DL Open Thread Thursday, Sept. 30, 2021

Are the media invested in ending American democracy? Sure seems that way to a lot of people, including Margaret Sullivan of the Washington Post, who’s hopping mad that the Eastman memo, laying out how Mike Pence could have thrown the election to Trump on Jan. 6, has gotten almost no attention from the mainstream media.

You’d think, though, that a few seconds of precious airtime might be given to something as startling as the Eastman memo. In numbered steps subtitled the “January 6 scenario,” it outlined how Pence, charged by the Constitution with counting electoral ballots from the 2020 election on that day, could have simply ignored results from seven states that tipped the presidency to Biden. Pence would effectively throw away millions of votes from Arizona, Pennsylvania and any other state where fraudulent groups of “shadow electors” had challenged Biden’s victory based on no valid legal principle whatsoever.

“The main thing here is that Pence should do this without asking for permission — either from a vote of the joint session [of Congress] or from the Court,” Eastman wrote.

Sullivan talked to a number of network executives about the lack of coverage. They all defended downplaying or ignoring the story.

[F]ormer and current network executives I spoke with offered a different view — and largely agreed with decisions to downplay the memo. For Tom Bettag, the document landed in his “shocked but not surprised” category. A former executive producer for “CBS Evening News” with stints at three other networks who now teaches at the University of Maryland, Bettag saw the story as merely “an unknown lawyer, who says he’s on the Trump legal team and had said Kamala Harris was not a citizen, wrote a crazy memo.”

He echoed the view of one network representative who told me: “After all, it didn’t happen.” In Bettag’s words: “There’s no indication that Pence considered it seriously.”

I won’t be here for it, but once the civil war starts, can someone make sure that the “network executives” are included in the first shipments to the guillotine?

Being a citizen of Dumbfuckistan has its costs. This graph shows that a vote for Trump was also vote for Covid — the higher your county’s Trump vote, the higher its infection and mortality rates today.

Why are the citizens of Dumbfuckistan being lied to? ‘Cause they’re so darn stupid! Also, there’s good money in hawking false cures, which is why it’s no surprise that hackers revealed a right-wing medical network is making millions peddling ivermection and hydroxychloroquine to them. Sheep dip is the perfect scam for shearing the sheep, it turns out.

Another story the media mostly ignored: A whistleblower told ABC News that his Trump administration superiors manipulated intelligence on Russian support for Trump, the Mexican border, and white supremacy in the U.S. Granted, we all assumed that was happening, but this would be important testimony for the Trump’s treason trial.

Ever since the Monica Lewinsky scandal — and can someone explain to me why that skank still gets occasional headlines? — Democrats have mostly kept their peckers in their pants. Republicans, not so much. The latest sex scandal to rock Dumbfuckistan has Trump’s onetime right-hand shitbag Corey Lewandowski porking South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, which Noem foolishly denied, which had the practical effect of confirming the story. It’s been a busy week for Lewandowski, who was also accused of drunkenly stalking a deep-pocketed Republican donor’s wife at a public event, and there are multiple witnesses. And I am not making up that the woman accusing Lewandowski is named Trashelle Odom, which is a name only the writers for “The Simpsons” (and Mrs. Odom’s mommy) would make up.

Want a good reason to leave the country? Try this story: Some 16-year-old dipshit Texan in a coal-rolling pick-’em-up truck saw some bicyclists on the road and decided to “have some fun” by discharging unfiltered diesel exhaust in their faces. When that got dull, he just mowed down six cyclists, who were training for an ironman triathlon, with his truck. Two of them were so critically injured they had to be airlifted to hospitals. Yet a majority of people in this country believe we can somehow survive without killing these motherfuckers before they kill us.