when McConnell refused to stand with him in a bipartisan way to defend our democracy before the election? Hell yes.
But no, Trump has not been “tougher” than Obama on Russia. Trump is the guy who gives Vladimir Putin a tongue bath every time he talks about him, and probably in private Skype Sessions too; who jizzes code word level intelligence from our Israeli allies all over Russian diplomats in the Oval Office; and who still refuses to implement the Russian sanctions Congress passed 517 to 5, because he’s scared to make his real dad Putin angry. For Trump to suggest that he’s “tougher” than Obama on Russia (or in any other way) is wondrously pathetic. Of course, weak racist near-senile old white men like Trump are pretty threatened by black guys who are smarter and prettier and have bigger hands than they have. Trump’s low self esteem is pretty funny, isn’t it?
WaPo analyzes:
On Russia and a host of other issues, aides and advisers say, Trump’s near-compulsion with measuring himself against Obama reflects an innate need to be judged superior to his peers and to have a singular opponent to target.
“If you watch Trump, he understands that there are two ways to be really tall, and one is to have your opponent be really short,” said Newt Gingrich, former House speaker and a Trump ally. “He spends a fair amount of his time shrinking his opponents.”
In other words, you can actually HAVE the goods like Obama, or you can be a Sadsy McWeakFuck like Trump who only feels big when he belittles others. Thanks, Newt Gingrich for telling us the textbook definition of “small-dicked bully.”
There’s one part of the WaPo article, though, that’s just bizarre, when it comes to Lies Trump Tells About Obama. (Yes, more bizarre than his lie that Obama never called families of soldiers killed in action.) Trump is apparently obsessed with saying Barack Obama never even used the Oval Office, whereas Trump, who definitely works a whole lot for at least 2.5 hours per day, uses it constantly, except for when he is golfing or watching TV or having Nakey Executive Time. But all the other times!
Upon becoming president, Trump started to show off the trappings of his job, taking visitors into the Roosevelt Room and the Cabinet Room. He quickly alighted upon a favorite last stop, ushering guests into the Oval Office.
“Obama never used the Oval, but Trump is different,” the president would say, referring to himself in the third person as he often does, according to people who have witnessed the tours.
As his guests marveled at the space, Trump would press them, asking if Obama had ever shown them the West Wing’s inner sanctum.
When he was invariably told no, Trump appeared to beam with pride.
What a sad fucking weirdo.
As Jonathan Chait points out, there are hundreds of pictures of Barack Obama working in the Oval Office, and unlike pictures of Trump working in the Oval, there is usually work on the Resolute Desk, because he was actually working there. (Also Obama had pictures of his family in his Oval Office, because he’s not a trashbag like Trump.)
Here are a bunch of pictures of Obama in the Oval. Of course, in many of them he’s GOOFING OFF, because unlike TRUMP THE PATRIOT, Obama had NO RESPECT and used the Oval as his personal NOBUMBER PLAYPEN:
Obviously he is just playing CHARADES in this one:
And here he is letting a guy TOSS THE FRUIT in the Oval Office, like a common person who likes FRUIT TOSSERS:
In this picture, Obama is talking to people who are not white in the Oval Office, ew yuck, Donald Trump does not like that one bit:
Nice look on your O-FACE, Barry Soetero Kenyobamanesiastan!
Here’s a picture of OBAMBI talking on the phone with Vladimir Putin. It looks different from pictures of Trump talking to Putin because when Trump talks to Putin, his pants are around his ankles. Allegedly.
Here’s one where Obama is being briefed about the Newtown school shootings, like an actual president who pays attention to briefings:
In this picture, Obama is obviously TRYING TO SEDUCE A MALE SNOWMAN in the Oval Office:
Oh great. Oh great. A baby:
Here’s Bamz on Thanksgiving morning phone-chatting with US servicemembers, despite how Trump lies and says Obama never talked to military people:
And finally, here is Bamz in the Oval with US Olympian McKayla Maroney, which is great because remember that time we had a president every single person on the US Olympic Team felt honored to meet?
Sorry, Donald. You will never be the man Barack Obama is, or the president he was.
Hi, Congressman! Enjoying this warm, sunny day in DC? I bet you’ll miss those cherry blossoms when you retire and head back to Texas next year. Or will you be staying here to earn that sweetsweet lobbying coin when you retire from the House? So cool that you’ll have a pension and guaranteed access to health insurance for the rest of your life! Bet that’s a big weight off your mind, huh?
Anyway, we’ve never met, but I’m just writing to let you know that you’re a bad parent. Like, TERRIBLE actually. Now, I know what you’re saying. How were you to know those photos of you naked and masturbating would leak to the press? This isn’t about that. And it isn’t about your dogged insistence on turning the earth into a boiling sewer of polluted sludge. Although I’m sure your four children will thank you when daytime temperatures in Texas start hitting 130 on the regular.
No, sir. I’m talking about the guns. I’m talking about this interview you gave to The Atlantic where you recounted your experience watching your 11-year-old son hide under a truck from a mass shooter at Congressional baseball practice last June. And I’m talking about how you decided that the best course of action would be to have a lot of “feelings” about it instead of changing any laws.
The shooter had two weapons, and he’d cease fire to reload or switch from his pistol to his semi-automatic rifle. In those silent seconds, Barton’s then 11-year-old son, Jack, would peek out from under the car where he was hiding. His father would frantically yell at him to get back down.
That must have been a terrible, traumatic experience, Sir. No parent and no child should have to go through that. I am so sorry for you and your son.
I’m a parent myself. In fact, our youngest children are the same age. Although I’m a heathen liberal still married to their father, not a family-values conservative like yourself. Maybe that’s why I just can’t understand your refusal to moderate your position on gun laws after watching a lunatic with access to powerful, semi-automatic weapons shoot at your own precious child. But the Lord and the NRA work in mysterious ways. I see the NRA still gives you an A rating! Too bad God doesn’t issue annual report cards.
“In terms of feelings, I don’t think there’s a difference between a liberal Democrat or a conservative Republican,” he said. “Regardless of your viewpoint, you’re just as upset. We care just as much. I can guarantee you that GOP members of the baseball team care.”
“We all want to do what’s right,” he added. “We just have different philosophical viewpoints.”
I guess we do have “different philosophical viewpoints,” Congressman. I feel that the safety of our children is more important than some tortured interpretation of the Second Amendment that allows Americans to wander around carrying giant murder machines. But I’m a radical who thinks that even adults should be able to walk down the street without fear of being gunned down.
You feel that the police should be empowered to detain people who exhibit “warning signs.” Not sure why you’re so much more concerned about the Second Amendment than the Fourth. But I guess people like you and me don’t have to worry about getting pulled over and strip-searched because police think we’re exhibiting “warning signs.”
Anyway, I’m glad to hear that you’re calling your son every day now since the shooting. You don’t seem to have updated your Twitter feed since your decision to retire, but I know you send thoughts and prayers to the victims of the Parkland shooting. It’s the absolute least you could do, being a Congressman and all. But I’m sure we’re all safer for it.
I know you’re a religious man, sir. So I’ll sign off with a verse from the Book of James.
What does it profit, my brethren, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can faith save him? Faith by itself, if it does not have works, is good enough for the NRA and more valuable than the lives of 33,000 Americans per year.
Did I do that right? I’m Jewish, so sometimes I get confused with the New Testament. But I’m pretty good at math, LOL. So I feel confident when I say that our murder rate, at 16 [Edit] 5.3 per 100,000, is higher than Europe’s of 3. So weird that fewer people get shot when access to guns is restricted!
Well, I know you’re a busy man. So I’ll just wish you good luck in your retirement, Congressman. I’ll be in DC next month with my kids marching against gun violence, but I suppose I won’t see you there. It’s the very least I can do, not being an elected lawmaker like yourself. But at least I’m doing it.
My fiance never punched me. He never choked me. But he did hold me down on the bed, trying unsuccessfully to rip the diamonds from my ears so I couldn’t “fuck anyone else when I was wearing them.” He always thought I was fucking everyone, most especially any gay friends who had dropped by for coffee, because clearly being gay was a ruse. I was never fucking anyone. He was though, often leaving a sweet note on the pillow to tell me he’d gone home because he couldn’t sleep and didn’t want to wake me, and going to another woman’s house instead.
He was romantic, and so funny, and so fun. He stayed up all night setting up my home office the night I moved into my new Santa Ana house. He put the dictionary on the book-stand, open to the highlighted definition of “love.”
He threw the wooden hutch my brother had given me into my mirrored closet doors, so my bedroom floor was blanketed in shards of glass. I screamed and screamed for help, but the neighbors eight feet away never called the police.
“I was scared last night,” my little boy told me when I walked him to school the next morning. “I heard him screaming at you in the night and I was scared.”
My father drove two hours to vacuum up the glass for me, after I’d called him, crying, and suggest gently it was time for my fiance to go. My fiance — who’d stormed out when I said my dad was coming, not about to face a mad dad — was furious that I’d told him “our business.”
He was always furious — but never so angry that he lost control so much that he broke his things instead of mine. When he smashed my African Virgin Mary bust into the wall, I rounded on him, punching him in the face, giving him a black eye. I took him back, the periods of time between breakups getting shorter and shorter, from six months to three days, for close to five years. Every time he left, I begged him to come home.
He smashed my Virgin Mary bust because I’d asked him to go to the video store with me, and he didn’t want to go.
He smashed my hutch into the mirror because I’d smoked a cigarette at the party, when we were both trying to quit, then lied and said I didn’t smoke, then said, “That was a lie, I did smoke.” In the morning I found a pile of cigarette butts he’d smoked all night the night before.
He smashed my bookshelves because I got my nose pierced.
He threatened to get my mother fired from her teaching job. He threatened to have my son put in foster care. He took me roller skating at the aged rink, holding my hand.
After enough of the breakups, my friends told me I loved the drama. I didn’t. But I believed — I truly believed — that I was so old and dumpy at 29, and 30, and 31 and 32 — that no one would ever love me again. At the time, I looked like this:
I would probably have stuck around another 10 years if he hadn’t gone and married someone else — he got two girls pregnant while we were together, on and off. I met her, while I was trying to reel him back, not knowing he’d moved on. I was friendly; she was not. I’m sure he told her I was crazy, like he told me about all his exes. I know they’re married still; I hope she’s fine.
Everyone loved him. He was the best. He was the funniest, and the charmingest, and the most outgoing. People knew he had issues; people knew he was bad. But he brought joy to their lives, unless he was dating them. Then it slid quickly from euphoria to shame.
I’m glad Rob Porter’s wives left him as quickly as they did. I’m sorry their church elders didn’t protect them. I’m happy to have dodged that bullet, and married a man who doesn’t smile calmly before allowing himself to rage and terrorize, all premeditated like you wouldn’t believe. I’m glad I can protect my old father now, and there’s no need for him to protect me. I’m sorry I let my son go through fear that I’d be harmed. I’m happy to have married a man who’s happy to be with me, even though I did finally hit middle age. And I hope that other man, whom I once so loved, is never in a position where I have to let the country know.
This Wonkette summary is fine, but seriously just click through and read the whole thing on The Atlantic. It is SOMETHING
Way back in the summer of 2016, or “before the dawn of time,” shit was getting hinky with Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s campaign manager, and “Ukraine.” There was lots of shade and mundane crookedness going on, but how interesting can something be when it is about “Ukraine,” right? We knew he was corrupt, there were “ledgers,” and wake us up when it’s time to add dick jokes to the boring details in the eventual indictment.
One thing I like about me is I will tell you when I am wrong. And in this case, mama was a fucking moron.
So here’s what you’re going to do: You’re going to open this tab for a time in the future when you have two hours to dick around. Then you’re going to try to read the tab, but it will have eaten your computer because you left it open too long, so you’re going to copy the url again and paste it into a new tab, and close the old tab, and you’re going to read it then. Because you WILL read this story about Paul Manafort by Franklin Foer — he of the “weird server” story in Slate that NUH UH WAS NOT DEBUNKED, haughty scolds of the New York Times! — unless you hate drama and intrigue and mistresses and morally void sociopaths and the history of lobbying and why does every single person Trump’s ever met have a corrupt jailbird daddy and what happened to Oleg Deripaska’s 18 million dollars and a suitcase with Ferdinand Marcos’s ten million dollar illegal donation to the Ronald Reagan campaign mysteriously disappearing in Paul Manafort’s fat, thieving hands.
It just. keeps. going.
It is crazy cinematic, a bad boy tale like Wolf of Wall Street, but if the corrupt Wall Street guy then had 50 more chapters of his life where he did increasingly sociopathic things up to and including helping dictators murder SO MANY of their citizens and then went to a clinic to cry about killing himself while his daughters Cordelia and Reagan bitched that he wasn’t giving them millions of blood moneys anymore, and then the very next year managed Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Which, fucking INSANELY, won, and now we are all going to die.
But we’re not going to die without reading — or even listening to! — this crazy telenovela first!
Chapter One: Cry, Paul Manafort, Cry!
Paul Manafort’s daughters complain he is getting cheap, and he is crying about killing himself, and Oleg Deripaska is trying to find him.
Andrea noted her father’s “tight cash flow state,” texting Jessica, “He is suddenly extremely cheap.” His change in spending habits was dampening her wedding plans. For her “wedding weekend kick off” party, he suggested scaling back the menu to hot dogs and eliminated a line item for ice.
I HATE YOU DADDY. I DON’T EVEN CARE IF YOU GET MURDERED BY THE RUSSIAN MOB.
Chapter Two: Paul Manafort And Roger Stone Ratfuck The Young Republicans
Whatever, this section’s fine, and interesting history, and includes the line “it was one of the great fuck jobs,” but not talking about prostitutes.
Chapter Three: Paul Manafort And Roger Stone Invent Lobbying And Hookers
The firm exuded the decadent spirit of the 1980s. Each year, it hosted a golf outing called Boodles, after the gin brand. “It would have to move almost every year, because we weren’t invited back,” John Donaldson, an old friend of Manafort’s who worked at the firm, says. “A couple of women in the firm complained that they weren’t ever invited. I told them they didn’t want to be.” As the head of the firm’s “social committee,” Manafort would supply a theme for the annual gatherings. His masterwork was a three-year progression: “Excess,” followed by “Exceed Excess,” capped by “Excess Is Best.”
How many hookers do you think died?
Having Invented Lobbying, Bored Manafort Invents Foreign Dictators
It is important to remain challenged in your work, so Paul Manafort did this:
The firm’s most successful right-wing makeover was of the Angolan guerrilla leader Jonas Savimbi, a Maoist turned anti-communist insurgent, whose army committed atrocities against children and conscripted women into sexual slavery. During the general’s 1986 trip to New York and Washington, Manafort and his associates created what one magazine called “Savimbi Chic.” Dressed in a Nehru suit, Savimbi was driven around in a stretch limousine and housed in the Waldorf-Astoria and the Grand Hotel, projecting an image of refinement. The firm had assiduously prepared him for the mission, sending him monthly reports on the political climate in Washington. According to The Washington Post, “He was meticulously coached on everything from how to answer his critics to how to compliment his patrons.” Savimbi emerged from his tour as a much-championed “freedom fighter.” When the neoconservative icon Jeane Kirkpatrick introduced Savimbi at the American Enterprise Institute, she declared that he was a “linguist, philosopher, poet, politician, warrior … one of the few authentic heroes of our time.”
Oh, that’s gross. Is there more?
As the country stood on the brink of peace talks in the late ’80s, after nearly 15 years of bloody civil war, the firm helped secure fresh batches of arms for its client, emboldening Savimbi to push forward with his military campaign. Former Senator Bill Bradley wrote in his memoir, “When Gorbachev pulled the plug on Soviet aid to the Angolan government, we had absolutely no reason to persist in aiding Savimbi. But by then he had hired an effective Washington lobbying firm.” The war continued for more than a decade, killing hundreds of thousands of Angolans.
Oh. There was more.
Chapter Five: I LEARNED IT FROM YOU DAD!
Paul Manafort’s dad, Paul Senior, was a big old crooky crook, and Junior loved him VERY MUCH. Also, his Dad got kickbacks for “a jai alai arena” because his dad was apparently the boy mayor of Ice Town.
Chapter Six: 1980s Arms Dealing For Fun And Profit
That’s the section where this fucking thing is:
Stories about Manafort’s slipperiness have acquired mythic status. In the summer of 2016, Politico’s Kenneth Vogel, now with The New York Times, wrote a rigorous exegesis of a long-standing rumor: Manafort was said to have walked away with $10 million in cash from Ferdinand Marcos, money he promised he would deliver to Ronald Reagan’s reelection campaign (which itself would have been illegal). Vogel relied in part on the 1996 memoir of Ed Rollins, a Republican consultant and Reagan’s reelection-campaign director. In the book, Rollins recounted a dinner-party conversation with a member of the Filipino congress who claimed to have personally given a suitcase of cash to a “well-known Washington power lobbyist” involved in the Marcos campaign. Rollins would neither confirm nor deny that the lobbyist was Manafort, though his description doesn’t leave much uncertainty, and he conceded in an email that “it’s a pretty good guess.” Rollins admits in his book to being “stunned” by what he heard—“not in a state of total disbelief, though, because I knew the lobbyist well and I had no doubt the money was now in some offshore bank.” This irked Rollins greatly: “I ran the [Reagan] campaign for $75,000 a year, and this guy got $10 million in cash.”
WHAT.
(Then you click through to the Vogel piece, because of course you do, and learn that Imelda Marcos now serves in the Philippines Congress? And your head explodes and you die of sadness at the realization that we actually will serve under President Ivanka’s 2040 reign, GOD FUCKING DAMMIT.)
Then you keep reading and you get this deliciousness and you forget about President Vanky:
After the election of George H. W. Bush, Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly agreed to help organize the inauguration festivities. The firm commissioned a company from Rhode Island to sell memorabilia on the parade route—T-shirts, buttons, and the like. After crews had taken down the reviewing stand and swept up the debris, the alumnus recalled, a vendor showed up in the office with a bag full of cash. To the disbelief of his colleague, Manafort had arranged to take his own cut. “It was a Paul tax,” the former employee told me. “I guess he needed a new deck. But this was classic: Somebody else does the work, and he walks away with the bag of cash.”
And you realize the President Vanky thing is okay, because we deserve it.
Chapter Seven: Ukraine Stuff
This chapter exists.
Chapter Eight: Oh, Here Is The Part Where He Steals $18 Million From A Russian ‘Oligarch’
I used to think nobody is stupid enough to steal $18 million from a Russian “oligarch,” and so surely Manafort and Oleg Deripaska were just moneylaundering through this one technique where you sue someone for stealing all your money but you are JUST KIDDING. (This has happened, weirdly, with the president’s personal attorney, Michael Cohen! Isn’t that weird?)
Well I was
For Pericles’s first deal, Manafort used Deripaska’s money to buy a telecommunications firm in Odessa called Chorne More (“Black Seas,” in English) at a cost of $18.9 million. He also charged a staggering $7.35 million in management fees for overseeing the venture.
But then 2008 hit, and Deripaska, after getting a loan from Russia that came with having to take a televised tongue lashing from Putin himself, asked Manafort for his investment back.
Manafort had little choice but to agree. But that promise never translated to action. An audit of Chorne More that Rick Gates said was under way likewise never materialized. Then, in 2011, Manafort stopped responding to Deripaska’s investment team altogether.
Deripaska wouldn’t let go of the notion that Manafort owed him money. In 2015, his lawyers filed a motion in a Virginia court. They wanted the authority to track down more information on the deal, even though the initial papers for it had been filed in the Cayman Islands. The lawyers had already managed to get their hands on some of the documentation surrounding the deal, and they had extracted a belated explanation of what had happened from Gates. According to a spokeswoman for Deripaska, Gates said that Chorne More had defaulted on a $1 million loan that it had taken out to pay for capital expenditures, allegedly forfeiting the partnership’s entire investment in the process. This explanation struck Deripaska’s lawyers as wildly implausible. Deripaska began to publicly doubt whether Manafort had even bought the telecommunications company in the first place. “At present it seems that the Partnership never acquired any of the Chorne More entities,” his lawyers argued.
That seems … unwise.
Chapter Nine: Can You Imagine If Donald Trump’s Bloated Old Goat Carcass Was Your ‘Prize’?
Manafort needed money, fast. But he knew you don’t ask Donald Trump for money. What ever to do?
Back in the ’80s, his firm had represented Trump when the mogul wanted to reroute planes flying over Mar-a-Lago, his resort in Palm Beach. Since 2006, Manafort had kept a pied-à-terre in Trump Tower, where he and Trump had occasionally seen each other and made small talk. This exposure yielded perhaps another crucial insight: Trump’s parsimony. When Manafort offered Trump his services, he resisted his tendency to slap a big price tag on them; he would provide his counsel, he said, free of charge. To his family, Manafort described this decision as a matter of strategy: If Trump viewed him as wealthy, then he would treat him as a near-equal, not as a campaign parasite.
But Manafort must have also believed that money would eventually come, just as it always had, from the influence he would wield in the campaign, and exponentially more so if Trump won. So might other favors and dispensations. These notions were very likely what led him to reach out to Oleg Deripaska almost immediately upon securing a post within the campaign, after having evaded him for years. Through one of his old deputies, a Ukrainian named Konstantin Kilimnik, he sent along press clippings that highlighted his new job. “How do we use to get whole,” Manafort emailed Kilimnik. “Has OVD operation seen?” Manafort’s spokesman has acknowledged that the initials refer to Oleg Vladimirovich Deripaska. In the course of the exchanges, Kilimnik expressed optimism that “we will get back to the original relationship” with the oligarch.
DIDN’T HAPPEN. But he went to work for Donald Trump — for free! — and everything turned out for the very best.
At least until you remember we have to look forward to President Ivanka.
On Thursday’s Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Billy On The Street star Billy Eichner enlisted host Kimmel’s help in unveiling his new project intended to liven up the upcoming 2018 midterm elections. Especially targeting those darned millennials (who, according to Eichner, only turned out for the 2016 presidential election to the…
Back in October, the first teaser for Hulu’s Castle Rock show finally offered some hint as to what it’s place in the “Stephen King universe” would be with a little reference to Shawshank State Prison. For the show’s Super Bowl ad, Hulu hits that note even harder with André Holland’s character not only mentioning the…
Thatold Lion King reference from The Simpsons was a deeper reference than it first appeared. You remember the one: Mufasa appears in the clouds, bidding Lisa to “avenge my death, Kimba—I mean, Simba.” If you didn’t get the Kimba bit, that’s okay—neither did most Americans. What the bit is referring to is Kimba The…
Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, a documentary film about Mister Rogers, is premiering at the Sundance film festival tomorrow. This short clip is the first look we’ve gotten at the movie:
Love is at the root of everything — all learning, all parenting, all relationships — love or the lack of it. And what we see and hear on the screen is part of who we become.
Love is the root of all learning. That has been a real theme around here lately. In my introduction to Noticing, I noted this recap by A.O. Scott of a favorite scene in Lady Bird:
Sister Sarah Joan (Lois Smith), the principal, has read Lady Bird’s college application essay. “It’s clear how much you love Sacramento,” Sister Sarah remarks. This comes as a surprise, both to Lady Bird and the viewer, who is by now aware of Lady Bird’s frustration with her hometown.
“I guess I pay attention,” she says, not wanting to be contrary.
“Don’t you think they’re the same thing?” the wise sister asks.
The idea that attention is a form of love (and vice versa) is a beautiful insight.
This is silly and I loved it: someone took the clip from Aladdin when he and Jasmine sing A Whole New World while riding the magic carpet and dubbed realistic audio over it. I laughed embarrassingly hard at this. (via @JossFong)
If you were to name a pair of songs that would absolutely not sound good mixed together, Pearl Jam’s Jeremy and Footloose by Kenny Loggins would be a good place to start. But as DJ Cummerbund’s mashup Jereloose, the two songs actually go surprisingly well together.
But what’s actually blowing my mind is that Footloose and Jeremy were released only 7 years apart. Maybe it’s because I went from 5th grade to my first year of college in that span, but the cultural distance between the two seems much greater than just 7 years.
For the past few years Da Share Z0ne has been one of the internet’s best and weirdest parodies of internet culture—most directly of the kind of Facebook page that posts tough-guy memes over pictures of skeletons that your fuck-up cousin shares. They’re this generation’s version of a “Keep honking, I’m reloading”…
SAN JOSE, Calif.—Figure skater Jimmy Ma just performed his short program at the 2018 National Championships. And about two thirds of the way through his performance, the music changes to a song you wouldn’t expect to hear at a skating competition—DJ Snake’s and Lil’ Jon’s “Turn Down For What.”
It’s been almost a year now since Workaholicswent off the air, taking with it the collectively deranged slacker schemings of Adam DeVine, Blake Anderson, Anders Holm, and their behind-the-scenes accomplice, Kyle Newacheck. Fans missing the quartet’s work are in luck today, though, because Netflix just released the…
Recently, Rick And Morty co-creator Dan Harmon tweeted that 2017 was “truly the Year Of The Asshole,” alluding to some misdeeds of his own. This caught the attention of Megan Ganz, a writer who worked with Harmon on Community and was responsible for many of the best episodes in seasons two and three—not to mention the…
Last September, we reported that Taylor Swift was being drawn back into court yet again, this time over the lyrics to her 2014 smash hit “Shake It Off.” The lawsuit in question came from songwriters Sean Hall and Nathan Butler, who claimed that Swift ripped off the lyrics to 3LW’s “Playas Gon’ Play”—which they…
by Kirk Hamilton on Kotaku, shared by Barry Petchesky to Deadspin
Back when it came out, Star Wars: The Force Awakens played like a straightforward homage to 1977’s Star Wars. It was plenty fun, but wasn’t all that deep. Now that I’ve seen its follow-up, The Last Jedi, The Force Awakens seems a lot more interesting.
![[They do not move.]](https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/interaction.png "[They do not move.]")
