Tag Archives: Dominion

“Succession”, A GOAT of the Modern Zeitgeist

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Modern media, valued most for holding eyeballs and generating clicks, loves quick-hit lists. Ten Best this and Greatest of All Time that. Never anything too serious you know, the crowds want to be entertained, not made to feel all gloomy and what not.

So bear that in mind as I suggest that HBO’s “Succession”, which returns for its final season tomorrow night, should be ranked among TV’s finest achievements, up there with “The Wire”, “Breaking Bad” and, ummm, “Veep”, with which it shares a lot of DNA. The soon-to-culminate saga of the gilded and truly wretched Roy family, principal owner-operators of Ameerica’s most influential mad dog conservative “news” network, is so completely locked in to the zeitgeist of this era it could pass as a documentary.

The fact that “Succession” returns at the precise moment that the Murdoch family on which it is unapologetically modeled is fighting off not one but two multi-billion dollar defamation suits for hosting and nurturing outright lies about the 2020 election is too delicious for words. (Even though I may find a few in the next couple paragraphs.)

If you haven’t watched any of the previous three seasons, I can’t help you much, other than to say the Rupert-like paterfamilias, Logan, played by Brian Cox, is currently at war with his four craven, despicable children over who gets the reins of ATN (their FoxNews-like network/money machine) when he passes on to his great reward. Needless to say none of the children trusts anyone else and all are running side scams to gut the others.

Rupert Murdoch to step back at Fox, hand off CEO title to son James - Los Angeles Times
Daddy Rupert and his boys.

It’s a thing of goddam beauty I tell you. And it very much recalls “Veep’s” farewell in the spring of 2019, two years into the Trump “administration” maelstrom of fraud, incompetence and rampant, spinning bullshit. At the time the show’s star, Julia-Louis Dreyfus made several talk show stops joking and shaking her head at the painfully obvious fact that “Veep’s” writers simply couldn’t keep up with the level of actual cowardice and lunacy playing out in the real White House.

Team Trump had trumped the most absurd satire anyone could imagine.

I have no idea if “Succession’s” show-runner, Jesse Armstrong, a former “Veep” writer, has been able to work the Dominion and SmartMatic defamation suits — with all the astonishing, incriminating texts from Fox’s wretched/ethically debauched news “stars” — into this final season. But the dramatic-to-farcical possibilities of Fox’s current predicaments are endless.

Consider Murdoch/FoxNews’ current predicament. They are currently waiting for the presiding judge to decide on a summary judgment, a complete “Get Out of Jail Free” card on the basis of the First Amendment … or some mobius-like legal convolution. Should that fail they will almost certainly have to try to settle. But at what price?

It is inconceivable that Fox would take their case to trial. Not with what has already gone public and internationally viral in the the intra-company communications that haven’t been redacted.

So it would seem that Dominion and SmartMatic are in a, um, strong position to demand ample compensation, which even at 50% of what they’re demanding could easily push $2 billion. A penalty that would almost certainly and deservedly enrage Fox/NewsCorp shareholders into a massive class action suit. Which is not to mention encouraging all sorts of other characters — cops and guards injured in the Jan. 6 riot, staffers subjected to the usual FoxNews in-house misogyny and coercions — to file their own suits.

This already colossal clusterf**k has set off speculation that — very much like “Succession’s” Roy family — someone else must be sacrificed for the good of the next quarterly earnings. (And no, I don’t pity Maria Bartiromo and Lou Dobbs.)

“Succession” is of course very much a bubble entity. Just as Fox has mentioned next to nothing about all the texts of Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity and others calling Trump an idiot and inferring that their devoted fans are clueless goobers hooked on bullshit. (I laughed so hard I wept at the e-mail from Carlson’s producer referring to their audience as a bunch “cousin f**kers.” That is so … so … “Succession”.)

The appeal, the dead-on, of-the-moment satire of the show is lost on MAGA nation. It simply doesn’t exist in their bubble. But that too is so of-this-moment. Two completely separate information/entertainment silos, with one capable of savoring a brilliant satire of a diseased reality and the other continuing to eagerly feed at a trough of prion-infused sewage.

I’ll have extra butter on my popcorn, thank you.

Porn Star Pay Offs, Inciting Insurrection, Sexual Assaults, Bank Fraud, Election Conspiracy and FoxNews v. Dominion. But Still … Not Even an Indictment.

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Can I see a show of hands on the question, “Do you believe no one is above the law in America?” Please. Hands? Anyone? I didn’t think so.

Of all the lofty assertions of our exceptional nature, the claim that be they poor or be they rich and connected, everyone faces the same justice in this country is arguably the most transparently false. It’s a nice aspirational goal, but utterly without basis as we can all see day after day in the American legal system.

In the news today we have the grand jury in Georgia releasing an abbreviated, redacted version of its investigation into Trumpist meddling/fraud in the 2020 election. This plays with Special Counsel Jack Smith’s range of investigations into Trump’s hidden trove of documents at Mar-A-Lago, his incitement of a riot on the U.S. Capitol and other, um, lesser matters. Then there’s everything going on in New York, with very, very long-running investigations into Trump’s tax and banking frauds, his assaults on various women, his hush-money pay-off of a porn star. And elsewhere, but related, FoxNews’ battle with Dominion Voting Systems, and the revelation yesterday that all of its prime time hosts concurred that guests regularly booked on their shows were not only touting flagrant lies about Dominion rigging the vote for Joe Biden but were saying stuff that was, “mind-blowingly nuts.”

The point here being that we are now … years … after the fact in all of these cases (except the documents) and — exactly like Wall Street’s gamed-out trading of 2008 — no one of any significant status has suffered any consequence for outrageously obvious crimes. The kind for which you or I would have been indicted, tried, bankrupted and sentenced within months.

This point is emphasized/hammered on by Elie Honig in his new book, “Untouchable: How Powerful People Get Away With It.” A former assistant attorney for the Southern District of New York, Honig is IMHO, one the better/least hyperbolic/more reliably credible cable news pundits. I caught him recently on Charlie Sykes’ daily Bulwark podcast.

(I can’t recommend Sykes’ show highly enough. Once the Jason Lewis of Wisconsin, Sykes looked at the Republican embrace of Donald Trump and essentially said, “These people are out of their f**king minds”, bailed on the party, has done multiple mea culpas for his role in enabling anti-constitutional idiocy to run rampant and now leads daily, consistently clear-eyed, rational discussions of where cult-think has led us.)

In short, Honig’s view of the likelihood of conviction in any of these cases is not encouraging. He firmly believes Attorney General Merrick Garland has lost his window for effective prosecution and is desperately looking for any way to avoid indicting Trump … on anything … preferring someone else, like Fulton County District attorney Fani Willis in Atlanta do the deed first and take him off the hook. Jack Smith may have a more “aggressive” attitude toward Trump, but he answers to Garland.

Furthermore, and this is where the rubber really doesn’t hit the road, is the matter of securing convictions. Good luck, says Honig, getting a unanimous verdict in New York, much less Georgia on any case where 30% of the possible jury pool remains convinced Donald Trump is not only innocent of anything and everything but sent from God on high to save them from woke liberalism. Point being, says Honig, no “buck stops here” prosecutor, like Garland, wants/dares a (super) high profile acquittal on their record.

But sadly, there is no “sure thing” in American court rooms, other than you know some black kid caught selling dope on a street corner.

Honig didn’t get into the Fox-Dominion case on Sykes show, but here’s tech’s Grand Inquisitor Kara Swisher on her podcast, (Also highly recommended.)

The takeaway there being that Rupert Murdoch has the resources and legal firepower to whittle Dominion’s $1.6 billion claim down to a rounding error for Fox, maybe even with the standard legalese of “admits no wrong-doing” in its final settlement. A settlement that will get no play on Fox and quickly disappear from public memory, much like Bill O’Reilly’s $32 million pay-out to one woman for whatever he did to her. (The “non-consensual sex” and gay porn angles are always worth a headslap.)

This stark, relentlessy reaffirmed double standard for American justice has no obvious resolution. (Honig argues for Garland to try the case against Trump for the basic Constititional demonstration that acts so egregious and historical must be publicly adjudcated, lone MAGA juror be damned.)

My only suggestion would be for pundits and legal experts to at least do us the courtesy of A: stop asserting that “no one is above the law” in this country and/or B: disclaim that assertion whenever someone else “wonders” if that is the case.