Thursday Evening

Tomorrow is...

Clap Clap Clap

A weird thing about Democrats is the desire to applaud...the minimum basic thing you expect from Democrats. We can argue all the time about what, say, President Obama could best achieve with Senate Majority Leader Mitch, but that's a practical question, not a "wow a Democrat supports ABORTION RIGHTS CLAP CLAP CLAP."

We don't have to applaud for the bare minimum.

Assume Lindsey Dead

Whut

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) plans to hand the chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee back to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa.) in the next Congress.

There's a story but... what is the real story.

What Crime Did I Miss

Busy again today.

Put On A Costume Knock On A Door Get Some Candy Hell Skip The Costume Who Cares

I'm not sure if this is just an internet thing but Halloween isn't really complicated?

Rotisserie Baseball

Baseball is the only sport I regularly half pay attention to, in part because with 8 thousand games per season you don't really have to pay all that much attention. But some people do! They pay a lot of attention! They don't just follow their own local sports franchise. They follow the entirety of baseball! This is amazing.

Amazing but it's something you can conceivably do now. People did it back in the dark ages before they could punch up stats on their phone instantly!

The Kids remember the good old days when the New York Times had a public editor because they remember Margaret Sullivan who was good. I met her once. She didn't like me, though I wasn't sure if she didn't like me or just the dumb bloggers I was representing at an event. But she was good.

Still most of them were bad! The first one was very bad! He was Daniel Okrent and he was dumb and bad and he invented Rotisserie baseball - which we now know as fantasy baseball - back when to invent such a thing you had to be incredibly rich and bored.

Morning Thread

Too Many Songs In 7

Rock on.

The Fall Is Coming Down

An amusing thing this year in the urban hellhole is that the little old Cambodian ladies discovered the weekly Mennonite farm stand and a massive number of them show up at once. Gotta fight for my Hakurei turnips.

Satanic Panic

These people are bonkers.

Lunch Thread

Busy with exciting freedom bureaucracy

If The President Does It

That's all they're going to be left with. Well, it's really "If A [Republican] President Does It." The belief that Republicans can do what they want and Democratic power only exists if Republicans benevolently let it happen is wired deeply not just within conservatives but within much of the media establishment and it has been that way since Gingrich.

It doesn't matter how many Lindsey Graham "RUUYYYUUUL OF LLAAAAWWWYAAAAW" quotes you pull up from the 90s. They don't care.

Morning Thready Goodness

Fair Point

I doubt members of the House Incel Committee can read 8 pages in 2 days.

Afternoon Thread

Enjoy

Writing About Trump

The thing is I think most people know this now.

This isn’t analysis because there is nothing to Trump, or to his politics—no room for subtext, no broader strategy beyond whatever seat-of-the-pants pandering is most immediately apparent, nothing but the wheedling and undignified and insatiable vanity that is always right there to see. This presents a problem for people whose job it is to write or talk about politics. That job, as the elite media has come to understand and pursue it, is to decode and translate The Great Game’s secret significances, contextualize the triumphs and tribulations of its heroes, and parse its finer points of strategy. Given that Trump is always doing exactly what he appears to be doing, and for precisely the reasons you’d expect, the people in these powerful jobs have naturally found themselves glossing and restating what is already quite obvious, or straining to situate things that are obvious and stupid and embarrassing within a context—a system of essential norms and traditions, governed by civility and reasoned discourse—that plainly no longer exists. They respect the office of the presidency so much that they insist on treating it with a reverence that Donald Trump, as its occupant, plainly cannot merit.

Which is my way of saying everyone who pretends not to know this is just writing presidential fantasy fan fiction, if not about the man himself then The Office Of The Presidency or The White House or the whoever the latest hire is who is supposed to save him from himself, and the Republic from them all. Less politely, they are all completely full of shit.

There was a time when maybe it wasn't completely nuts to imagine there was some grand strategy, or that every Trump Tweet was meant as a distraction from The Last Tweet, or that maybe, just maybe, the man had a tiny glimmer of understanding of the job he had. February 2017 was that time. It was a long time ago. He's just a stupid narcissistic old man with brain worms.

Mr. President I IS DISAPPOINT SIRRAH

I think it's dumb, but I at least get the purpose of the faux-naive rhetorical device of feigning disappointment in Trump or Republicans. But I swear lots of people who are paid lots of money to cover politics and explain it to the rest of us really mean it. They're not hiding who they are!

THIS IS A NEW LOW FOR PRESIDENT TRUMP. No, really, did you not read the twitter just yesterday?

Hard Work

Ambition is a weird thing. Donald Trump didn't really expect to win, but Boris Johnson definitely wanted to. He's lazy. Probably he imagines that a lot of the stuff he did, such as appearing on the teevee or showing up to fancy lunches with important people, and occasionally even having to vote, was "work," but it really isn't. With the right personality all that stuff is just fun, really. He was the Mayor of London, which is largely a figurehead job without too many direct powers, and he delegated most of that (which is fine!). But Prime Minister actually has to... work. No amount of shirking and delegating can really get around that. Having been around government all his life, he has to actually know that. Why would he want the job?

It's weird.

No Way They Could Smear A Troop!!!!

Republicans have been using The Troops as props and metaphorical human shields for their careers for decades, and every day pundits wake up pretending to forget.

Great job CNN, good hire here. https://t.co/YieqZ9V3ID

— Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) October 29, 2019

Also John Yoo, highly respected Berkeley Law Professor, of the highly respected UC-Berkeley Law School, was on Laura Ingraham accusing him of espionage. I have never heard that name before, and thus I am shocked that an elite law professor could be bad!

Morning Thread

The Halifax Examiner has one of own recounting her experiences as An American Flying Air Canada. Whatever could go wrong, did. Head over and have a chuckle. We've all been there and now that we're comfortably at home, we can laugh about it.