Our moronic president and the existential threat of a Sharpie.

by Therese Odell, posted in Uncategorized

I struggled with what to lead with today, because 1. there’s not a lot of TV news out there right now — it’s something of a TV news dead zone until September 22, And 2. the biggest (and stupidest) story of the day which involves our brain-addled president, a hurricane and a Sharpie marker, it isn’t really a TV story? But it kinda is? But not?

You know what, let’s just go with it.

A timeline of the idiocy:

Sunday: President Tweetsalot tweeted that among the states in the path of Hurricane Dorian was Alabama, a state that was not in the path of Hurricane Dorian.

This was long after the cone of uncertainty had turned away from the Gulf of Mexico, and the National Weather Service in Birmingham, Alabama tweeted within twenty minutes that Alabama was not, in fact, in danger:

The Meteorologist-in-Chief then went to FEMA where he continued to talk about how Alabama was in danger. It was not in danger: “And Alabama could even be in for at least some very strong winds and something more than that, it could be,” he said.  “This just came up, unfortunately. … So, for Alabama, just please be careful also.”

NARRATOR: It had not just come up.

Then,  Monday, when journalists were like, “Hey, Alabama is not in the cone of uncertainty,” President I AM ALWAYS RIGHT had a meltdown on Twitter, completely predictably

BUT THEN, THEN, yesterday the motherfucker doubled down, held a press conference in the Oval Office and showed off a hurricane map that had been altered with a black Sharpie marker that put Alabama magically in the cone of uncertainty:

When asked about the OBVIOUS Sharpie job, President Can’t Even Lie Well responded, “I dunno.”

But then, this morning, SO MAD that this didn’t end the controversy, he tripled down on this utter bullshit:

This whole mess obviously led to a Twitter explosion:

As you can imagine, there are a million more of these. And it is funny! Sharpiegate might actually be the single stupidest thing he has done in this presidency — and that includes trying to buy Greenland, nuking hurricanes, “covfefe,” serving McDonalds to people at the White House, and insisting that Texans went out on boats to “watch” Hurricane Harvey. But it’s also 1. illegal:

and 2. dangerous on two levels, both literal and existential. As I am sure you can understand (especially those of us who live in Hurricane Alley), it is dangerous to have the most powerful man in the country give citizens false information about an emergency. It could potentially create chaos, undue worry and unnecessarily dangerous conditions for thousands of people.

But on an existential level, it is INCREDIBLY dangerous to have someone in the White House who is just fundamentally incapable of admitting a mistake, incapable of just saying, “I had been looking at earlier predictions of the path of the storm and misinterpreted them to potentially show landfall in Alabama. I am sorry for any confusion it may have created and I am praying for everyone in the path of this very dangerous storm,” and move on.

But because he is the living rebuke to the expression, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts,” he is never able to admit a mistake. As a result, President Big Brother is actively determined to bend reality to his will, no matter who that might harm. A category five hurricane is dangerous enough, but imagine if this were a mistake about an international emergency. Actually, you don’t have to imagine anything: just look at what is happening with North Korea, Iran and our tariff war with China because this sociopath can not admit that he is wrong about anything and that just because he believes something doesn’t actually make it so.

Anyway, dangerous times we’re living in! But did you see that one tweet with the inauguration crowds? LOL.

Ugh. So. And when our president wasn’t lying about hurricanes, he was busy harassing Debra Messing. Again. About something different: Debra Messing liked a tweet that was an image of a church sign that called black Trump supporters “mentally ill.” She apologized for it and added that she is concerned about black voters being targeted for voter suppression by the GOP. President Sharpie took the opportunity to try to slam her as being racist and compared the situation to Roseanne calling Valerie Jarrett a monkey.

And just leaving aside the wild hypocrisy of President Go Back to Where You Came From calling anyone else a racist, just putting that aside, what bums me out about this story, what worries me is that I don’t know that we as a nation will ever really be able to move to a race-blind society if we can’t even agree on what racism looks like. Blerg.

In actual TV news

Happy 25th birthday, Friends! You are now the same age as your characters were when they lived in those ABSURD West Village apartments.

~books a ticket to London~

Obviously, Andy Cohen wants Bethenny Frankel to remain in the Real Housewives universe: “… it was just so fun to have her back and she brought so much to the show that I just am living in the gratitude of her second return. I will hopefully live in the gratitude of her third return, because we are much like the mob — you can’t get out.”

Every season, we the viewers spend some 7,000 weeks watching Bachelor in Paradise. In reality, filming only lasts about three weeks. What I’m saying is that the producers of Bachelor in Paradise have managed to disrupt the time-space continuum.

MIND. BLOWN.:

The Steven Universe movie is not the end of the Steven Universe … universe.

Looking for a Halloween costume? How about Sexy Bob Ross? No, I am not kidding.

Janice Min is leaving Quibi, the second high-level departure in a month. Hmm.

There’s still time for you guys to tell me which new fall show I should hate blog. Right now, it’s a drag-out knock-down fight between Evil and Emergence, but Stumptown is not far behind. If you need to learn more about the series themselves, check out all of the trailers here, and then vote in my poll below. You can vote as often as you’d like for the next three two-ish weeks:

Renewal

  • Big Brother has been renewed for a 22nd season and Chenbot will be back to host.

Cancellation

In Development

Casting News

Mark Your Calendars

  • It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia returns on FXX on September 25.
  • Mad About You returns on Spectrum on November 20.

WATCH THIS

Sunday Night Football: No, it’s not Sunday, but NBC has the rights to “Sunday Night Football” and apparently the first game of the season so here we are. Packers at Bears.  7 p.m., NBC

Spin the Wheel: Two-hour season finale. 7 p.m., Fox

The Naked Gun marathon: But only the first two movies — or, specifically, the first 2 1/2.  7 p.m., The Movie Channel Xtra

Late Night:

  • Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon: Kendall Jenner, Desus & Mero, Tanya Tucker featuring Brandi Carlile
  • Late Night with Seth Meyers: Sen. Bernie Sanders, DeRay Mckesson, Carter McLean
  • The Late Show with Stephen Colbert: Pete Buttigieg, Graham Norton
  • The Late Late Show with James Corden: Orlando Bloom, Yvonne Strahovski, O-Town
  • Jimmy Kimmel Live: Kirsten Dunst, June Diane Raphael, Clairo
  • Lights Out with David Spade: Anthony Jeselnik, J.B. Smoove, Annie Lederman

 

THUR 7:00 7:30 8:00 8:30 9:00 9:30
ABC The LEGO Movie Reef Break
(new)
CBS Young Sheldon
(repeat)		 Young Sheldon
(repeat)		 Big Brother
(new)		 FBI
(repeat)
CW The Outpost
(new)		 Two Sentence Horror Stories
(new)		 Two Sentence Horror Stories
(repeat)		 News/Local
FOX Spin the Wheel
(new)		 News/Local
NBC Sunday Night Football: Packers at Bears
(live)

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