Forgive those who "know not what they do?" I don't think so

 

Although I attended a Catholic school and spent lots of time in church when I was young, it was mainly just boring listening and doing the same thing all the time; as a kid, you were made to feel “guilty” if you didn’t have anything to “confess” each week, and if you had nothing else to confess you lied about lying. Anyways, there are some Bible sayings that seem to be asking too much of a concerned citizen. For example: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they are doing.” This is what Jesus said while he was hanging on the cross, probably more a general reference than just about those directly responsible for his crucifixion, “They know not what they do”—so they must be “forgiven.”

Does Tucker Carlson know that he is telling lies to millions of people every day? If he doesn’t know that, does he deserve to be “forgiven”? He told Brit Hume the other day a lie he has been telling his viewers: That Joe Biden is sending 8,500 troops to the Ukraine. Hume “corrected” him that no such thing was being contemplated, but there was a “reason” to tell what he knew was a lie: Carlson—who has of late revealed himself to be a fan of Vladimir Putin and has been defending his threats against the Ukraine—wants to “juxtapose” this with the “crisis” on the southern border. Of course this “crisis” that hardly anyone is actually effected by has been one for decades with no actual change in the estimated number of illegal immigrants in this country (of course the media ignores the growing percentage of illegal immigrants who are from Asia and India). But it does excite Fox News’ racist base, who Carlson and Laura Ingraham constantly remind of the “danger” to the “culture” to this country—despite the fact that Hispanics are virtually invisible in popular culture and media.

Of course the lie that U.S. troops are going to the Ukraine (and billions of dollars of military aid, which Hume didn’t dispute) was too easy to “correct,” but Carlson is the type who can’t take the heat when he is “outed” as a lying hypocrite; a few years ago in an unaired interview, Dutch historian Rutger Bregman called out Carlson’s hypocrisy about his “empathy” with the (white) working class when he charged him with being just another millionaire funded by billionaires. Carlson tried to bring in AOC, which Bregman ignored him, stating “It’s true, right?” Carlson then proceeded to  embarrass himself by responding like a juvenile delinquent, calling Bergman a “moron” and he should just “go fuck yourself, you tiny brain—and I hope this gets picked up because you’re a moron, I tried to give you a hearing but you were fucking annoying.” Bregman replied “You can’t handle the criticism, can you,” and naturally Carlson was too cowardly to follow-up on his “threat” to air the segment.

Ingraham is another narcissistic Fox News personality who gets so wound-up in her lies that she becomes easily flummoxed by even the tiniest “hint” of contradiction. Before she was seen clapping giddily like one of those Clueless/Mean Girls upon the news that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, had revealed that he had tested positive for Covid-19, she was engaged in an Abbot and Costello “Who’s on First?” routine that brought up the Netflix series You during a segment with fellow far-right commentator Raymond Arroyo; there are those who claim that this was a "set up," but Arroyo's exasperation at Ingraham making him look like a fool is real, and this certainly wasn’t meant to be “funny”:

 

 

Arroyo:  “You know I was watching an episode of 'You' where measles came up.”

Ingraham: “Wait, wait, wait, when did I mention measles?”

Arroyo: "I don’t know. It was on 'You'."

Ingraham: “What was on me? What are you talking about? Is Raymond even hearing what I’m saying? I never had the measles. We never did a measles and vaccine episode, is this a joke?"

Arroyo: "It was on ‘You,’ it was on ‘You.’”

Ingraham: “I’ve never had measles. What are you talking about, this is stupid!"

Arroyo: “It was an episode of a show, Laura.”

Ingraham: “What’s it called?”

Arroyo: ‘You,’ ‘You,’ it’s called ‘You’."

Ingraham: “I completely give up.”

Arroyo: “It’s a show called ‘You’ on Netflix.”

Ingraham: “There’s a show called Laura Ingraham on Netflix?"

Yep, we see these extreme cases of stupidity and narcissism in Fox News hosts who are being paid millions of dollars, for anyone who thinks life in unfair. I mean, doesn’t it seem that you have to have some kind of mental illness to willingly spout the surreal nonsense that Fox News hosts are expected to expectorate out of their asses? That would suggest that we would have to “forgive” them because they “know not what they do.” But we really don’t want to do that for people whose principle purpose in life is to sow division and hate, do we?  Remember the “good old days” when William F. Buckley was the respected voice of conservatism? Those days are long gone.

Of course Carlson and Ingraham are not the only mental cases that Fox News employs. Isn’t it remarkable that you see these former award-winning female journalists like Maria Bartiromo and Lara Logan showing up on Fox News and reveal who they truly are: extreme-right conspiracy nutjobs? Or can it be that they “know” what they are doing?

Bartiromo, for example, allowed Newt Gingrich to spew his nonsense the other day. He claimed that the January 6 committee members should be “arrested” if the Republicans retake the House next year, for the “crime” of, well, being a nuisance to those who aided and abetted the insurrection. Gingrich, as we may recall, was the “guiding light” of hyper-partisanship back in the 1980s, and if anything else he has taken this to new lows ever since he felt constrained to resign from his House seat for revelations of an extra-marital affair while his wife was undergoing chemotherapy, the failure to have Bill Clinton removed from office, and the subsequent failure of Republicans to take advantage of Clinton’s impeachment in the 1998 midterms. Gingrich, of course, had—and has—no credibility on the moral and ethical front, but this hasn’t stopped folks like Bartiromo from giving his like airtime, since she obviously has no moral or ethical credibility either.

Logan has a show called “Lara Logan Has No Agenda,” which of course is not true because it clearly has the agenda of being contrary to accepted facts, and you have to have an “agenda” to deliberately lower the already low IQs of her viewers. Logan previously worked for CBS News, where she gained a reputation as a reporter so “embedded” in the U.S. Army command centers that she simply served as their propaganda organ, especially in regard to the war in Afghanistan, when the military was clearly lying about the situation on the ground. Logan eventually was pushed out at CBS because of her infamous report about Benghazi on 60 Minutes, when a security contractor told her what she wanted to hear rather than the truth: rather than being a Rambo, he had hid out in his villa, as he had previously admitted to his employer and CIA investigators.

Today, Logan is comparing Anthony Fauci to Josef Mengele, and claims that AIDS isn’t “real,” but an “elaborate conspiracy” to enrich drug makers—and of course she is making the same claims about the COVID-19 vaccinations. In 2020 Logan got Antifa and BLM mixed up, going on this racist rant: “The head of the police of Minneapolis is black. The attorney general there is black. The person in charge of state security is black. So saying that this is a race issue is allowing these groups to proliferate, infiltrate law enforcement, and attempt to burn this country to the ground, which is their ultimate goal. They want to kill everyone.”

You think that is evidence of someone who belongs in a mental ward? Logan had this to say recently on the Fox News show “Outnumbered”—where the only people who are “outnumbered” are those with any semblance of sanity:

In the time that we live in, for people to stand up and openly say something against the Democratic president or something in favor of the troops, I mean, in this country today that puts you at risk of being arrested and jailed by the FBI. Because anyone who believes in patriotism is being purged from the U.S. Military, they’re being purged from DHS and the other agencies. And people are being — they’re sitting in prison in solitary confinement in an offsite correctional facility in Washington, D.C., without trial. They have not been convicted of anything. So, and you know they have been there for a long time now, almost a year. And no one is saying a word. So we live, really, in a state of fear in America today. We don’t live as a free people, as a free nation.

It is fair to ask if Logan knows what country she is living in, particularly after the January 6 insurrection; perhaps we should ask if she is aware of what planet in the solar system she lives on. It certainly isn’t the country (or planet) that most of us (or at least those who live in reality) know about.

We could go on and on with this. Of course, the “They know not what they do” was the “defense” of Elizabeth Holmes, who had hoped that throwing stones at someone else would cloud jurors’ minds about whether or not she was actually “knew” she was lying to investors and committing deliberate fraud. But according to one juror, it was done deal that she would be convicted on four charges, and that on the rating for “credibility,” Holmes’s testimony was on the lower end of the scale. Holmes has one more card to play to avoid significant jail time: playing “mother,” at least until September when she is scheduled to be sentenced. But the fact that Holmes did not marry her child’s father indicates that this wasn’t about having a “family,” but a cynical ploy to use the child as a prop to escape just punishment.

Then there is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s devolution into madness which apparently began when he claimed he was approached by a woman who told him her son had developed autism from a vaccine. Before he began labeling medical experts as Nazis engaging in a vaccination Holocaust, 

 

 

in 2014 RFK Jr. was attempting to get U.S. Senators interested in his theory that thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative for vaccines, was the cause of autism. Although he did receive a hearing, his arguments were rejected as having no basis in fact. The CDC has stated that in regard to the potential of autism from vaccines using thimerosal,

One vaccine ingredient that has been studied specifically is thimerosal. Thimerosal is a mercury-based preservative used to prevent germs (like bacteria and fungi) from contaminating multidose vials of vaccines. Research shows that thimerosal does not cause ASD. In fact, a 2004 scientific review by the IOM concluded that “the evidence favors rejection of a causal relationship between thimerosal–containing vaccines and autism.”

Of course science didn’t sit well with Kennedy then as it doesn’t now, because he is “smarter” than everyone else, just as he likes, according to a recent AP story, to “butter-up” his current audiences into believing that just being “contrary” to science and facts makes them “smarter” than everyone else too.

“They know not what they do”: Peter Navarro was supposed to be a “trade advisor” in the Trump administration, although like most of Trump’s loyal flunkies he just collected a paycheck despite being a total incompetent in his position. Like most administration hacks, Navarro seemed to spend most of his time on cable news shows expectorating on subjects outside his alleged area of “expertise.” It seems that Navarro—tag-teaming with fraudster Steve Bannon—had a game-winning play, which they called the “Green Bay Sweep”—to overturn Trump’s election defeat; frankly I think it is shameful that Packer fans haven’t denounced this analogy.

Navarro claimed that the January 6 insurrection “ruined” everything; had Trump supporters just stayed outside, everything would have gone the way he and Bannon “envisioned.” He gave Rolling Stone magazine his anti-matter version of the universe, where everything is done with “honorable and good intentions,” fighting against a “coup d’etat” that the “others” were “trying to steal the election.” Of course the “others” were not the Trump supporters we saw running wild in the Capitol building, but Democrats who were “bragging” about “stealing” the election.

Navarro and Bannon’s “plan” was to simply have enough lawmakers delay the Electoral count process for so long that “public pressure” would convince Mike Pence to simply call it off and send the decision back to the states, where “presumably” those states in question with Republican-dominated legislatures would approve sending Trump electors. In his recently published memoir, Navarro claimed “It was a perfect plan. And it all predicated on peace and calm on Capitol Hill. We didn’t even need any protestors, because we had over 100 congressmen committed to it.”

After months of court decisions and recounts that confirmed the election results, there are still people like Navarro who insanely “know not what they do.” Are we supposed to “forgive” them for “not knowing” what they were doing was engaging in the destruction of democracy? It they had been allowed to get away with this, does anyone really believe that any election result they don’t like is safe? How about your normal tin-pot dictatorship?

Meanwhile, Republican House leader Kevin McCarthy is threatening several Democratic lawmakers without cause if Republicans retake the House next year. McCarthy may be a coward and a liar, but he at least knows what he is doing. He knows that Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boerbert and Paul Gosar bring shame and embarrassment to his party, but in order to appease Trump and his fanatical following, he will simply do nothing to reign them in, waiting for Democrats to punish them for him, so that he can avoid taking responsibility for their behavior himself. Of course, actually knowing one is doing wrong and having others take the blame isn’t something that should be “forgiven.”