Doom Report (Week 82: A Toll in the Strait of Hormuz Forever)

This week, a couple of NBA dropouts signed up for the Culture Wars: they’ve announced that, since the WNBA doesn’t currently have any standards on the admission of trans women, they will pronounce themselves female and seek to join the league.  Yes, they are, apparently, attempting to re-enact the plot of that classic comedy, Lady Ballers.  What’s that, you say? never seen that movie?  Good for you: it’s a detestable piece of rightwing nutjob propaganda dressed up as a movie, brought to you by the God-damn-we-wish-we-could-have-made-it-in-Hollywood failures over at The Daily Wire.  (If you really need to know how bad it is, Some More News has you covered.)

There’s good coverage of this from (of course) Even More News—including talking about the even more detestable new movie from Ben Shapiro and the Daily Wire crew—as well as from Brian Tyler Cohen.  To call what these no-names are doing a “stunt” is an insult to people like Evel Knievel and Super Dave Osborne.  Personally, I wish the WNBA would just say “sure!” and then let them try out.  Apparently these men think that (much like the plot of Lady Ballers), they would obviously win if they were playing against women.  But I have a feeling this fantasy might turn ugly once it collides with reality: just ask Bobby Riggs how that worked out for him.^*  So make these guys put their money where their mouths are, I say.  After getting relentlessly embarrassed by the women and failing to make the cut, they likely wouldn’t want to talk about this bullshit ever again.

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Other things you need to know this week:

• On Last Week Tonight, John Oliver gives an in depth analysis of the DoJ fuck-ups under Trump.  It’s a good retrospective on just how bad it’s been.

• On this week’s “Armageddon Update”, Christopher Titus takes a break from current events to cover climate change, in his inimitable style.  Meaning, if you don’t want to hear someone yelling and cursing vociferously about how dumb our politicians are being on this issue, you may want to skip this one.

• On this week’s Strict Scrutiny, Melissa and guest Elie Mystal cover Todd Blanche’s confirmation, Jeanine Pirro crashing and burning (yet again), subpoenas for journalists, and more.  I adore Elie; you may recall me mentioning him back in week 6, or my original discovery of him waaay back in December of 2023, when I had a brief discussion of third parties back before the Doom Report was even a thing.  My favorite moment this time was when Elie just goes off on Republicans: “We have to stop thinking that Republicans will ever grow a spine and stand up to this president, right?  Even the ones that the president has humiliated, even the ones that the president has kicked out of his inner circle, even the ones, as in the case of Tillis and Cornyn, that the president has literally taken their jobs away, they’ll never grow a spine.  If they had a spine, if they had a conscience, if they had decency: they wouldn’t be Republicans in the first place, right?  You don’t become a Republican because you have decency.  You don’t become a Republican because you have a spine, because you have commitment to the people.  You become a Republican because you are a spineless coward who lives to lick boots.  And that’s who Cornyn is.  And that’s who Thom Tillis is.  And that is who they will always be regardless of what this particular president does to them.”  Now, is this perhaps too harsh?  My favorite person who proves that “conservative” is not the same as “rightwing nutjob” (i.e. Adam Kinzinger) might say that it is.  But I mainly just admire Elie’s passion: preach on, brother.

• Speaking of Adam, in Monday’s “Kinzinger Report”, Adam covers Israel blowing up Trump’s peace deal, Trump’s shameful reaction to the news of Biden’s illness, and the amusing furor over Trump’s hair.  And a few other bits and bobs.

• Whereas in Friday’s “Kinzinger Report”, Adam covers Trump getting shut down on his Harvard lawsuit, the toll the Iran War is having on our sailors,^** for a decade longer than he was in Congress, even), and more, including Mamdani’s program to get Broadway tickets into the hands of underprivileged schoolkids.  Like most conservatives, Adam can’t pronounce “Mamdani”, but, the difference is, he keeps trying till he gets it right.  And that’s why we love him.

• Brian Tyler Cohen covers dumb attacks on Michigan Senate primary winner Abdul El-Sayed on Monday’s edition of “Another Day”.  You may recall we talked about El-Sayed last week.  Apparently the rightwing nutjobs feel very threatened by El-Sayed, ’cause they keep attacking him.

• Brian Tyler Cohen also covers Trump throwing reporters under the bus (or, more accurately, under the shoulder-fired missile).  Good coverage, but, more importantly: how did fucking TMZ become the new standard in journalism?!?  No doubt this says something about the current state of our news media.  (And probably not something particularly good.)

• I love it when my streams get crossed.  This week, Hasan Minhaj Doesn’t Know meets More Perfect Union: Hasan interviews John Russell, whom I’ve talked about many times in these Reports, most recently in week 78, where I enumerated all the previous weeks that I mentioned him, so just go look at that one to see all those.  In fact, Hasan brings up most of the pieces I’ve covered in the Doom Reports in this very interview.  A bit of a longer time investment, but well worth it in my opinion.

• And, speaking of More Perfect Union, this week they had a video exposing the scam that is home insurance.  If you’ve ever wondered why you keep having to pay more for insurance only to get denied more often, this explains it all.

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On Tuesday, PBS published an interview with the commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.  Needless to say, this is not a group which grants a lot of interviews, so it was a big deal ... and yet almost no one I watched covered it.

The one exception: this week’s Coffee Klatch.  There’s no Robert Reich this week, but W. Kamau Bell sits in with Heather Lofthouse, and he’s always great.  As he says in this episode: “I never thought I’d quote the Iranian ... Revolutionary Guard: you know, if you check Trump’s pockets and bank accounts, he’s doing great.”  Specifically, the commander was talking about the way Trump is handling the war, and what he said was this:

As soon as the stock market closes, they start hostilities.  When the stock market opens, they send positive messages to raise stock prices.  All the while, they are buying and selling the stocks themselves.  If I was in the place of the American Congress, I would call for an investigative committee to compare the assets of Mr. Trump, his family, and his inner circle before the war to their assets after the war.

Which ... yeah.  Kind of embarrassing that we have to hear it from the “Death to America” folks, but there you have it.  As Kamau also says in this Coffee Klatch episode: “When I was a kid ... there was generally a country that we made fun of for being run ridiculously.  There would be like a country ... that’s the international punchline.  ...  It’s us.  We’re the ridiculous country now.  That even the—like you said—the Republican [sic] Guard guy could be, like: they are really messing up over there.”

Also this week, Election Profit Makers is back, after a 4-month hiatus.  There’s a fair amount of diarrhea talk (which is only to be expected from David Rees), and a fantastic metaphor for the reflecting pool,^*** and then they too talk a bit about the war in Iran.  Here’s David’s take on the current situation:

We’re going to pay Iran money to stop making fun of us online, basically, and then we’re going to give them a toll in the Strait of Hormuz forever.  That’s my understanding of the current state of play.

Mild hyperbole, perhaps ... or then again maybe not.  Here’s the Revolutionary Guard commander’s assessment of how we’re doing so far:

The longer this war lasts, the more experience we gain.  We had never seen a real war to gain real experience to learn how to fight with America.  In these five months, we have learned how.  We have also seen how the American military is weaker than what we perceived.

All the Trump flunkies say that Trump is keeping us safe by ensuring that Iran can never have a nuclear weapon.  I think what Iran is demonstrating that they don’t need a nuclear weapon to kick our ass.  Not sure how safe that’s keeping us.

Not sure this counts as a note of hope (unless of course you happen to be Iranian).  But, on the other hand, the chances seem increasingly slim that this war will be over by the midterms, and that may have a distinct impact on the election.  So, as fucked up as it is, maybe we can eke out some positive outcomes from this debacle.  Certainly it would be better if people didn’t have to die for us to get there.  But it seems like reducing the power and influence of the assholes who are prosecuting the war that’s killing all the people—primarily for the purpose of lining their own pockets—maybe that’s about the best we can hope for.

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* Fun fact: I’m actually old enough to remember this match, and how upset my dad got over Billie Jean King’s victory.  Kind of a punch to the gut when your deeply held misogyny gets upended in real time.

** Remember: Adam himself was in the armed forces, for a decade longer than he was in Congress, even.  So he has particular empathy for stories that impact our troops.

*** Specifically, David says: “Everybody knows about the Washington Monument, right, because it’s phallic, and it thrusts up into the sky, ...  The pool is sort of the inverse of the Washington Monument; a pool is a receptacle, right? ...  The Washington Monument is the daddy, and the reflecting pool is the mommy, and the Lincoln Memorial is the baby, because Lincoln represented the best of our country.  And there you have the whole nuclear family.”