TUESDAY, JUNE 23, 2026
Are we sure she got this right? Philip Kennicott works for the Washington Post. At this link, the newspaper thumbnails his tenure:
Philip Kennicott
Philip Kennicott is the Pulitzer Prize-winning art and architecture critic of The Washington Post. He has been on staff at The Post since 1999, first as classical music critic, then as culture critic. In 2011, he combined art and architecture into a beat focused on visual culture and public space. He is now the Post's culture critic, focused on cultural issues and the arts in general.
According to the leading authority, he graduated summa cum laude from Yale—with a degree in philosophy, no less!
Be all that as it may, Kennicott likes the Obama Presidential Center more than some other critics. Back on June 2, his review of the complex appeared beneath this dual headline:
Art
The Obama Center opens as a time warp to an old political order
Despite a range of controversies, the Obama Presidential Center makes a good first impression—even the “Obamalisk” at its center.
Early in his review, Kennicott mentioned the current president's "childish meme on social media" about the Obama Center. In that childish meme, the current president had portrayed the center as "a monumental trash can surrounded by an urban clutter of cars and telephone poles."
So our failing nation's Ozymandias had portrayed the place. Along the way in his own review, Kennicott offered this intriguing claim:
Something dark and catastrophic was brewing during the Obama years, and it seems, in hindsight, that America was sleeping when it should have been on alert.
"Something dark and catastrophic was brewing?" Some will agree, some won't.
Almost surely, Kennicott was alleging the existence of "something dark and catastrophic" on the right, but the current version of that strain was brewing well before the Obama years—for example, in the crackpot attempts by the very pious Reverend Falwell to persuade the world that Bill and Hillary Clinton had apparently somehow been involved in a wide array of murders.
So the pious Falwell had pimped it out during the bulk of the 1990s. During that juncture, the darker forces on the right were also attempting to prove that Hillary Clinton was involved, somehow, in the death (by suicide) of Vince Foster, a high Clinton official and a lifelong Clinton friend.
In short:
Long before the Obama years, blatantly crackpot behavior was general over America as something dark and catastrophic—and baldly deranged—intruded itself on the discourse.
The Clintons murder the folks they don't like? How much cracked pottery has been involved in the attempt to keep this theme alive, even in the present day?
If you watch the garbage can the Fox News Channel spills out each night at 10 p.m. Eastern, you'll see a baldly disordered cable news nutcase who works, on an almost nightly basis, to keep the image of Hillary Clinton as a murderer alive. This is the garbage can his corporate owners have chosen.
Also, this is the garbage can Blue America agrees to ignore.
"Something dark and catastrophic was brewing?" Did this strain go national in 1988, when Rush Limbaugh's radio program entered national syndication?
In March 1994, this tiny man behind the bluster and girth shoved the garbage can down the road on the way to its current residence in the halls of the Gutfeld! program. In this report in July 1994, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) started by recalling the basics of what had happened:
Koppel Covers for Limbaugh’s Rumor-Mongering
Ted Koppel’s special (ABC Viewpoint, 4/19/94) on press coverage of Whitewater was a perfect opportunity to take Rush Limbaugh to task for spreading unfounded conspiracy theories. But instead, ABC journalists Koppel and Jeff Greenfield let Limbaugh off the hook.
On his March 10 radio broadcast, Limbaugh had announced the following in urgent tones:
"OK, folks, I think I got enough information here to tell you about the contents of this fax that I got. Brace yourselves. This fax contains information that I have just been told will appear in a newsletter to Morgan Stanley sales personnel this afternoon…. What it is is a bit of news which says… there’s a Washington consulting firm that has scheduled the release of a report that will appear, it will be published, that claims that Vince Foster was murdered in an apartment owned by Hillary Clinton, and the body was then taken to Fort Marcy Park."
So said Limbaugh that day, live and direct from the syndicated garbage can. As happenstance had it, we were driving through West Virginia that afternoon. We heard this shot heard round the world as we motored along.
El Rushbo had offered fresh garbage right from the can, as his successors do today on a nightly basis. The report by FAIR continued:
[continuing directly]
After he returned from a commercial break, Limbaugh began referring to the story as a “rumor,” but continued to claim that the story was that “the Vince Foster suicide was not a suicide.”
Limbaugh was referring to an item in a newsletter put out by the Washington, D.C. firm of Johnson Smick International. The newsletter, relating a rumor that has no apparent basis in fact, reported that White House attorney Foster’s suicide occurred in an apartment owned by White House associates, and that his body was moved to the park where it was found.
Limbaugh took this baseless rumor from a small insiders’ newsletter and broadcast it to his radio audience of millions, adding his own new inaccuracies: The newsletter did not report–as Limbaugh claimed–that Foster was murdered, or that the apartment was owned by Hillary Rodham Clinton. Limbaugh’s repetition of an unfounded rumor has been credited (Chicago Tribune, 3/11/94; Newsweek, 3/21/94) with contributing to a plunge in the stock market on the day it was aired.
The fallout from El Rushbo's garbage was enormous. Even then, something dark and catastrophic was emerging, on a daily basis, from the nation's garbage can.
At this point, we jump ahead 32 years, to Sunday evening, June 14 of the present year.
We jump ahead to the UFC event staged on the White House lawn that evening. Just to refresh you, the garbage can popped open that night and this dumbbell emerged:
After White House bout, UFC fighter disparages Michelle Obama as ‘a man’
UFC fighter Josh Hokit used his post-bout interview Sunday night at the White House to disparage former first lady Michelle Obama.
In a post-fight interview, the heavyweight fighter praised President Donald Trump for hosting the event, which was intended to celebrate America’s 250th birthday.
He then insulted the mother of one of his rivals, thanked Jesus and ended by shouting: “And lastly—Michelle Obama is a man! Am I right, America?”
Some in the audience laughed at Hokit’s remark, which is rooted in a baseless far-right conspiracy theory. Right-wing podcaster Joe Rogan, who was conducting the post-fight interview, did not follow up with Hokit on the comment.
So began Amy Wang's report about what happened that night.
The following day, on Deadline: White House, Nicolle Wallace didn't mention this moronic, insulting event. On Tuesday, she spoke about the event with Maya Wiley, who began by saying this:
Well, let me start by saying this. This is racist.
Later, Wiley described Hokit's ugly / stupid behavior as "bigotry." She said, "This is evil come alive in words,"
Maya Wiley is very sharp. To our eye and ear, she seemed to be stricken this day, and there's no obvious reason why she shouldn't have been.
By now, the claim had fairly widely spread—the claim that Hokit's pathetic performance had been a racist attack. But is it clear that that's the case? Is it possible that something else was going on when Hokit launched his pitiful attack?
We ask that question for a reason. As we've frequently noted, the little tramp who hosts the Gutfeld! pigsty routinely spreads the theme that Michelle Obama is secretly a man, and that Barack Obama is secretly gay.
As it turns out, that dual theme stretches back at least to 2014, when the increasingly sour Joan Rivers let it crawl out on the land. But even as we've seen the aforementioned cable star pimp that theme about Michelle Obama, we've seen him relentlessly pimp the same theme about Randi Weingarten, and we've seen him and the droogs with whom he surrounds himself burn the time away by asking if Brigitte Macron, the first lady of France, does or does not "have a penis."
We'll walk you through some history this week, including some history about the way the slimy El Rushbo spoke about first lady Hillary Clinton—and about Chelsea Clinton, when she was 13 years old. Full disclosure:
When we let these creeps hold forth (as we constantly do), there are few restraints on where these creeps will go.
Our guess would be that what's currently bothering them is frequently something other than race. The "masculinism" is all around, and it's a powerful, braindead force.
With these ruminations, we're on our way back to the way Blue American elites reacted to those recent Supreme Court redistricting decisions. But also to questions like these:
Will we Blues be able to win elections in the future? Also, is it possible that we Blues sometimes react in ways which might make that task much harder?
Tomorrow: Through our inexcusable silence, these are the creeps we've chosen
