A whole new level.

Tuberville Falls.

******************

Sing it.

Ever since ol’ Tommy took a tumble
And landed like a fool upon his ass
I’ve wondered when the rest of him would crumble
And make his farce a memory of the past…

When Bama makes no rendezvous
With folks whose brains are all doodoo
When this disgusting pol is through
Won’t our lives be fine?

[al.com]

What a diplomatic way of saying that (using the descriptor of his hometown newspaper) Tommy Tuberville is a real “dumbass.”

Sing it.

They asked me what I knew

Of Marjorie and Jews

I of course replied

When a fascist lies

Snow gets in my eyes

We’re going to let you pay him off.

Several [University of Cinncinnati] students were surprised to learn UC officials have been quietly forcing them to pay thousands of dollars each to subsidize the athletic department…

David Ridpath, associate professor of sports administration at Ohio University, said students at most schools are unaware that their pockets are being emptied by the athletic department.

… UC’s athletic department spent $2.1 million in severance payments in 2017. Approximately 90 percent of payments went toward one person — former UC head football coach Tommy Tuberville.

In October 2016, Tuberville signed a two-year contract extension with a $2.4 million buyout — more than double the buyout under his original contract, according to the Cincinnati Enquirer. Less than two months later, Tuberville and UC parted ways.

In the end, the university paid Tuberville $1.9 million — over $900,000 more than payments owed in his original contract.

“It’s ridiculous,” fourth-year construction management student Ryan Burch said. “After the position Tuberville left the program in, he shouldn’t have gotten much of a buyout at all.”

Cincinnati finished 4-8 in Tuberville’s final season as head coach.

… a tragic saga of violence, fraud, loss, and birtherism, now draws to a close.

Having been abandoned by its dark lover, who now for America’s pain slut university? Who will not only coach the imminent Meineke Car Care Bowl, but keep Texas Tech University in the golden shackles it loves so well? The school has gone through Mike Leach, Bobby Knight, Billy Gillispie (the last two in basketball) and Tommy Tuberville. Who’s left?

Who’s left to slap the coaching staff, concuss players, force the team into illegal practice hours? You can get trash-talking coaches – trash-talking coaches are a dime a dozen – but TTU’s standard of torture is higher than that. TTU never forgets that

Football is violent by design. It became a sensation because of television, yes, but also because it expressed certain truths about American life: the dangers of the mines and mills, dirt, struggle, blood, grime, the division of labor, the all-importance of the clock. But we’ve changed, which is why white middle- and upper-middle-class fans recoil at the cascade of injuries that can make ESPN resemble the surgery channel…

TTU doesn’t recoil. They go for it, man!

*************************

UD proposes Rocco Siffredi. Has any Texas Tech coach forced a player’s head down a toilet while sodomizing him? It’s time.

************************

UD thanks John.

[T]he Republican insistence on nominating crazy people … affects us all. If you nominate and elect Tommy Tuberville to the United States Senate, we all have to pay a price. If you allow rancid weeds like Matt Gaetz and Paul Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene to grow at your grassroots, cut them off before I have to put up with them. I remember when it looked like Nevada was going to inflict Sharron (The Chicken Lady) Angle and Maryland was going to hand us the famous non-witch Christine O’Donnell, and I thought that truly was one step beyond. Turns out there is no Beyond. Mark Robinson is proof of that. He should stay on the ballot. He is the perfect GOP candidate for 2024.

What a piece of shit.

Michigan State was happily on its way to bankrupting the school, via massive payments (an almost hundred million dollar ten-year contract extension!) to a football coach who racked up some winning games, when (quoting James Bond) “something big came up.”

Given that as recently as 2018 another Michigan school was out 500 mill because a team doctor also had something come up, you kinda wonder

1.) how does one of America’s not at all rich states keep finding all this dough (and more) in its university sports programs? and

2.) will the state ever realize that hugely expensive degenerates tend to populate American university sports programs at the highest levels? (Tuberville not high-profile enough for you?) Because once you get RID of, say, Tucker, he’s gonna turn around and sue you for hundreds of millions more, the way all of them do when you fire them, for cause or not. Right? Has anyone besides UD been following this history?

As daunting as the remaining two months remaining on the schedule appear, there’s also the potential for a lengthy legal fight with Tucker hinting at his intent to sue the university over the roughly $80 million remaining on his contract. Michigan State doesn’t want to pay a dime and will have to decide if it’s worth absorbing hefty legal fees and headlines continuing to link the school with Tucker or reach a settlement to bring the saga to an end.

3.) can anyone at these institutions of higher learning think about cause and effect? As in, when you suddenly give a hundred million dollar contract to a… not too upstanding person, might that money and power go to his head? Make him think he can get away with anything cuz he’s such hot shit?

Yeah. You kinda wonder why so many American universities are ineducable on the most basic patterns, the most basic matters.

[I]n this unpredictable era of reproductive health care in the U.S., Maryland is about as safe a place an abortion provider can be.

UD has always been rather proud to be a Marylander, but never so much as now, when the gulf between Tommy Tuberville and Jamie Raskin states has never been wider.

We’ve followed many of them on this blog over the years, wrenching accounts of young innocents who adored college football and watched it obsessively until, you know, violence, concussions, asshole players and coaches…

I was watching when the Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa’s fingers twisted up during what looked like a seizure after his head slammed on the turf. But at least Tua had $30 million in the bank. He wasn’t a teenager, too young to understand the risks, counting on the adults to protect him.

… [I] can’t watch college football at all anymore…

Then a whole bunch of stuff about how mentally challenged coach/player-senators and senator-candidates mean all of America’s becoming college football by a different name.

Tommy Tuberville coached in the Cotton Bowl in 2007. He’ll be in the U.S. Senate until at least 2026. He is America’s future.

Maybe a tad overstated, but it’s the final three sentences of the piece and dude wants to end with a bang.

Anyway, people like UD have been saying the same thing about college ball for twenty years – accompanied by mucho scoffing/derision – but it don’t make no nevermind. I don’t actually think Tom of the Tuberville is our national future; but, like his exemplar Trump, he’s certainly able to kick up a lot of shit.

Pride of ‘Bama Tommy Tuberville forgot to lie to Politico about having told Trump his vice-president’s life was in danger.

[T]he detail that Tuberville informed Trump his vice president was in danger is a new and potentially significant development for House prosecutors seeking Trump’s conviction: it occurred just around the time that Trump sent a tweet attacking Pence for not having “the courage” to unilaterally stop Joe Biden’s victory. And Trump never indicated publicly that he was aware of Pence’s plight, even hours after Tuberville says he told him.

Whoops! Instead of leaving your quarterback vulnerable to attacks from the civilized world that he reveled in the thought of his vp dying from mob violence, you were supposed to (didn’t you read the offensive play charts?) say that the president had no idea where Mike Pence and his family were.

Senior aides to the House impeachment managers said Thursday that they considered Tuberville’s comments to be new information that confirms their case that Trump abandoned Pence and Congress to the mob rather than attempting to quell the violence.

“It squares with what we already know, that the president knew his vice president was in danger and did nothing,” said one of the aides, adding, “We will have more to speak on that point today.”

Or as the fully embarrassed Alabama media puts it:

There are only a few ways to interpret this. Either Trump didn’t care his vice president was in danger and recklessly put his life at further risk. Or Trump did care — and wanted him pursued, or hurt, or killed.

When did the English language decide that the OO sound meant stoopid and/or crazy? Why is it so easy to think of words designating dumb/nuts that feature OO? Rube, yahoo, boob, booboisie, stooge, goon, loon, moonbeam, buffoon, doo-doo, woo-woo, zoo (as in “the zoo at the Capitol building”).

UD wondered about this as she read a wonderful opinion piece from Alabama, where the author, seeking an organizing principle, a leit motif, around which to discuss “our political class in Alabama, … folks too dumb to understand how dumb they are, made that way through self-inflicted repetitive brain injuries,” lights on The Three Stooges (plus Shemp).

Kyle Whitmire works his way down the list of Alabama’s highest-profile idiots, comparing each of them to his Stooge-equivalent:

Mo Brooks “believes sea-level rise is due to rocks falling in the water; he’s called mitigation measures put in place by Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey ‘nanny state’ politics and last year, he bragged on the effectiveness of the American healthcare system against the coronavirus… [S]poke to insurrectionists before they stormed the capitol, [and] now faces censure by Congress.”

Rep. Barry Moore: “[T]old Alabamians that, if Trump could get the coronavirus, everybody would wind up getting it, so there was little point to protective measures… [S]upported overturning a lawful election and declared that he was leaving Twitter after the platform had already suspended his account… [S]hared a meme on Facebook defending Kenosha, Wisc., shooter Kyle Rittenhouse, saying he’s ‘fought back.'”

Sen. Tommy Tuberville is “too dangerous to trust around kitchen appliances, much less the power of a United States senator. And he’s prone to slap people he’s mad at and no one assumes he knows what he’s doing.”

[Attorney General] Steve Marshall’s organization “helped organize the pro-Trump march in Washington, but after that march turned into an assault on the capitol, Marshall said he didn’t know anything about the organization’s role in it. Marshall promised to investigate, but when asked whether Trump bore any responsibility, Marshall played dumb. ‘I didn’t see anything about the rally,’ he told the Montgomery Advertiser. ‘I don’t know anything about his remarks.'”

As the massive Trump tide recedes (or, as one observer memorably put it, as “witless ape rides helicopter” out of DC), it leaves in its wake schools of minnows that we hadn’t been able to see before, drowning as we were in the tide.

But now is the time to zoom in – on the fools, the nincompoops, the kooks, the googly-eyed, the stooges – before they try for another insurrection against the republic.

This blog will chronicle their movements.

Farhad Manjoo frets over the power of the reactionary paranoid media and how it’s leading our people astray, but it ain’t that. That’s a symptom. That’s merely their reading material.

There are two primary causes of violent insurrection in today’s America:

1. Arsenal Sadness: Most people solve the problem of arsenal sadness by unlocking their arsenal and killing themselves, or their wife, or both, with a selected weapon from it. They are sad because they have spent decades, and tens of thousands of dollars they don’t have, amassing a world-class armory, and have been unable to use it. It sits, a seething reproach to their promise to themselves that someday they would spray some setting with bullets and everyone would pay attention to them. These people have what used to be called an itchy trigger finger. They are actively looking for occasions to pop someone; they open carry in desperate hopes that in the course of this or that ordinary day they can whip out their semi-automatic and do a wee-wee on the Waffle House lawn. Scaring people with their AWS-16 Beowulf just doesn’t do the trick anymore; they’re still sad. What better target than the national leadership of American democracy? It’s cathartic; it’s a culmination; it’s a hoot. If Stephen Paddock hadn’t prematurely shot his wad in Las Vegas, he’d have been blasting his way into the Pence family secure location on January 6. Ditto Adam Lanza.
2. Stupidity: This is the most thoughtful analysis of American stupidity UD has found. Yes, it is a long read; yes, it is somewhat pedantic. But the author captures better than anyone I know the roots and significance of the globally recognized idiocy of many Americans, their hatred of intellectuals, and their love of Louie Gohmert, Sarah Palin, and Tommy Tuberville. Like the almost seventy percent of Americans who cannot name our three branches of government, Senator Tuberville, pride of Bama, cannot … name our three branches of government. I would not be surprised if Senator Tuberville thinks he sits on the Supreme Court. The archē-idiot, the person who took the ultimate, most powerful, opportunity to do good in the nation and the world and turned it into the foulest, most degenerate, most pointless killing field this country has ever seen, directs these people in their political activity. He shows them where to point their Beowulfs.

Oh solutions. Solutions. Yes, yes, solutions!

Fuck if I know.