I was going to weigh in this week on Tucker Carlson being fired by Fox but the thought of writing about him made me nauseous.

More nauseating was that Tucker was the highest rated host on cable news (Note: By a lot), probably in great part for spewing a lot of American nativist rhetoric with racist, sexist and anti-Semitic dog whistles.

Yeah, when you resist calling someone a racist, sexist Jew hater outright you couch it with phrases like dog whistles so you don’t sound overly vitriolic and hysterical from the get-go.  But I’m not even sure there’s much value to that these days.

I just finished watching Netflix’s original, mesmerizing and often confounding limited series Beef.  It stars Steven Yeun and Ali Wong as two people involved in what can kindly be called a road rage incident that escalates into a full out war to their metaphorical deaths.

Like their episode one characters, I used to flip off people in my car for doing something I saw as particularly egregious like cutting me off or driving too fast or too slow.

As most people who live in Los Angeles do at least two, or three, or four hundred times during their lives. 

But I don’t do it anymore because I’ve learned to prioritize and have had years of therapy. 

Still that doesn’t work for everyone.

As Mr. Yeun cautions Ms. Wong in one of the best lines in the series:

Western therapy doesn’t work on eastern minds.

Good as that observation is in the context of those characters, I’m wondering whether insight and appropriately channeled anger is all that it’s cracked up to be for any one of us in 2023. 

I mean, giving someone the finger is certainly a healthier reaction than, say, shooting them in the head.

It also beats disowning a relative simply because you disagree with their politics.  It even trumps (Note: Sorry) living each day waiting for the next misogynist, bigoted or privilege-enabled remark someone makes just so you can toss out your very well rehearsed retort back to silence them.

Flipping someone off the old-fashioned way is just so… clean.   

Like a succinct stroll down memory lane of the way things used to be.  If only it didn’t lead to the kind of inevitable destruction and death the way it sometimes does in Beef, and now too frequently happens in real life, I’d do it all day. 

And night.

Here’s just a brief list of things and circumstances that would get my middle finger this week:

1 – Montana Rep. Kerri Seekins-Crowe sponsored a bill in the state to ban gender-affirming care for transgender minors, even with parental approval.  And in a speech she made on the floor of the legislature she went viral for saying she’d rather risk her daughter dying of suicide than allow her to transition. 

She backed this up by proclaiming her own daughter was, in fact, suicidal for three years.  And when someone once asked her if she wouldn’t do anything to help save her, Rep. KSC’s response, after some thought, was a firm:

No…I was not going to give in to her emotional manipulation…I was not going to let her tear apart my family and I was not going to let her tear me apart…

Really?  Well, here’s my f-n middle finger Kerri. Choke on it.  And if your daughter happens to read this she can feel free to shoot me an email.  She might not be trans, you don’t ever quite say, but quite clearly she’s depressed and needs to be around someone who will not only listen but also hear what’s on her mind. #BiteMe #MissHannigan #YoureAStoneColdWtch

2- During a Congressional hearing on school closures during COVID, US Congresswoman and national embarrassment Marjorie Taylor-Greene (GA-R) this week asked Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers and a married out lesbian, if she was a mother. 

When Ms. Weingarten answered that she was a mother by marriage, aka a stepmother, large Marge called her out by declaring she was not a biological mother.  She later went on to emphasize: The problem is, people like you need to admit… you’re a political activist, not a teacher, not a mother, and not a….

Well, you get the picture….of me sticking my middle finger in her eye and up her…

And that would cheer my late and fabulous stepmother Shelly, who I think about daily, to no end.  And I can also guarantee that if my biological mother Marion were still alive to hear this she would literally say Marjorie Taylor-Greene can go f-ck herself! Just who in the hell does she think she is, anyway??

3- At his civil rape trial this week, Trump’s lawyer Joe Tacopina grilled writer E. Jean Carroll on the validity of the events that led her to file a suit against his client decades later for assaulting and raping her in a Bergdof Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s.

At one point in his cross-examination, Tacopina blithely used the word supposedly when referring to Ms. Carroll’s accusation.

Not supposedly.  I was raped, she retorted.

That’s your version, Ms. Carroll.  That you were raped, Tacopina countered.

Those are the facts, she insisted.

It then escalated when he pressed her on why she didn’t scream.

I’m not a screamer…I was fighting.  You can’t beat up on me for not screaming.

Denying her was beating up on her, Tacopina continued on with that style of questioning, but Ms. Carroll was not having any of it, noting that women often stay silent about attacks for years because they’re afraid of being questioned on why they didn’t physically do more to stop it.

They are always asked, why didn’t you scream?… I’m telling you he raped me, whether I screamed or not…

Clearly, Ms. Carroll doesn’t need me, or any man, to defend her from questioning by an attorney that seems like a bit player who never made it on camera during all six seasons of The Sopranos.

Nevertheless, I will. 

Hey Joe — This is why you are in the minority and the reason why most people under 40 are merely waiting for you and your kind to die off and go away so this can be a better world.  My only regret is I will likely not live long enough to dance on all of your graves.  In the meantime, here’s an Instagram photo of the biggest digit in my right hand to put under your pillow. #DouchyMcDouche

4 –Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, an announced 2024 Republican presidential candidate who is polling at barely 6%, far behind Trump and DeSantis and not even close enough to surpass Mike Pence, decided to weigh on in on, of all things, the subject of AGE a few days ago in a Hail Mary attempt to get into the news cycle.

So desperate is she for attention that after Pres. Biden this week announced his reelection campaign, Ms. Haley warned on Fox News that he wouldn’t make it to the end of a second term.

…I think we can all be very clear and say with a matter of fact that if you vote for Joe Biden you really are counting on a President Harris, because the idea that he would make it until 86 years old is not something that I think is likely.

Nice.

And so good to know she’s got a bead on these things.

Not that it matters but…Biden’s Mom lived to be 92 and ½ and his Dad made it to 87.  And they died a full one and two decades ago, respectively.    Which means that given the president’s genes, access to top quality health care and the advances in medical science, he could easily live to be…100.

Suck on my middle finger, Nikki, until you can figure out some other strategy to lift yourself up from the hellscape that your life has become.  You also might rethink tossing a Molotov cocktail across the bow at Kamala.  In the minds of many in your party, you two have A LOT MORE in common than you might think.  #ThinkAboutIt

5-  And speaking of middle fingers, what about….Succession??  I, for one, was thrilled when the old fart dropped dead.  F-CK ‘EM!  ALL of them.  And randy Cousin Greg, too. 

Because do you really care at this point what happens to the fictionalized HBO version of Fox News when we get to see the real one, and its family, slowly imploding before our eyes, in the actual news cycle, each week?

I’ll raise BOTH my middle fingers to that.  And all of yours, if I could.

Charlie Day – “Go F*ck Yourselves”