But I digress

The Portuguese government—which had little desire to accept any of these refugees—sent agents to escort the disobedient consul back home, and fired him from the foreign office. Yet officials who cared little for the plight of human beings nevertheless had a deep reverence for documents, and the visas Sousa Mendes issued against orders were respected by French, Spanish and Portuguese bureaucrats alike, spiriting up to 30,000 people out of the Nazi death trap. Sousa Mendes, armed with little more than a rubber stamp, was responsible for the largest rescue operation by a single individual during the Holocaust.”

Me about Revival!Rory

I know tumblr frowns on telling people they’re not trying because we don’t know their life, their story, etc.— and in general I agree. But we DO know Rory’s life story, and there is no excuse for her sneering away opportunities that most people would kill for (or at least commit some class A felonies for). Rory was gifted with brains, beauty, multiple relatives with trust funds, and a happy, stable, loving home life— and to call Revival!Rory a dumpster fire of a human being is an insult to dumpster fires, who, after all, are capable of warmth.

Hello! It’s good to see you again, Irate Trump Fan yelling at the “sheeple” in the comments of your ex-coworker’s or second cousin’s post about how they actually like Hillary Clinton. You sure are showing everyone…something! I created this post because everyone is exhausted by your bullshit and no one has the time to write out long responses to your regurgitations from Breitbart and InfoWars, and if they did that would only mean talking to you more and that sounds awful. So, here are some answers to the garbage storm shooting out of your typing fingers.

Angry Trump Fan Claim #1: The Clinton Foundation is a sham, designed to enrich the Clintons.

The idea that the Clinton Foundation is an evil enterprise is 100% true if you are Malaria. Then you are correct, it is out to get you. Let’s start with the lie that only 6% of the Clinton Foundation’s budget goes to actual charities. Only 6% goes to other charities, while the Foundation does most of its own work. They have done great work across the world with health care, reforestation, education, and hope to one day MURDER JAMES BOND. Crap, I blew at the end, didn’t I?

Here is an article from FactCheck.org on that subject. You can also check CharityWatch, GuideStar, and Charity Navigator which all give the Clinton Foundation top ratings.

There is another myth that the Clintons have pocketed eleventy billion dollars from the Foundation because they spend all their own money on claw machines in arcades even though they’ve never once gotten a prize, but several times they really thought the claw had the stuffed bear in its grasp.

Hillary, Bill, and Chelsea make $0 from the Clinton Foundation. Here is Politifact’s analysis.

Then there are the charges of conflicts of interest. You’re probably yelling about uranium right now, so we should talk about uranium. The story is that Hillary Clinton took $145 million for the Foundation and in return allowed Russia to buy a company which has control over a significant amount of uranium. This story is bunk. One might say this story came straight out of uranus (DAD JOKE!).

You can read Politifact’s long breakdown, but the short version is a) 9 government agencies signed off on the deal and b) there’s no evidence that Clinton intervened at all in the deal. 

There are also allegations that the Clintons allowed donors special access to Clinton when she was Secretary of State, but the smoking guns here are basically that she met with a Nobel Prize winning economist and Elie Weisel. (Washington Post). 

Hillary Clinton has admitted they could have done a better job of keeping the Foundation better separated from her work. I personally have never run a charity that provide access to AIDS medications to 11.5 million people or lowered the cost of Malaria medication by 80-90% in several countries, but apparently it’s tricky. So, yes, we can criticize Hillary and Bill for not being diligent enough in eliminating any possible hint of impropriety while working to combat heroin addiction and providing healthier food to students in the United States. 

But no, they did not pocket money or sell uranium to Lex Luthor.

Did you know Donald Trump has a foundation? He has illegally used the money from it to settle legal disputes, bribe Florida’s attorney general, purchase a painting of himself, and buy a helmet signed by Tim Tebow.  He has not contributed any of his own money since 2008.

Angry Trump Fan Claim #2: HILLARY DID BENGHAZI!

No, Hillary Clinton did not refuse to send support to Benghazi and no one was told to stand down instead of defending the embassy (except in the Michael Bay movie). And no one slept through Benghazi (except in the Michael Bay movie).

Media Matters has a full breakdown of all the myths and facts about Benghzai.

Most likely the controversy over Benghazi comes from the fact that it was the first US embassy attack in the history of the United States in an alternate universe because there were 13 attacks that killed 60 people during the Bush administration alone. This Politifact article actually breaks that number down a bit and shows it goes up if you count attacks on embassy employees outside the compound.

Four people died in Benghazi and it would be thoughtless to say that nothing can be learned from the tragedy and everything was done exactly as it should have been. The same is true of 9/11 under George W Bush, the USS Cole bombing under Bill Clinton, the death of hundreds of marines in Lebanon under Reagan, back to the British torching Washington, D.C. My point is that we used to all hate the British and we all worked together against them and I want to go back to that uniting, Brit-hating spirit.

Angry Trump Fan Claim #3: Donald Trump gets attacked for what he says about women, but nobody calls out Bill Clinton.

Here is a handy link to the answer to that question.

After you click that, go look at yourself in the mirror. Yeah, that’s a scumbag who blames women for their husbands’ infidelities. Pretty disgusting, right? Like you wanna look away and go get ice cream, but you don’t deserve ice cream.

Angry Trump Fan Claim #4: Hillary wants open borders, but Trump is going to build a wall. A Wonder Wall that Oasis could only have dreamed of.

Hillary Clinton does not support open borders. 

And Trump’s Wall? The worst idea to come out of Game of Thrones since your high school friend named her daughter Hodor? What is the goal here? More immigrants are going back to Mexico than coming in. More undocumented immigrants are entering the United States legally and then overstaying their visas than crossing the border. Why am I talking about a wall that is never going to be built? People get really emotional about this wall likes it’s their dad finally being proud of them. “OH, IT’S GONNA HAPPEN!”

Angry Trump Fan Claim #5: Hillary Clinton led us into war in Iraq and Donald Trump was against it.

It is now well known that Howard Stern asked Donald Trump in September 2002 if he was for invading Iraq and he said “Yeah, I guess so.” Now Fox News has released a clip of him talking to Neil Cavuto which they say proves he was against it. The quote that supposedly closes this case: “Well, he has either got to do something, or not do something.” Strong words for a leader. TRUMP 2016: HE’LL DO SOMETHING OR NOT DO SOMETHING! 

Clearly Trump was just talking out of his ass, something I’m sure he is almost finished doing. He didn’t know the answer, but that didn’t stop him from talking. I’m sure he remembers that he was right, because he only remembers being right. After the first debate with Clinton he denied saying something he had said just an hour before. An hour! It was like Sam from Quantum Leap entered his body and had to answer a question but had no idea what had happened immediately before.

Hillary Clinton voted to authorize President George W. Bush to use military force in Iraq. She has said he had given assurances he would use this authorization to pressure the Iraqis to allow weapons inspectors, and she believed him. There are certainly people who did not believe this. Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders both opposed the war, and so she cannot claim that no one saw the mess coming, but she certainly was not leading the charge to war.

Can I comment right here how hilarious it is what conservatives are willing to now believe since Donald Trump says it. The Iraq War was now bad! Paid family leave is good! That’s great! He also has conservatives talking about how awesome Vladimir Putin is and that is batshit insane. This strong leader garbage he has fellow Republicans spouting is ridiculous. Putin has to murder reporters and political enemies to stay in power while he is destroying Russia’s economy. It’s like if one of your friends started telling you that candy corn tastes delicious, so you started pretending to eat candy corn, but candy corn is fucking disgusting.

No, but really, Trump is indebted to Putin’s cronies and is more concerned with pleasing Putin than defending American interests. If that last statement is wrong, it could be disproven by the release of Trump’s tax return which he refuses to release. This is a man that over 40% of America is going to say “Yes, please lead us, Giant Lying Russian Stooge!” on election day.

Angry Trump Fan Claim #6: This article from InfoWars says th-

Counterpoint: Fuck you. InfoWars is not a news website. It’s a white paranoia bunker run by a nutjob who said no one died at Sandy Hook. He saw a tragedy with 26 dead, 20 of them little kids and he made it about his own ridiculous delusions. Seriously, fuck InfoWars and fuck you for giving them clicks.

And fuck Breitbart, too.

Angry Trump Fan Claim #7: Hillary should be in prison!

Nope, she was investigated by the FBI and its Republican director who found no cause to prosecute her and there is no analogous case where someone who had made a similar error was prosecuted. Please don’t try to connect it to General Petraeus who had knowingly gave out classified information. That would be embarrassing for you.   

The email server: Yes a bad move, which Secretary Clinton acknowledged. Was it illegal? Nope. Rules about private emails were instituted after she left. There is no evidence that any emails contained information considered classified at the time they were sent. If you read the articles linked here, you will see that there is definitely criticism of Secretary Clinton’s use of the server, which was, in technical political terms, a real boner. 

If you read down this far, Angry Trump Fan, you found somewhere I conceded she erred! Congrats! 

My personal guess is that she wanted to have some communications that wouldn’t be uncovered later and people would discover that she’d said Angela Merkel had shitty taste in music and Nicolas Sarkozy wore ugly hats. This is in a sense understandable, but not acceptable. Just like how the W. Bush administration lost 22 million emails. Y’all were equally pissed about that right?

Update: I received a message from someone who felt I had not accurately represented this issue, and that person was correct. This Politifact article finds that of the thousands of emails FBI Director Comey says110 contain classified information, but “Most of these emails, however, did not contain markings clearly delineating their status.” The article, in general, is very critical of Secretary Clinton and I’m linking to it because I do not want to be guilty of choosing my own reality that supports my candidate.

Angry Trump Fan Claim #8: Trump won the first debate! The polls say so!

Quick one: No they don’t. I’m not usually a believer in saying someone “won” a presidential debate, but when one is talking about policy and the other is farting out his mouth about how his son likes computers and maybe there are 400 pound hackers and Rosie O’Donnell and how it’s smart business to cheat people out of money and not pay taxes, then I’m willing to allow maybe Hillary Clinton won the first debate. And the real polls agree.

Angry Trump Fan Claim #9: Hillary invented Birtherism!

Nope. It’s possible that hard-core Hillary 2008ers were suggesting Obama was born in Kenya, but Clinton did not. In fact she fired an employee for sending out an email spreading that rumor.

But this is not about Hillary, this is about Trump who built himself up on racist bullshit and now is backing away from it because it’s politically expedient. It’s not just that he spread the lie and continued spreading it. He said he had investigators in Hawaii and “they cannot believe what they’re finding.” I CAN’T BELIEVE IT EITHER! NO ONE BELIEVES IT!

This is another one that fills me with delight in that his supporters looooovvvve to say “He’s no bullshit. He calls them like he sees them.” And here he is making it incredibly clear that either a) he was utterly full of shit for years and is now abandoning that lie because it’s no longer politically useful or b) he totally believes it still even with no evidence, but he’s willing to pretend he doesn’t to win votes. This is your straight-shooter, 40% of America.

Angry Trump Fan Claim #10: Hillary called me deplorable!

Maybe. She said half of all Trump supporters were deplorable. I do not know the percentage of Trump supporters that are deplorable, but there are a sizable chunk that are anti-black, anti-Jewish, anti-woman, and anti-anything-that’s-not-a-straight-white-Christian-male. In response to the comment, two of Trump’s advisors including his Fuckhead Son (official title) Donald, Jr. posted an image of The Deplorables, a photoshop of The Expendables poster with Trump allies’ faces placed over the stars’. Included in that are Alex Jones, Milo (a hateful race-baiting internet troll), and Pepe the Frog, a Neo-Nazi internet meme. Junior claimed he had no idea what Pepe the Frog is, but we are well past the point where this over-privileged bag of leaking feces gets to claim ignorance of white supremacist jargon and symbols. 

I have no clue what is in the hearts of Donald Trump’s supporters. Paul Ryan just wants to eliminate the estate tax for people worth over $5.45 million dollars. Some people will take anyone who will at least claim they’ll appoint Supreme Court justices who will overturn Roe Vs. Wade. But a lot want to turn back the progress made by minorities, and that I find deplorable.

And listen, I’m not going to call Donald Trump a racist. At least not without a hundred pieces of evidence. Which you can find here. 

Angry Trump Fan Claim #11: Hillary is a bigger liar!

This is such a weird one and it’s what I see most often. “She’s a bigger liar than Trump!” Considering pretty much every human lies, it’s impossible to say anyone isn’t a liar. I’m even not sure how you would rank who is a bigger liar. Luckily PolitiFact does and they made this.

Angry Trump Fan Claim #12: She was wearing an earpiece!

I forgot this one when I originally posted, so I’m adding it in because people still want to believe it. “Listen, Trump totally won the debate. I mean there were problems with his microphone and Lester Holt was so mean to him and Hillary had an earpiece but we’re not mistaking excuses we’re just saying!”

No, she did not wear a secret microphone, or an anti-seizure device, or a mystical amulet to animate her corpse since she obviously died decades ago. CAN’T YOU SEE CTHULHU IS BEHIND THIS!

The Florida GOP even retweeted an InfoWars link on this subject (Hey, fuck you again InfoWars!). The Florida GOP would quote a Ouija Board at this point if it told them Hillary had consumption.

Update: Angry Trump Fan Claim #13: Trump may be inexperienced, but he’ll surround himself with good people.

I’m paraphrasing a comment under my original posting of this article on Facebook, and I kinda thought it was a joke. Apparently people believe this. Can I use this moment to point out how much work people put into liking Trump? Can you imagine if they put one tenth of one percent of that effort into giving Obama a chance? People have convinced themselves that Donald Trump, a thieving, philandering con artist, is a moral, religious everyman.

Back to this idea that he’s going to surround himself with good people. Here are the people he has chosen so far:

a) Corey Lewandowski, his first campaign manager, was charged with battery for assaulting a female reporter. But, hey, the charge was dropped! That’s something!

b) Paul Manafort, Trump’s second campaign manager, was a former advisor for the Putin-backed Ukranian dictator and was paid in funds stolen from the state.

c) Steve Bannon: Trump’s current campaign chief changed Breitbart from a conservative news site to a home for white hate groups (Yes, I reused a link. You caught me). They have a section on the site called Black Crime.

d) Chris Christie: Not even Donald Trump believes Chris Christie, who is in charge of leading his transition team, told the truth about Bridgegate. While he’s avoided prosecution, both sides in the Bridgegate trial acknowledge he was aware, despite his constant declarations to the contrary.

e) Al Baldasaro: Oh you don’t know the co-chair of Trump’s veterans’ coalition? You might remember that he called for execution of Hillary Clinton. He continues to work for the Trump campaign.

f) Roger Fucking Ailes: Yes, Roger Ailes who harassed and extorted sex out of female employees for years, is an advisor to Donald Trump. Roger Ailes is a monstrous sexual predator and Donald Trump thinks he’s a cool guy who can hang.

No, Donald Trump is not going to surround himself with good people.

Update! Angry Trump Fan Claim #14: Hillary called all of Bernie Sanders supporters basement dwellers!

This is incorrect. She spoke empathetically of people who have been let down by the economy. That take might be biased because it comes from noted Bernie Sanders foe and longtime Clinton supporter Barney Fra…No, sorry that’s what Sanders himself said.

Update: Speed Round

Thanks to everyone who reblogged this. Since it keeps going, I thought I’d throw in a couple more that have come up since I first posted this. No, Secretary Clinton was not kicked off the Watergate Commision, No, she did not lose $6 billion as Secretary of State. No, bragging about grabbing a woman by the vagina without consent is not locker room talk, it is sexual assault. That last one is easy because I don’t need a link to a non-partisan website to prove it, I just need to not be a scumbag. I could spend years going through every fake controversy from John Podesta’s emails, but here are the top ten from PolitiFact. Yes, however, John Podesta’s risotto recipe does sound promising. No, the multiple women who have accused Donald Trump of sexual assault have not had their claims debunked. No, the polls aren’t rigged. No, voter fraud is not what’s going to keep Donald Trump from becoming president. Yes, there is a tape of Donald Trump discussing how great Hillary Clinton is from 2008. No, Al Gore did not contest the results of the election. He pushed for hand recounts during the legally mandated recount in Florida. George W. Bush sued to stop the recounts. Bush was the plaintiff, which is why it’s Bush v. Gore instead of Gore v. Bush. (Guys, Gorvy Bush sounds like a great name for a loony yokel on a sitcom). After the Supreme Court decision, Gore conceded and democracy kept chugging along.

And I think we’re done. I’m glad we took this ride together and you read all the way through this and now you don’t need to keep posting false garbage in everyone’s comments. Good-bye and you’re welcome.

Well, that was bold. Completely awful, but bold!

That paragraph above is what I tweeted immediately after “The Good Wife” aired its finale. It’s the worst series finale I’ve watched since “How I Met Your Mother,” although to be fair, HIMYM was far worse far longer than “The Good Wife” ever was. Still, the HIMYM was still so staggeringly bad that I watched in abject horror/amazement at the lengths it went to undo its central premise and violate and any all investment by any viewer. I don’t think “The Good Wife” finale was that bad, and I recognize that in today’s hot take economy making brash statements so close to air time should be taken with a silo of salt.

STILL.

Let’s make something clear up front: I don’t abject to the ideas in this finale, but the execution. The idea that the Kings understand how a series finale should work and then consciously go in another direction isn’t something inherently to fault. I think such misdirection works better in a film than a long-running television series, but I’m open to the idea of Alicia not getting anything she wanted and ending the series without any catharsis. There are certain shows that should reflect life as it is, and that means resisting the happy ending. Whether or not you think “The Good Wife” is such a show is up to you. But I’ll allow for the idea to be viable, even if the execution here was terrible.

Primarily, “The Good Wife” series finale failed because it emphasized plot over story, leaving almost no time for Alicia (and thus the audience) to take in the emotional ramifications of Peter’s trial. At the very least, this should have been the second to last episode. At the very VERY least, Diane should have slapped Alicia before the opening credits aired. Ending it the way they did wasn’t shocking, unless you want to talk about how shockingly sloppy the construction of this show’s final arc has been. Look, TV is harder. Series finales are even harder. But everything about this final arc has felt simultaneously too long and too rushed, leading to a tension no show wants to incur in its audience: “Sweet Jesus, how are they going to wrap it all up in time?”

Throwing Will into the mix did the show no favors, for while I’ve enjoyed plenty since Josh Charles left the show, tonight’s dream sequences went a lot way to make everything that’s happened since his death feel relatively meaningless. It also robbed Alicia of a lot of agency, since every decision was tied to her relationship to a potential mate. Maybe that would have worked if the trial were over, but weaving that emotional material into what honestly felt like an uninteresting case of the week starring a vengeful glee club instructor was just baffling. The Kings more or less decided to end the show in media res, which after seven seasons simply breaks the bargain this, or any show, has with its audience.

Maybe I should applaud more risk-taking in television. But I can’t dismiss the fact that television works the way it does for a reason, and that deconstructing that approach puts the very work that people put into watching, thinking, and talking about these shows at risk. The power of television over other mediums is the sheer time people invest in it. Television can meander in ways other art can’t, and while that makes it riskier, it also makes it more endearingly shaggy. True, “The Good Wife” always emphasized Alicia’s precision, her seemingly unflappable nature, the idea that the public saw her as the same person in the press conferences that bookended the series even we saw the cracks in the façade over seven seasons. Again: I don’t give a flying shit that Alicia got burned in the finale. I care that the Kings gave neither Alicia nor the audience time to process that in a way that felt fair.

In the end, we want to feel as if the journey we take with certain shows was worth it. And while no creator should ever be beholden to the whims of its fanbase, it should play fair with those fans all the same. After the tire fire of season six, in which Alicia’s run for State’s Attorney nearly sapped all of the good will the show had accrued, the show earned it back in fits and starts this season with having Alicia climb the ranks and potentially finally move on past Peter, past Will, into something…else. You could call Diane’s slap a bold reprimand for where we thought the story “should” go, but that would imply that the show had logically built to that moment. And while Christine Baranski sold the everloving hell out of that betrayal, the story move felt more like an Emmy reel opportunity than a logical period for the show’s ultimate sentence.   

The popular narrative is that “The Good Wife” sucked after Josh Charles left the show, although I don’t really buy that. I think the show bit off more than it could chew more often than not, and suffered from the types of production and personality issues that plague all long-running shows. But it did feel as if the show were building towards Alicia finally shedding off the title of the program and becoming something…well, whole. She didn’t have to partner with Jason to make this a worth finale, with or without The Ghost Will guiding her morals and libido along. But Ghost Will had the more than likely unintended effect of negating anything that happened in the past 2.5 seasons. Coupling that with the “business as usual” aspects of the perfunctory trial, setting up future storylines (Alicia as Hopelessly Drunk On Red Wine Governor for…reasons?), and failing nearly a half-dozen core characters in the process…what’s there to like about this?

At best, the Kings failed to plot this out correctly and shoved four episodes into a one-episode bag. At worst, they thought this would be a bold move that served the central themes they had laid out for nearly a decade. Had I been able to listen in on them breaking this episode like the NSA listened in on countless phone calls throughout “The Good Wife,” I might have tried to warn them against such bridge-burning. Artistic integrity is fine, but audience engagement always wins out. This isn’t some small off-off-off-Broadway show intended to antagonist and enrage as much as entertain. This is a drama on one of the biggest television networks there is, and with that comes some modicum of responsibility to not shit on its loyal viewers. That makes me sound old and in the pockets of Big TV, but I’m a TV critic that’s first and foremost a TV viewer. Give me something painful that naturally flows from what you’ve laid out previously, and I’ll give you credit. Give me something painful that is designed to provoke for the sake of provocation, and I’ll re-enact Serena Williams in the “Sorry” video from Beyonce’s “Lemonade” album.

And hey, maybe me writing this piece means The Kings got exactly what they wanted out of this episode. But that’s a hollow victory. Hot takes about why something enraged me aren’t fun to right. I’d much rather keep my mouth shut if something doesn’t work, because there’s no small part of the internet dedicated to trashing things that ultimately don’t mean anything. But this was a special show, and was for a very long time, and to see it end this way isn’t just disappointing but instructive. It’s useful to look at how wrong the Kings got this in order to get at not just what people liked about “The Good Wife” but they like about TV in general, about what’s important about the medium, and how it can serve its viewers in the future.

The best shows teach you how to watch them, and bad finales stem from a systemic violation of those teachings. “The Good Wife” didn’t exactly violate those teachings in principle, but almost went out of its way to cloud them as it sprinted towards the finish line. I thought the show had a clear path after so much time lost in the woods, but instead failed to understand that we needed character closure, not plot closure, in its final arc. Baranski’s slap might earn her accolades, but came at a much higher cost for the show’s ultimate place in 21st-century television.

Some have wondered if “The Good Wife” the last great network drama. I don’t believe that for a second, and not just because I hated this finale. This was at one time a great drama, and often a great drama, and for quite a sustained run a great drama. The crappiness of this finale doesn’t undermine that, nor does it damn all other dramas by association. Greatest can be found on any network at this point, but in addition to, not at the expense of, The Big Four. This episode didn’t work, which crippled the entire season by extension, and hurt its series credibility some. That’s unfortunate, but not the end of complex, funny, smart, maddening hour-longs on ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox. But no show that runs for that long on any network can choose artistry over audience engagement.