WAZ Awards 2021 Winner Number 8 ‘The Noose’ (Tommy O)
It being a nice night, meaning it wasn’t raining for a change, and our great forest was still gaining 3 minutes of daylight per day Tommy Obrien fired up the grill and produced a massive spread of barbequed venison steaks from a buck he and Tim took on the last day of hunting season. Red meat with root vegetables that he also cooked on the grill, plus sourdough rolls, butter, and home made IPA that wasn’t quite carbonated, but good. Tommy handed the first clue to Al and Ira. Al began to sing an old tune from the American folk tradition.
“Hang me, oh hang me,
I’ll be dead and gone.
Hang me, oh hang me,
I’ll be dead and gone.”
A core element of folk music is improv so Ira came in with the next verse with a twist on the words.
“Wouldn’t mind the hangin’
but for being on TV so long.
And I spent six days in jail…”
“Ahhh! Jussie Smollett!”
“That was quick.” Tommy said, ‘Jussie the Noose’. A gay, multimillionaire person of color who lit up the race-mad feeding frenzy down in America for three years in a row until he went down, if you’ll pardon the expression, with both engines on fire. Not sure if he’s still a multimillionaire. No doubt he’s shelled out a few bucks for lawyer fees.”
“Who’s Jussie Smollett, man?”
“Dammit Cosmo, see what you miss by not having a television or social media? Who is Jussie Smollett? Gosh, where to begin?”
“How about at the beginning.” Roy suggested.
“That’s right Tom. Start at the beginning.”
“Every word.”
“And go slow.”
“Yeah, we don’t want to miss anything.”
“Okay funny guys, you asked for it.” Tom began. “Jussie is a half black, half white…”
“Half-white privilege again.” Sven said.
“Hey, if they’re half-white, is it a racial slur if you call ‘em ‘Cracker?’
Tom ignored that. “And gay, like I said. That’s relevant because it’s part of his victimhood ensemble.”
“So, why is he famous, man?”
“Well, I’m getting to it if you’ll all put a sock in it and listen. Yeef!” Tommy said. Where was I? Oh yeah. Smollett was knocking back about $125,000 per episode on a TV show…”
“Per episode?”
“That’s what I read. At first he was only making about $65,000 but it went up. A lot of speculation is that Jussie wanted more money and that’s why, on January 29, 2019 explosive diarrhea all over the media screamed that actor Jussie Smollett was the victim of a racist, homophobic attack in Chicago.”
“Chicago again? We’ve already done two WAZ Awards to Chicago for 2021.”
Tom shook his head. “Nope. This story went national, then international, in hours. “A lie can go halfway around the world before the truth can put it’s pants on.” as the saying goes. Jussie’s attack became a pig pile hundreds of bloggers deep from sea to shining sea. And it sucked every virtue signaling race baiter of every side in the country into the vortex.
What happened, according to Jussie, was he left his luxury apartment building [which had room service, according to reports] at two in the morning, in the dead of Chicago winter when it was 16 degrees below freezing—to get a fast food sandwich. You with me?”
“With you.”
“According to himself, Jussie gets his sandwich, and as he’s almost to the stairs of his building, two white men in ski masks accost him yelling, “Empire! (that’s Jussie’s TV show), and ‘This is MAGA country’. And calling him faggot and nigger. Got a question, Roy?”
“I do.” Roy said. “Two questions, in fact. First, do white racists watch black TV shows? And second, ‘MAGA country?’ Didn’t Chicago vote about 84% against Trump in the 2016 election?”
“You’re answering your own questions. Anyway to get on with it. Jussie, who looks like he couldn’t fight his way out of a wet paper bag, claimed he fought the two men. They beat him up, put a noose around his neck, and poured bleach on him. There are pictures of the noose on the internet. It wasn’t a real noose. It was clothesline from the hardware store. You know what a factory clothesline coil looks like? Jussie hadn’t even tied it into a noose. He was still wearing it when the police arrived, and that coil is still intact except for a couple strands around his neck.
So, the cops, who are way better actors than Jussie because they’re acting like they’re taking all this seriously, tell Jussie and his friend who called them, they’ve got body cameras on. So they know they’re being recorded. You can watch it on the internet.
“Within hours,” Tommy went on. “Within hours Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Corey Booker, the NAACP….”
“Oh No! Not Al Sharpton!”
Tommy rolled his eyes. “Of course, Al Sharpton. Politicians, actors, singers, doofy white women with blue hair and nose rings, transexuals on national television…everyone with a twit or a tweet was throwing themselves on the pyre of, “Oh my God! What country is this? America is racist! America’s terrible. Jussie, oh Jussie we are all Jussie!
He did a Good Morning America interview with a black woman named Robin Roberts and it’s a thing of beauty. Turns out there are people who read body language for a living. That was news to me. Anyway, some of them put up Jussie’s Good Morning America interview as a textbook case of how to identify a liar. When he bites his lip, when he looks away, when he reacts inappropriately to a question, or starts crying. He tells Robin he’s a fighter as he’s blubbing through the interview.”
“I never seen Mike Tyson blub in an interview.” Sonny said.
Tommy nodded, “The body language people do a good job but I wish they’d have said more about Robin’s body language. That’s what interested me the most because I’ve never in my life seen an interviewer so closed off from a conversation as she was. Her legs are crossed, her arms are crossed, torso pulled down the way people do when they’re protecting themselves… Sometimes she’s partly turned away…I have a sense she knew he was lying. In a way, she’s like the Chicago police. This is what she does for a living. She knows bullshit when she hears it. Didn’t call him out, though.
She did ask him why he thought he was attacked. He said, “I can just assume, I mean, I come really, really hard against 45.”
“He’s hard for Donald Trump, the 45th American President?”
“Apparently,” Tom said. “Meanwhile, Jussie was living the narcissist’s wet dream. All the attention a guy like him could wish for. Then it blew up in his face.”
“How?”
The Heater
“Some of you guys might remember Rosie Ruiz who won the Boston Marathon back in the day. Only she didn’t? She just jumped in near the finish line and pretended. Consensus was she probably didn’t mean to win, she just wanted to pretend she’d made a good showing. If she’d come in third, or tenth, or twentieth it wouldn’t have mattered, but first? It did. The cameras were rolling. No way out. She was exposed as a fraud, a hoaxter, and she became the meme for people who meant to fake something but the fake takes on a life of its own and they can’t stop it. I think that’s what happened to Jussie. A trait of narcissists is they think they’re smarter than other people.
“How’d they figure him out?”
“Our man Jussie had inadvertently created what the judge at his trial called a ‘Heater.’ A Heater is a case so hot and urgent the public demands it be solved. A Heater means the police pull out all the stops. They yank resources from other cases, detectives on overtime, lab work, interviews with everyone, review every surveillance camera, slog through thousands of pages of documents, until they solve it.
Evidence came raining down on Smollett to the point the cops arrested him for faking a hate crime. It went to a 23 member Grand Jury. Raham Emanuel, Chicago’s Mayor at the time said later that the Grand Jury had only a sliver of the evidence the police had collected but even that was enough that they said he should go to trial. You with me? Say yes because it’s about to get strange.”
“Yes! With you!”
Chicago District Attorney Office closes case after Grand Jury Indicts Smollett: Enter the Obama Connections
“Good.” Tommy said. “Chicago’s District Attorney is a black woman named Kim Foxx. Shortly after the Grand Jury verdict, Foxx’s office dropped all charges against Smollett and the judge sealed the facts of the case.”
“How can she do that? Is that legal?”
“Depends who you ask. Here’s where it gets weird. Jussie Smollett has connections with the Obamas. His sisters worked on Obama’s campaign, there’s a video of Jussie the Noose dancing on stage with Michelle Obama in 2018. There’s a different video of President Obama thanking performers at a White House tribute to Ray Charles and Jussie Smollett is one of those performers. Question Tim?”
“That means nothing, Tom.” Tim said. “Any Presidential family meets more people in a month than the rest of us meet in a lifetime. So you can’t hang this on the Obama’s.”
“You’re right. And I’m not. My point, which I was getting to, isn’t the Obamas themselves are actively involved. Not at all. I do think clout, cronyism, political patronage can get things done in Chicago. Kim Foxx recused herself, or said she did, from the Smollett case because, as she admitted, she’d had inappropriate contact with members of the Smollett family and with…wait for it…former Michelle Obama Chief of Staff, Tina Tchen, who coincidentally also had connections with the Smolletts.
Next thing you know, Foxx’s office dropped the charges, in return for Smollett forfeiting $10,000 bail, without Smollett having to admit guilt. She compared Smollett’s international sensation to burning a draft card. Chicago smelled a rat. And you know what? When they let Smollett off the hook, Foxx’s office allowed Smollett and his legal team do a press conference before anyone else, including the District Attorney’s Office. To the public it appeared that Jussie had been found innocent. In fact, a reporter asked Smollett’s lawyer “Is it a deal, or not a deal, if he’s giving up his bond.” The lawyer said, “There is no deal. The state dismissed the charges.” Total rubbish. Raham Emanuel and the Eddie Johnson, the Police Chief, found out about the ‘deal’ when the press did. They were pissed.
Still, it was looking like Jussie would sashay away awash in today’s pungent, perfume of victimhood. Except a former judge filed a motion to have a special prosecutor investigate the case. That happened. And the prosecutor, Dan Webb is his name, tore Jussie’s hoax a new asshole, beat his legal team like a red headed step child, excoriated Kim Foxx, and brought six new charges against Smollett.
The MAGA attackers turn out to be two Nigerian body builders.
“So, with Jussie still claiming he’s innocent they go to trial. Right away the public learns the guys who roughed Jussie up weren’t white. They were two brothers from Nigeria.”
“Nigeria? Black MAGA guys?”
“Well, black guys.” Tommy said. “Abimbola and Olabinjo Osundario. Two muscle men who could pound Smollett into sandwich spread in their sleep. They didn’t hurt him because they were friends of his. At least, they thought they were. He wrote a script for them of what they were supposed to yell. Like “This is MAGA country.” and they were supposed to rough him up, but pull their punches, let him fight back a little, and put the noose around his neck.”
Tim said, “This is too strange, Tom. How do you know they’re not lying?”
“Well, for one, the brothers testified under oath they attacked him because he asked them to. They did it thinking he’d help them get into films. For two, they had worked with Smollett on his TV show. For three, Smollett paid them—with a check.”
A groan went around the room. “Not really!”
“For four, there’s a video from a surveillance camera of the Osundarios buying the masks, gloves, bleach, and noose at a hardware store called the ‘Crafty Beaver Home Center.’”
“No!”
“Oh yes. The Crafty Beaver. The brothers testified Smollett gave them $100 to buy the props. And the store security guy said he remembered the Osundarios because they’d wanted to buy MAGA hats. I guess they thought that would be a nice touch. The guy told them the store doesn’t sell MAGA hats.
The caper itself didn’t go off well. Apparently Jussie’s plane was late getting back to Chicago. That pushed the time frame back. The brothers played their part but it seems a car came by before they put the noose around Jussie’s neck. They’d already started the hoax but took off so Jussie put it around his own neck. The camera Jussie thought would have footage of the attack was facing the other direction… Question Tony?”
“Yeah. Two in the morning, on a below freezing night in Chicago, who’d be around to hear these guys yelling ‘This is MAGA country?”
“That’s another nail in Jussie’s coffin. Just before the arranged time, Jussie called a friend who was in Australia where it was day time. The Osundarios jump him as planned, yelling what he’d told them to, and the guy on the other side of the world hears the whole thing.”
“So,” Tony said. “He’s outside his building in freezing weather but didn’t want to wait until he got in where it was warm to call his friend.”
“I guess. Somehow he held onto his sandwich, through the ordeal. At trial Jussie threw the Nigerians under the bus. Or tried to. Said he had a gay relationship with one of them. Which the guy denied.”
“Whut happened?” Sonny asked. “Whut’d the jury decide.”
“The special prosecutor filed six charges.” Tommy said. “Jury took less than a day to find him guilty of five of the six. There’s an entertaining half-hour of the judge lambasting Smollett after the guilty verdict. Called out his arrogant, selfish, narcissism. Then he sentenced Smollett to pay back $125,000 incurred by the Chicago Police Department for the investigation. Plus a $25,000 fine. Plus 3 years probation. Plus 150 days in the Cook County Jail.”
“Awesome!”
“No it ain’t. If he was making $125,000 per episode of his TV show they should have bumped it higher.”
“When does he get out of jail?”
Tommy laughed, “Oh, he only served six days. He’s out on appeal. Don’t hold your breath for him doing time.”
“Damn.”
Epilogue
“That’s about it. As you’d expect, after they lost the case, Jussie’s lawyers tried to play the race card—again. One of them said, “The impetus was second-guessing the prosecutor—a progressive black prosecutor—and to say ‘This old white man can do a better job than you.”
“Well,” Roy said. “Maybe Jussie’s lawyer was simply stating the truth, Tom. Dan Webb did do a better job. Knocked it out of the park, I’d say.”
Tom agreed, “As for Kim Foxx, three years earlier she’d written an opinion piece to the Chicago Tribune titled, ‘I welcome an outside review of how we handled the Jussie Smollett Case.’ Well, that happened, and she didn’t welcome it so much after all. After the trial she claimed ‘The justice system failed.’ and Jussie Smollett faced ‘Kangaroo Prosecution.’”
“Sore loser.”
“Jussie’s family made a statement to the effect the system was the bad guy, Jussie’s innocent. Poor Jussie. His brother was particularly upset the judge shamed Jussie. He said, “We don’t shame people in 2022.”
“I do.” Gene said. “Jussie’s brother can speak for himself. Not that that would matter to Jussie. From what we’ve heard shame slides through Jussie like shit through a goose.”
Tom nodded. “Nothing we can say in that department that hasn’t been said. Still, I’d like to send some shame out to these politicians, and the news, and the race baiters who’ve never apologized to this day. Never said, ‘I was wrong. I’m sorry.’ They don’t admit their complicity any more than Smollett. They spew baloney like, ‘This could prevent real victims from coming forward.’ Which is true, but beside the point. When they say, ‘We’re with you, Jussie’ I think that’s as close to an admission as we’re going to hear. They’re with Jussie at the bottom of the outhouse.”
Tom passed Roy the Rubber Chicken of Destiny.
“Gentlemen,” said Roy in his most somber tone. “The evidence is before us. In addition to making black women fat, killing black people with Covid, causing rich, black students to steal wine and attack bakery employees, Donald J. Trump is responsible for Nigerian musclemen attacking second string actors in the wilds of a Chicago winter’s night. Where, oh where I ask you, will it all end?”
“How ‘bout we end with a vote and go home.”
“Sven calls for a vote.” Roy said. “I second it. All in favor of giving Jussie “I am not a piece of shit” Smollett the WAZ, say Aye.
“AYE!”
“Opposed?”
“Nay!”
That was from Uncle Tim, naturally, who we admire for his consistency and who thinks Jussie should get a buy because he sounds like a head case.
Far as the rest of us, Jussie, the thing we like best about you is that you live thousands of miles away. From a distance then, we present you with a WAZ Top Black Racist Award for 2021. Shame on you.
Following are some piquant quotes from the usual suspects. As far as we know, they’ve never retracted them with apologies:
“What happened today to Jussie Smollett must never be tolerated in this country. We must stand up and demand that we no longer give this hate safe harbor; that homophobia and racism have no place on our streets or in our hearts. We are with you, Jussie.” Joe Biden, 01.29.2019
“It’s outrageous. I know Jussie, he’s one of the kindest, most gentle people I have ever met. It’s awful.” Kamala Harris on the Senate floor 01.29.2019
“The terror of racism and homophobia” in America. [Jussie] will “shine a bright light on the world for decades to come.” Danny Strong, co-creator of Smollett’s TV show ‘Empire’ in a twit 01.29.2019
“The vicious attack on actor Jussie Smollett was an attempted modern day lynching.” NJ Senator Cory Booker urging Congress to pass his anti-lynching bill. [as if lynching is legal some place in America]
“The recent racist and homophobic attack on acclaimed actor and activist is troubling. The rise in hate crimes is directly linked to President Donald J. Trump’s racist and xenophobic rhetoric…” NAACP [who also called the attack on poor Jussie “hate based terrorism.”]
“(Jussie) is a true champion for LGBTQ people.” GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.)
“We want to be clear, this was a racist and homophobic hate crime…called the ‘attack’ ‘domestic terrorism.” Smollett’s family 01.31.2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wa0xDq4_iT0
