Chez Pazienza
STORIES BY THIS AUTHOR
Chez Pazienza Predicted the Nightmare Scenario Puerto Rico is Now Facing
Editor's note: Bob Cesca emailed me yesterday to suggest we print this Members Only article Chez Pazienza wrote on January 26th 2017. The Trump administration has been shamefully slow in responding to the three and a half million United States citizens languishing on the island ...read more
Bill Maher Isn't the Enemy
Editor's note: This was the last piece Chez Pazienza ever wrote. It was published in issue 73 of 'Banter M', our digital magazine for members. I have decided to publish on the main site because I believe that is what he would have wanted. The infighting on the left infuriated ...read more
James O'Keefe's Little War on CNN Should Be Taken As Seriously As the Rest of His Scams
So James O'Keefe, whom you may remember from such comical roles as "A$AP Chad, Frat Pimp," "Jail Inmate Behind the Great Mary Landrieu Office Break-In Caper," and "Guy Who Tried and Failed To Lure a Female CNN Reporter Onto a Yacht Filled with Dildos" is in the news again -- ...read more
Now We Know, You Have To Promote Pedophilia To Be Too Disgusting for Conservatives These Days
I've managed to go the length of my time here at the Banter, and as an internet writer in general, without mentioning the name Milo Yiannopoulos other than once in the context of a larger piece about Donald Trump's relationship with Twitter. This was by design, because it always ...read more
The Decline of Jimmy Fallon May Be the One Good Thing To Come Out of Trump's Presidency
It's not supposed to happen anymore. One of the realities of life in the hyper-paced, omni-connected world, where information comes at us so quickly that it feels like overload, is that very little actually sticks. Even before the ascendance of the Trump era, the turnover rate ...read more
Donald Trump Is Asked a Question About Anti-Semitism, Answers By Rambling Like a Mental Patient
While a good portion of the country is rightly fixated today on the new details of the Trump administration's ties to Russia, the country that helped put Donald Trump in the White House in the first place, it's necessary once again to remind you that, irrespective of that, Trump ...read more
Um, Did Kellyanne Conway Just Tweet a Hidden Neo-Nazi Message To a White Nationalist?
God, I hate this. Let me say that right off the bat. I despise the fact that we're so far down the rabbit hole in terms of what the Trump administration has unleashed on our nation that I'm actually willing to even entertain something I'd normally dismiss as pure conspiracy ...read more
America's Biggest Owner of Local TV Stations Just Fired Someone Over Two Anti-Trump Tweets
If you don't work in television, you may not be aware of the name Sinclair or what it means within the business. If you do work in television, the second I mention Sinclair there's a pretty good chance your eyes involuntarily roll toward your forehead and you give a couple of ...read more
Appropriately, There's a Glaring Spelling Error on Donald Trump's Official Inauguration Print
We've already established that Donald Trump can't spell. We know that his White House staff can't spell. We even know, as of this past weekend, that the newly Betsy DeVos-helmed U.S. Department of Education can't spell. So, with all of that in mind, and with the knowledge that ...read more
Another Day, Another Deluge of Insanity and Dishonesty from the Trump Administration
I keep coming back to this, but it really is astonishing how off-the-mark I was in my pre-inauguration predictions of what we could expect from a Donald Trump presidency. I said it would be a deluge, a daily gangbang of incompetence, scandal, dishonesty, corruption and general ...read more
Surprise, Tamron Hall Left NBC Because She Wouldn't Stand for Being Sidelined by Megyn Kelly
This is really more of an aside to a couple of previous pieces that ran down NBC's woes in terms of its roll-out of the shiny new toy it's obsessing over, Megyn Kelly. But it's information that, while not surprising in the least, deserves to be seen far and wide so people can ...read more
Sean Spicer Royally F*cked Up the Location of the Pulse Nightclub Shooting Three Separate Times
Sean Spicer is the best TV sitcom running right now. He's laughably hapless, painfully hopeless, and utterly inept, and what makes his one-man show so watchable is his level of commitment to the part. Spicer's incompetence is matched only by his relentless rage at having to put ...read more
They Said, "We Survived Bush, We'll Survive Trump." Now We Have Proof That, as Before, Not All of Us Will.
There were more than a few common refrains from the nihilist left during the Democratic primaries -- sayings, slogans, memes, or just meaningless buzzwords repeated at such regular intervals that in short order they became a punchline, the stuff of "bingo card" parodies and ...read more
Kellyanne Conway's "Bowling Green Massacre" Was a Lie, and Her Apology for It Is an Even Bigger Lie
Donald Trump is a malignant narcissist whose self-obsession is so profound and unrelenting that he can tell lie after lie without even knowing he's doing it. It's entirely possible he truly believes the bullshit that regularly comes out of his mouth. Kellyanne Conway is a ...read more
MEMBERS ONLY: The Great Boston Mooninites Panic of 2007 Now Feels Like a Warning
It started before it actually started. In early January of 2007, a local Boston artist began hanging signs around town as part of a guerilla ad campaign for the upcoming Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie... To continue reading this article, please go here. A Banter Membership gets you ...read more
Tamron Hall's Exit Is NBC's Next PR Disaster
Well, I hate to say I told you so, but, this is NBC we're talking about. A couple of days ago I posted a piece in our members' section detailing how NBC was already screwing up the roll-out of its shiny new toy, Megyn Kelly. Since the Peacock never met a talent transition that it ...read more
The Trump Administration Just Did CNN the Biggest Favor Possible
According to a report running at Politico right now, the Trump White House has made a semi-official decision to effectively freeze out CNN, pulling its spokespeople off the network's air for an indefinite period of time. “We’re sending surrogates to places where we think it makes ...read more
MEMBERS ONLY: NBC's Big Megyn Kelly Roll-Out Is Already a Disaster
Stop me if you've heard this one before, but NBC is about to royally fuck up an on-air talent transition, screwing over marquee names, angering its audience, and instantly tainting the new face it paid a lot of money to see on its programming.... To continue reading this article, ...read more
F*ck Steve Bannon
One of the most difficult and daunting things about chronicling the early, traumatic days of the Trump presidency is trying to decide how much alarmism is acceptable and necessary and how much really is hyperbole. It feels wrong to warn of the worst case scenario in just about ...read more
MEMBERS ONLY: The Nightmare Scenario for California Under President Trump
While every single day of the Trump presidency so far has been a kind of Dali-esque nightmare, Wednesday was by any measure the darkest day yet. To continue reading this article, please go here. A Banter Membership gets you access to the magazine and all our Members Only ...read more
Trump's Latest Batsh*t Twitter Rants Are Likely Direct Responses To Sitting Around Watching TV
If you write about politics, you figured this would be overwhelming. You knew going into it that the Trump administration would be a daily deluge of incompetence, irrationality, corruption and general surreality. You probably even assumed that no matter how bad you imagined it ...read more
NBC Suspending an SNL Writer for a Joke About Barron Trump Is the Real "Political Correctness Gone Mad"
It speaks volumes about liberals, to say nothing of why conservatives often have an easier time than they should beating them like a drum, that there's a debate going on on the left over whether physically laying out a Nazi is acceptable behavior. It's not even that it so much is ...read more
The Trump Administration Declared War on the Press and on the Truth, So Here's What the Press Should Do About It
If anyone really thought that Donald Trump would somehow, finally, pivot toward becoming a sane, focused, responsible leader once he actually assumed the office of President of the United States, it took exactly one weekend to disabuse him or her of that notion. The first three ...read more
Remember That Picture of Trump Writing His Own Inaugural Address? The White House Just Admitted It Was a Lie
Update 8pm ET: It didn't even take a full day for another lie, a blatant one, to dominate the news cycle. Earlier today, during an address to the CIA, Donald Trump couldn't help himself and pivoted to the subject of the crowd size at his inauguration yesterday. Put simply, he ...read more