Lung & oral cancers are nature’s way of cleaning out the barn.
Tell me if this strategy sounds familiar.
- Pick a target, any target, as long as the Trumpkins hate ’em.
- Pay a non-credible source to make up an unlikely story of sexual malfeasance.
- Hold a press conference in which the story palpably unravels.
- Profit!
That was the game plan in their phony accusations against Mueller and Warren, and their balloons collapsed so fast they sounded like a fast wet fart. Would you believe Wohl and Burkman have done it again? Only you may not have heard about it because the press doesn’t believe them anymore.
- They tried to discredit Anthony Fauci.
- They found a woman, Diana Andrade AKA Diana Rodriguez, willing to make up a story about Fauci.
“He looked rich and powerful, and I love smart men with grey hair. He told me all about his fantastic career in medicine, so I went upstairs,” Rodriguez wrote of her fictional meeting with Fauci at the bar of the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, D.C. After detailing some ineffective hotel bed wrestling and managing to flee with her honor intact, Rodriguez closed with the statement, “Now, when I see him on TV touted as some kind of hero, I want the nation to know the truth. This is my truth. This is my story.”
- They tried to recruit the media to report on the story. They mostly failed. Andrade later wrote to journalists confessing that she’d been paid.
And that would have been that—until Saturday’s email, which included Andrade telling me, “The reality is that I’ve known Jacob since 2018 and that he charmed me into taking money to do this (see attached picture of us together),” taken when they were romantically involved. Also, that Wohl and Burkman “had me do something like this…back in January.”
- I fail to see what they gain from this nonsense. Does anyone believe anything they have to say any more?
To put the frosting on the cake, though, Andrade called Wohl and Burkman to express her unhappiness with her role, and most wonderfully, recorded the entire call, so we get to see the two con artists rationalizing their lies. It’s something.
“Let me tell you something, Diana,” says Burkman. “This guy shut the country down. He put 40 million people out of work. In a situation like that, you have to make up whatever you have to make up to stop that train and that’s the way life works, OK? That’s the way it goes.”
Andrade counters that he and Wohl are not taking COVID-19 seriously. “It’s not just any virus. I mean, it’s a huge deal….I think you guys think it’s something made up, and it’s not.”
“Mother Nature has to clean the barn every so often,” Burkman counters. “How real is it? Who knows? So what if 1 percent of the population goes? So what if you lose 400,000 people? Two hundred thousand were elderly, the other 200,000 are the bottom of society. You got to clean out the barn. If it’s real, it’s a positive thing, for God’s sake.”
“So, what? Survival of the fittest?” Andrade asks, a bit more pique in her voice. (The sense you are dealing with people who have an enthusiasm for eugenics can do that.) But Wohl’s not having it.
“Diana, look, can you just do this for me?” he says. “Can you just keep your mouth shut and just…just do it for me.”
Uh-oh. They said the quiet part of the Republican strategy out loud. It’s OK if the virus kills 400,000 people, because half of them are old and the other half are “the bottom of society”.
They don’t seem to have noticed that they themselves are the dregs.
It’s antics like this that makes one truly appreciate O’Keefe’s ratfuckery craftmanship, amirite?
It is good they are not learning from their mistakes.
It’s funny how these alt-right never believe that they could be infected and die from this pandemic.
Actually 1% of the population is 3.6 million people, not 400,000. Minor point I suppose.
The Randian philosophy in full bloom. Clean out the barn–get rid of the moochers, the takers, the useless, so only the productive survive. Of course, that is just a convenient cover for racism, sexism, classism, and just about any ism you could imagine. But they are forgetting that the people of low intelligence could also be swept up. And, boy, howdy, are they at the top of that list. But of course, they are too stupid to realize it. Dunning-Kruger is a corollary of this principle–the truly stupid never realize it, and lash out when their facade is threatened (See: White House).
cervantes@4, The 1% = c.3.6 million people includes those who are guilty of being black (e.g.). I presume the nutcases quoted in the OP don’t count such individuals (who are disproportionately affected / infected); without checking — doing the hair furorian fact aversion — 1% of the nutcase’s definition of would be closer to the quoted 400K.
“That was the game plan in their phony accusations against Mueller and Warren, and their balloons collapsed so fast they sounded like a fast wet fart.”
It’s easy to lose track of the idiotic lies and sleazy actions of some people. Buttigieg was also a target of theirs. https://tinyurl.com/y5ek967k
Off topic: I’ve been planning a post about bigotry common on the political left and the comments in that article are useful. The casual homophobia in suggestions that someone sucks dick, the ableism of “retarded”. I’m saving that.
On topic: why the fuck hasn’t anyone arrested and charged Wohl and associates yet? It’s bad role-modeling to let them keep committing fraud.
How is it that these idiots are not in prison?
Both these guys belong prison, struggling for their next breath and receiving no help. Dying by COVID-19 to too good for these two pieces of shit.
Brony @8,
On topic: why the fuck hasn’t anyone arrested and charged Wohl and associates yet? It’s bad role-modeling to let them keep committing fraud.
The problem is, that in order to be charged with fraud (at least under federal law, according to the most recent decision by the Supreme Court) you actually have to benefit in some way from the attempt to deceive. As it is, Wohl and Burkman don’t seem to be able to make a cent off what they’re doing. Indeed, they probably spend more on these idiotic endeavors than they could possibly stand to make. Their idea of “Profit!” seems to have been taken straight from the Underpants Gnomes and been dumbed-down from there. They always do this sort of thing against public figures, which also makes it harder to prove libel or slander, and none of their targets want to give them any more publicity by even acknowledging the story, much less suing them over it. So they’ll remain free to wallow in ignominy for as long as they fail to break any other laws. That’s what got O’Keefe in the end, after all. He was finally brought before the law not because he committed fraud but because he got caught breaking and entering in his attempt to set up a target.
I’m not trained in US law, but this doesn’t strike me as possible fraud, which involves leading someone to make some sort of disposition of their assets in the fraudster’s benefit under false pretences. It does sound like libel, especially if the false accusations involve acts that are criminal in nature.
It looks like I got the kind of deceptive behavior wrong.
What about conspiracy?
When I was a kid, the classic was to hire a woman to lure one’s political enemy into a hotel room and arrange for a photographer to break in and get a snapshot of the two of them. It showed up in movies and novels. In The Late George Apley it was kind of poignant. By the 1960s this was considered passe. No one gave a crap about FDR & Lucy Mercer, Eisenhower and Kay Summersby or JFK and probably the female half of the A-List celebrities. With Nixon, it would have been written off as a play for sympathy, catching him in an illicit affair would humanize him.
Now it’s back, everything but the old fashioned flash powder for the camera.