And what a long 12 months it was.
2017 was the year that even Bully Boy Bush saw some spit polishing from some claiming to be on the left.
In less than a year, Donald Trump as President of the United States made some people miss the Supreme Court appointed, War Criminal (Iraq and Afghanistan) who illegally spied on Americans.
Last June, Negassi Tesfamichael (POLITICO) explained, "Bush, who left office in 2009 with a favorability rating of just 35 percent, now sits at 59 percent, just four points shy of Obama’s current favorability rating of 63 percent."
That was three months after Ellen DeGeneres proved that she was a fair weather lesbian and brought Bully Boy Bush on her show and danced with him.
Rake your brain and you'll recall that the talk show lesbian who spoke out against the Iraq War was Rosie O'Donnell while the one hiding in a closet on Iraq was Ellen.
Apparently, she's stepped out to embrace a War Criminal. What a proud moment for her, right up there with the affair that almost destroyed her marriage to Portia.
So did Donald manage in less than a year to outdue what Bully Boy Bush did in eight?
No, but it was The Year of Chicken Little and the mantra was, repeatedly, “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!”
It must still be in descent then since it’s yet to crash down.
We do realize that, right?
Because we were told over and over that the United States was no more because of the November election or because of the January swearing in.
There was Ashley Judd, for example, snarling that she was one of those "nasty" women.
Was she trying to say those rumors about her and a certain power player at Paramount were true?
Because, though they were left out of her NYT feature about being harassed by Harvey Weinstein, those rumors have always circulated about Ashley.
As one unfamiliar with the casting couch, she was about as believable -- inside the industry -- as Tony O'Dell was pretending to be straight when he starred on ABC's HEAD OF THE CLASS.
So many secrets, so little time to air them all out.
The sky is falling!
Ashley insisted it.
So it must be true.
Because Ashley also insisted that Harvey destroyed her career. But there were a number of people who argued that Ashley's cosmetic surgeries destroyed her career.
Harvey destroyed her career?
So he ran off TV viewers? Ava and I liked her 2012 show MISSING but we were in the minority.
The show started with 10.6 million viewers but ended with 6.5 million.
Did Harvey run off the 4.1 viewers?
Did Harvey force Ashley to say the many things she did that struck some as racist remarks?
Have we forgotten all of that?
Ashley was harassed. Not denying that.
But it's a little easy and pat for her to claim her career would be hugely different than it is today if it weren't for Harvey Weinstein.
Mira Sorvino?
Absolutely her career would be different. She didn't get the breaks Ashley did. She didn't star in blockbusters like DOUBLE JEOPARDY, A TIME TO KILL or KISS THE GIRLS.
Ashley did though. And she played the same damn role in DOUBLE JEOPARDY and KISS THE GIRLS, et al. In fact, by the time of HIGH CRIMES (2002), she should have realized that her box office was slipping. By 2004's TWISTED, Ashley's glorified LIFETIME movies were barely breaking even.
She failed at romantic comedies and dramas and now she was failing at her woman-in-jeopardy films. Until 2010's THE TOOTH FAIRY, she wouldn't have another modest success (and she wouldn't have anything after it either).
Ashley's likes to be seen as "political."
She also likes to be seen as smart.
She's not political and she's not smart.
She's partisan.
Supposedly cares about the world Ashley can't say a damn word against the ongoing Iraq War.
Ongoing, Ashley.
At the end of last week, Richard Sisk (MILITARY TIMES) reported, "U.S.-backed forces were in the process of 'crushing the life' out of ISIS but 'the war is not over' in Iraq and Syria, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Friday."
Not one word from Ashley on it.
Because she's a partisan.
She's not political.
From 1993 to 2014, she got to be a leading lady in films. This despite one flop after another -- films like EYE OF THE BEHOLDER that didn't even make back half of their shooting budget.
Who was her co-star in that one?
Ewen McGregor. By 2009, he was reduced to supporting roles in US films. Was that Harvey Weinstein's revenge too?
Chicken Little with a martyr complex, that was Ashley Judd in 2017.
Interesting though, her first film was KUFFS and her co-star Christian Slater. Ashely knows all about the Christian Slater co-star who was whored out by her agency. Used, especially with foreign money coming to town, to keep investors happy.
That woman suffered.
You'll never catch Ashley saying one single kind word about that woman.
Nasty woman?
Yes, Ashley, you are.
Paul is dead. Cranberry sauce.
Or why spend money reporting when you can just repeat whatever crazy thing pops into your head and pass that off as news?
Or why spend money reporting when you can just repeat whatever crazy thing pops into your head and pass that off as news?
Who knew that NETWORK, a send up of
broadcast news, would become less funny not because the jokes grew stale
but because the news industry would go insane and begin aping NETWORK?
Sybil the Soothsayer?
That’s practically any of the so-called “news” channels.
It was the week of Christmas when CNN brought on James Clapper.
Forget that Clapper shouldn’t be on CNN’s payroll. Public trust? Clapper lied to Congress.
But there he was. CNN played a clip of Trump speaking and Clapper was brought on to explain what Trump really meant.
Because, apparently, listening to the words spoken wasn’t enough.
Clapper all but grabbed the bong as he rushed to tell America the hidden meanings in Donald Trump’s remarks. You kept expecting him to say that if they’d play the feed backwards, he could decipher even more in the remarks. Or, abandoning the topic of backward masking, argue that if you played Trumps remarks and THE WIZARD OF OZ at the same time, Trump’s remarks synched up to the big Yellow Brick Road scene.
What was the news value of the segment?
Zero.
And we should point out that the value of any Clapper segment will always be zero and CNN should never employee people who perjure themselves in front of the US Congress. It’s a trust issue.
The outrage.
All year long, each month was overflowing with outrage.
Each day.
Each hour.
CNN spent how many days boring the country with their 'reporting' on the van that may have blocked their shot of Donald Trump golfing intentionally?
Who the hell cares.
Iraq girls were under threat of being married off at the age of nine but we couldn't discuss that in the US press. We couldn't devote time to it.
But we can speculate for hours about whether or not a white van was intentionally parked in a spot so that CNN cameras were denied video of Donald golfing?
Or you got MSNBC's Chris Hayes starting with "it's trivial in the scheme of things, but" before going on to waste all of our time on something minor and inconsequential.
When are they going to report?
And how can they keep deluding themselves that they're doing journalism?
America's not deluded.
Whether you're on the left (like I am) or the right or somewhere in between, if you're honest, you know you saw the press rush to repeat (not report) the worst -- to repeat the worst as fact without checking it out.
Ask yourself which report on Trump was wrong because it gave him the benefit of the doubt?
Which of those reports did ABC or CNN have to retract?
Answer?
None.
Because they didn't exist.
The worst of the false repeating?
Probably Brian Ross on ABC NEWS because that repeating sunk the stock market -- and ABC waited way too long to correct it.
Or you could argue it was the week later when, despite ABC's public humiliation, CNN went running with a repeat that wasn't quite a report.
Surely, they should have already learned their lesson.
But they were too busy making themselves the story to learn anything.
Trump said something about them and then they went into non-stop respond mode.
They are not the story and need to learn to shut the f**k up.
It's a shame that today's executives and editors apparently contain no grown ups among their ranks who can tell them, "Enough."
They are embarrassing and ignorant.
They are not under attack by Donald Trump.
His Tweets are mocking them.
Mocking them is not assaulting the press.
They need to toughen up and they need to grow up.
Donald Trump is a blow hard. When you stop taking his every insult seriously, you'll find the bully will resort to them less often because they don't get the response he wants. Or the attention he wants, for that matter.
Instead of remembering the lessons we all learned (or should have) on the playground as children, we whined and whimpered and soiled ourselves publicly -- forever waiting for the sky to fall -- even though it never did.
And we were suddenly interested in poor reporters being insulted.
Now we weren't interested in their safety.
I remember when Ned Parker had to flee Iraq.
We called it -- and Hayder al-Abadi -- out in real time.
But these 'press freaks' -- Meryl Streep, kiddie expert Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks -- they didn't say a word.
They were a lot like then-President Barack Obama in that regard.
A REUTERS journalist has to flee Iraq because he's being threatened by Shi'ite militias and the prime minister -- Hayder al-Abadi -- is stirring things up -- and will laugh about the whole thing on a visit to DC -- and these so-called friends of the press can't say one damn word?
Just like they couldn't say anything in defense of the press during Barack's eight year war on whistle-blowers?
If not having a celebrity spokesperson to comment on Barack's eight year war left you uninformed, be sure to read Mike's "Tom Hanks is full of s**t" which provides a strong overview of Barack's attacks on the press.
You are the only ones -- Meryl, Tom, Steve and all the rest -- who think you are doing anything noble or brave.
Everyone else sees you as the hypocrites you are.
And keep making those (bad) films about events from the early 1970s while we notice how you won't address today's ills.
Again, the Iraq War.
It's not over. It's not ended.
Where are the voices?
Senator Dianne Feinstein stated:
The Administration offers no apparent road out of Iraq. It offers only an escalation plan that keeps growing, and an open-ended commitment to a civil war.
Those words are so accurate.
And they were also accurate March 27, 2007 -- when she stated them.
There is still no road out of Iraq.
There is still an open-ended commitment to a civil war.
Nothing has changed.
Every 'turned corner' leads back to the same exact spot.
Over a trillion dollars has been wasted on an illegal war that has claimed over a million lives.
And Iraq's no closer to democracy, no closer to power-sharing.
The exiles that the US government keeps installing are motivated by vengeance.
Silly Shi'ites who fled Iraq when Saddam Hussein was alive and only returned fater the 2003 US-led invasion.
It's no surprise that they are not accepted by the Iraqi people as legitimate leaders.
Legitimate leaders don't flee a country like cowards and then wait until foreign forces invade to come back.
But the plan is apparently -- the same plan as it has always been -- to back whatever cowards the US government has put in place and to try to hold back the Iraqi people until they're too exhausted and go along with whatever they're stuck with.
The Iraq War is no longer just illegal, it's now also absurd.
So much of 2017 was.
As the year wound down, VANITY FAIR offered a video with suggestions for what Hillary Clinton could do and, among the suggestions, knitting was offered. Oh, the backlash online as the Cult of Clinton took to their Twitter feeds. If you were a thinking person, of course, you could afford to laugh. Laugh and wonder where the hell these ridiculous people were when actual and harmful sexism was aimed at Hillary in 2008. These crybabies today. It was 2008, remember, when so many of us were defending Hillary against genuine sexism. Like when THE WASHINGTON POST decided to make a video and Dana Milbank offered "Mad Bitch" beer.
Mad.
Bitch.
Beer.
And today’s junior crew -- still in junior wear -- gets offended by a suggestion that Hillary take up knitting?
A la Madam Defarge? Or did they miss that? Or are they just not well educated?
Defarge is part of the French Revolution.
Get it? Hillary’s part of the resistance?
Get it? No?
America’s educational system has failed
so many. A sign that we need to stop gutting education and instead
increase funding for it. We should spend at least as much on education as we do
on war.
Where are the Ashley Judds championing that?
Because if we could all step away from the Henny Penny model, we might grasp that we are stronger than we realize and that we could actually work together to change the world for the better.
Work.
It's never as exciting as self-created drama.
And some would rather continue running around shrieking, "The sky is falling! The sky is falling!"
But a year of that hasn't really accomplished anything, has it?
Oh, I can hear the partisan fools now: We defeated Roy Moore!
Did you?
Seems like Roy defeated himself in that race.
More to the point, that race is hard to duplicate.
Unless, of course, you think that the Republican Party plans to nominate only men who have past experiences that could suggest rape -- statutory or otherwise -- and that the media can focus on solely one race for weeks and weeks the way they did on Roy Moore.
If you believe that, maybe you should just keep screaming,"The sky is falling!"
Previous Year-in-Reviews:
2016: The Year of WTF
2015: The Year of the Ass
2014: The Year of Self-Exposure
2013: The Year of Exposure
2012: The Year of Avoidance
2011: The Year of the Slow Reveal
The Common Ills Year in Review 2005
The Common Ills Year in Review
