In Wake Of Renee Good's Murder, Tony Dokoupil Would Like America To Hug It Out

The new CBS Evening News is off to a roaring start.

When we wrote a week ago about Bari Weiss stooge Tony Dokoupil taking over the anchor chair at CBS Evening News, we of course had no way of knowing that in his first week he would get to cover both America using a military raid to bomb a foreign country and illegally kidnap its head of state, and an immigration officer flat-out murdering, on camera, an unarmed lesbian mother and poet for the crime of driving away from him and his team of masked goons. What an opportunity right out of the gate to show the world what kind of journalism the Weiss-Dokoupil less-than-dynamic duo could pull off under pressure, covering two of the biggest stories that will likely come their way this year.

How did they do? In a word, poorly. In a word preceded by an intensifier, really poorly. In a word preceded by multiple intensifiers, really, really, really poorly.

There were technical issues. There was the fluff interview of keg fiend Secretary of Defense Pete (Hic!) Hegseth. There was the ill-conceived “Look! Marco Rubio is a meme on the Internet!” segment, which we suppose makes some weird sense to run when the age of your average viewer is 58, but which was just embarrassing from a “high-level journalism is not whatever dumb shit is running across your Twitter feed at any moment” perspective. Way to confuse America’s grandparents, Tony.

Then there was Thursday night, when Dokoupil signed off with a short commentary about Renee Good’s murder and its aftermath that can only be summed up as — and we really struggled, as a professional writer, to come up with the most accurate word we could to describe it — ass. Ass, ass, ass, ass, ass. The statement was total ass.

How do you “both sides” this situation? If you are Tony Dokoupil and the Bari Weiss-ified CBS Evening News, you do it by ignoring any analysis of the facts of the event in favor of some bromides about Americans needing to learn to live with each other. All delivered to you by a straight man so white, you could use him as printer paper.

“There is so much to say about the last 24 hours, but sometimes what matters most is what is yet to be said at all, and what we all still need to hear.”

Is it that ICE is getting the fuck out of Minneapolis and every other city it is currently plowing through like the character of George in the old Rampage video game? Because that’s all we need to hear right now.

“Renee Good is alive and those videos, behind the wheel of her SUV, her three children expecting mom home again soon come. And we’ve seen the freeze frames, too. We’ve heard the political warfare, the clashing declarations about what happened, and unfortunately, we know the ending for Renee Good. Nothing is going to change that. Yet what we have not yet heard is one another.”

Oh, we’ve heard one another plenty. We heard the president, the vice president, and multiple other high government officials trash this woman with apocalyptic fan fiction out of an airport thriller: She was a “domestic terrorist” who tried to run down an ICE officer because she’s part of a trained cabal of bleeding-heart antifa operatives who hate America’s laws, and so she bears culpability for her own death, which she invited by daring to oppose the Trump administration.

We’ve heard more than enough.

“I spoke to people today who haven’t slept since it happened, who want ICE out now, who don’t like masked men on their street, don’t want their neighbors arrested, don’t want families ripped apart.”

But ...

“I’ve heard, too, not on the streets protesting but in passionate notes in my inbox, from people who want to see our immigration laws enforced, legally and peacefully and with safety for all, including the officers who, in many cases, are also parents themselves. These are both deeply American sentiments.”

Are those emails from other people in Minneapolis or any other city that ICE has invaded with his squadrons of psychotic ROTC washouts? Or are they from conservatives with brains pickled in rightwing media who write over and over “THIS IS WHAT I VOTED FOR!” Because with respect, those people are fucking idiots.

Okay, maybe without respect.

See, on the one hand, Dokoupil walked around Minneapolis and got residents to comment on camera how furious and traumatized they are by ICE’s very public, very cruel actions in their city. On the other hand, he also got emails from people in Bumfuck, Nowhere, who don’t see that the people preventing immigration laws from being enforced peacefully are the trigger-happy Trump-approved yahoos who are supposed to be peacefully enforcing them.

“But our job now is maybe the most American thing of all. It’s to find a way to live with people who are genuinely different from us. To try to be fair to them, and in doing so, to make things better, and keep things decent. Because in America, no one is going to do it for us.”

This is the airheaded Bari Weiss/radical contrarian centrist view of the world, where there must be two sides to every story, neither of which can be given more moral weight than the other. In this world, Good was standing in the way of the Real Americans and their avatar Donald Trump. So, her punishment (summary execution in the street by a cop) is simply one more disagreement about our views of what America should be.

So thanks for the condescending lecture about how we should treat each other, Wonder Bread. Next time, leave it in your Drafts folder.

The relevant clip of Dokoupil farting word sounds out of his yap hole starts around the 18:06 mark in this video. Or you could spare yourself and do something more worthwhile with two irretrievable minutes of your life, like swan-dive into a swimming pool full of broken glass.

[YouTube]

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