Saturday's Final Word

S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y -- tabs ... 

Ed: Absolutely hilarious. Isn't this what late-night comedy is supposed to be about -- comedy? Self-deprecating humor, light topics, happy conversations, and generally just entertainment. If late-night hosts had focused on the basics, the genre wouldn't be in its death throes. I'd bet that Fallon gets his best ratings in a while for this segment. Not everyone approves, however ...

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New York Mag (via Instapundit): After CBS announced it’s canceling The Late Show With Stephen Colbert last month, there was widespread speculation that the decision was politically motivated. The thinking was that CBS fired one of President Donald Trump’s most vocal critics so that his administration would push through Paramount’s (CBS’s parent company) merger with Skydance. (Trump has claimed partial credit, writing on Truth Social that he is not “solely responsible” for CBS’s decision.) Others claimed the move was financial, arguing that late-night TV’s liberal-leaning material is the cause of the genre’s declining ratings. In either case, if the future of late-night television is in any way contingent on kissing the rings of conservatives, the world got a glimpse of what that might look like on August 7’s episode of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. Greg Gutfeld, host of Fox News’s wildly popular late-night show Gutfeld!, was featured on the show as guest, yukking it up with Fallon like the pair were old pals.

To some, Gutfeld! proves the theory that late-night TV would be more successful if it catered more to conservatives. The show, geared toward a MAGA audience, consistently outperforms all its competitors in linear ratings. Despite his success, Gutfeld’s appearance on The Tonight Show is the first time he’s been invited onto any of the big-network late-night shows since his own show debuted in 2021. It’s hard to view this booking as anything other than a ploy on the part of NBC to court his audience.

Ed: Ya think?? Great detective work, Sherlock. The title of this piece is "Jimmy Fallon Kisses the Conservative Ring." He wouldn't have to kiss the conservative ring if he and his genre colleagues hadn't made a point of telling conservative viewers to kiss their ass for the last decade. 

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This Gaza journalist has now given up on documenting events in Gaza because H-mas has made it clear they will kill him if he continues to put out anything that counters their narratives. This is the reality of information coming out of Gaza. https://t.co/WNKcsfG9Mf pic.twitter.com/J7HLwTdVk7

— AG (@AGHamilton29) August 9, 2025

Ed: Hamas can afford to do without his honest services because they have the Protection Racket Media handy to amplify their propaganda instead. Want to keep fighting their dishonest narratives and outright corruption? See below to find out how to join the fight ... and speaking of which ...

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Power Line: The Secret Service doesn’t use canoes for its protective details, it uses motorized water craft–speedboats. Portions of the Little Miami River, at this point in the summer, were deep enough for a canoe or a kayak, but not deep enough to operate a motorboat. So the Secret Service had the Corps of Engineers release some water to temporarily raise the level of the Little Miami in order for its boats to operate safely.

So what, you ask? The liberal press went crazy, beginning with the always-unreliable Guardian ... The New York Times and many other “mainstream” Democratic Party papers joined in.

Ed: J.D. Vance wanted to take his young kids out kayaking. That's it. That's the scandal. The raised water level had nothing to do with that activity, but so that the Secret Service could carry out its protection detail properly. You'd think that two assassination attempts last year on Donald Trump would get the Protection Racket Media to take that mission -- and theirs -- more seriously, but you'd be mistaken. 

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This shows how desperate Libs are to find something on JD Vance. This story is incredibly dumb.

Secret Service said they raised the water level without asking @VP, so they could use motor boats in case of an emergency.

You can Kayak in a couple inches of water morons. https://t.co/HvX54JcddS

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) August 8, 2025

Ed: Despicable. And dependable, in its own way. They are who we think they are. 

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Matt Taibbi: For sheer chutzpah, it’s hard to match Warren Stroebel’s crude hit piece. First, it isn’t news: many of us who wrote on Gabbard’s releases already reported that these documents came out over objections from other agencies. The crucial 46-page House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) report showing how officials like former CIA Director John Brennan cooked the books to argue Russia “aspired” to help Trump was declassified only after current HPSCI chairman Rick Crawford complained about it being “held hostage” at the CIA and “Trump interceded in early July,” as I put it weeks ago. ...

More to the point, the fact that she’s had to fight elements in the intelligence community (and others in government) just to get true material to the public is to Gabbard’s credit, not any kind of demerit. The Post, in a breathtaking spin job, simply took news Gabbard’s office is proud of, and spat it out as a negative.

“I love the Washington Post headline,” said Alexa Henning, Deputy Chief of Staff in Gabbard’s office. “Of course, the deep state is going to try to push back against us. When the CIA and others are leaking to the Post and the New York Times, that means we’re onto something.”

Ed: It means they are over the target. And yet again, the Protection Racket Media tries in vain to run its narrative program rather than do actual reporting. If Watergate had been a Democrat operation, Woodward and Bernstein would have toiled in obscurity the rest of their lives. 

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There can be no peace as long as Hamas remains. Why can no one ever answer the question: why don’t they release the hostages? Never an answer. pic.twitter.com/jeQJELluh6

— Scott Jennings (@ScottJenningsKY) August 9, 2025

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WSJ: Three years ago, the Biden administration came up with what it considered a clever policy to curb Russia’s ability to finance the war on Ukraine. Instead of trying to remove Russian oil from the global market, something that would have shaken economies worldwide, Washington quietly urged countries such as India to keep buying it—as long as Moscow was forced to sell at a steep discount.

Ed: What an idiotic policy. The reason why Trump keeps bragging that the war wouldn't have started if he was president is that he was ramping up oil production to force prices down in his first term. The WSJ analysis here thinks that prices dropped on their own recently and Trump has an advantage out of luck. That's not what happened -- Trump is once again incentivizing future production increases here in the US, and prices are falling because of it. Putin can't make a profit on oil at these levels, at least not enough to keep funding his war. And obviously, he can't profit at all if he can't sell any of it. The Biden Regency Politburo reached historic levels of incompetence, and not just because Biden was senile through most of it.  

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Ed: I'm out on vacation until August 20th, so the Final Word posts will be on hiatus. (Technically, I'm on vacation today, but I had to squeeze in one more!) Keep up with the gang, and hopefully most of the furniture will be intact when I get back...

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