Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

I wonder if trump will be tried as an adult.

It’s time for the GOP to dust off that post-2012 autopsy, completely ignore it, and light the party on fire again.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

Roe isn’t about choice, it’s about freedom.

Fuck the extremist election deniers. What’s money for if not for keeping them out of office?

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

After roe, women are no longer free.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

Hot air and ill-informed banter

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

I was promised a recession.

You are here: Home / Past Elections / Election 2016 / I’ll try to love again but I know

I’ll try to love again but I know

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What I like best about politics is the abject idiocy of commentators. I think modern civilization is so smug, so proud of its liberal democracies and its scientific method. People think we’re smarter and better than our illiterate cave people ancestors, but we’re not, and the best proof of this is the writing of Peggy Noonan. Will this column the day before the 2012 election ever be surpassed?

Who knows what to make of the weighting of the polls and the assumptions as to who will vote? Who knows the depth and breadth of each party’s turnout efforts? Among the wisest words spoken this cycle were by John Dickerson of CBS News and Slate, who said, in a conversation the night before the last presidential debate, that he thought maybe the American people were quietly cooking something up, something we don’t know about.

I think they are and I think it’s this: a Romney win.

[…]

All the vibrations are right…

[…]

One of the Romney campaign’s surrogates, who appeared at a rally with him the other night, spoke of the intensity and joy of the crowd “I worked the rope line, people wouldn’t let go of my hand.” It startled him.

[…]

But he (Obama) is still trying to fire up the base when he ought to be wooing the center and speaking their calm centrist talk. His crowds haven’t been big.

Will we ever see political punditry this bad again, now that we live in a Sam Wang/Nate Silver world? You can talk about H. A. Goodman but he writes for HuffPost so that’s like talking about Herschel Walker’s USFL records. Peggy Noonan is famous and has been talked up for a Pulitzer. You might say that in terms of pure volume, Megan McArdle produces more words of stupidity than Noonan, but she’s working in a medium that allows longer articles. It’s like comparing Sadaharu Oh to Babe Ruth.

Is there anyone out there who’s going to challenge Noona’s record? I can see Frank Bruni making a run at it, but he seems like the clean-and-sober type. Theres no way that Noonan could have done what she did without performance-enhancers like vodka.

Reader Interactions

251Comments

  1. 1.

    Grumpy Code Monkey

    Will we ever see political punditry this bad again, now that we live in a Sam Wang/Nate Silver world?

    Nate seems to be giving it a go this time around.

  2. 2.

    aimai

    Still, I salute her vapid, dreamlike, drugged style. Its inimitable. Things don’t happen in Noonan world, they kind of percolate, bubble, foam, mist and then evanesce.

  5. 5.

    randy khan

    We’ll never see her likes again.

    (And no, Silver isn’t remotely in the same league – among other things, you can be sure that he would greatly prefer to think the election was completely in the bag, as there’s no way he’d ever support Trump.)

  7. 7.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    Peggy Noonan is famous and has been talked up for a Pulitzer.

    If this happens, it is the duty of every liberal and/or smart blogger and blog reader to join twitter, if only to pin, I believe is the term, the text of her Magick Dolphins column and leave it their for a year

    I put twenty internet quatloos on Richard Cohen’s column, should be posted Thursday?, calling on Clinton to appoint Jim Comey AG as a gesture bipartisan healing and admission of shame over the great email fiasco. Or will Fournier write that one?

  10. 10.

    Facebones

    @Grumpy Code Monkey: Nate’s been writing some awful articles and he’s gotten real thin skinned on twitter, but the Great Aggregator Wars of 2016 really come down to: Is a Clinton victory a 65% probability or a 95% probability? In either case, she’s a clearly dominant favorite.

  11. 11.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @aimai: I always say Noonan’s prose is like cotton candy: Pinkish-purple, lighter than air, sticky sweet, and really bad for whoever consumes it.

    ETA: @Villago Delenda Est: Remember her column about her “friend” Cesar, who works as the deli counter at her grocery store and assured her was voting for Rubio, Cruz or Bush, and hated HRC? I wish she had been on TV and someone asked her what her “friend” Cesar’s last name was. But no one would.

  13. 13.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @dmsilev: He’s in a position where he must play the Villager game to make a living. He’s damned forever for that. Had he stuck to just putting out the numbers, and not mindlessly engaging in punditry, he’d have a shot at salvation.

  14. 14.

    Turgidson

    @aimai:

    This is true. I enjoy a good point-and-laugh at Noonan’s expense as much as anyone, but I will grant that she has a writing style that is unique and, if possessed by someone who wasn’t such an insufferable Republican ditz, might be effective.

    But we’re talking here about someone who thinks lawn signs can vote.

  15. 15.

    BGinCHI

    Somewhere in the universe, a powerful alliance of aliens have been weighing the merits of whether human beings should be allowed to survive.

    I fear the last few decades, culminating in the last year, are going to bring us a nice, shiny death ray.

  16. 16.

    peach flavored shampoo

    More like Peggy “drunk by” Noonan. Or is that Carafe McArdle? I cant keep by X chromosome-enhanced tosspots straight.

    And nice (deserved) slam on Nate Silver. More like Nate Bronze this cycle, amirite?

  17. 17.

    Gindy51

    Isn’t she the one who went to Colorado, ate a shit pot full of dope candy and freaked out? Or was that Dowd… I get the two mixed up.

  20. 20.

    dmsilev

    Email from the Clinton campaign: “this is the very last time I’ll write to ask you to support this campaign — can you believe it?!”

    Promise?

  21. 21.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    for old times’ sake, best I can find since the original is behind the WSJ pay wall

    Mr. Reagan would not have dismissed the story of the dolphins as Christian kitsch, but seen it as possible evidence of the reasonable assumption that God’s creatures had been commanded to protect one of God’s children. And most important, the idea that he would fear Mr. Castro, that he would be afraid of a tired old tyrant in faded fatigues, would actually have made him laugh. Mr. Reagan would fear only what kind of country we would be if we took the little boy and threw him over the side, into the rough sea of history.
    He would have made a statement laying out the facts and ended it, “The boy stays, the dream endures, the American story continues. And if Mr. Castro doesn’t like it, well, I’m afraid that’s really too bad.”
    But then he was a man.

  24. 24.

    call_me_ishmael

    MoDo doesn’t have the dreamy, fugue-like style of Nooners but when it comes to spittle-flecked ranting about Shrillary she has no peer. Maybe the Barry Bonds to Noonan’s Babe Ruth. Scratch that, she’s more like Ty Cobb.

  27. 27.

    GregB

    Whenever I heat talk of the significance of political signage I think of breathless Peggy Noonan’s predictions for 2012.

    Also in NH, if signs voted Ron Paul would have won in 2008.

  29. 29.

    Face

    TPM’s “election scorecard” thing is only getting worse. Now they have Michigan (!!!) as a “toss up”. I hope Josh pulls the plug on this after this election cycle b/c it defies all reality to think MI is going anywhere but for the Dems.

    Clearly their mathematical modeling/averaging/aggregating/whatever is not accurate; not even close.

    ETA: Holy Jesus….now it has PA (!!!!!!!!) as a toss-up. Wow. Just wow.

  31. 31.

    Turgidson

    @dmsilev:

    Yeah, the “Will Trump Appeal to College-Educated White DudeBros Who Listen to Spotify?” chats they post at 538 are surprisingly atrocious, when you remember that Nate said he started 538 to be a counterweight to the kind of savvy-yet-totally-clueless blather that passes as political punditry in this country.

    We’ll see about the models, I guess. I mean, they’re all predicting a HRC win, only with varying confidence. I thought Nate looked like a pompous jerk in 2014 when he singled out Sam Wang for being wrong…then, it turned out, Wang was indeed much wronger than the rest (though in fairness, they were all pretty wrong. No one predicted the GOP wave would be as big as it was). So we’ll see. Maybe I’m just pollyannaish, but I think the non-polling data (like early vote reports) points to HRC’s strength being underestimated, if anyone’s is. In which case she’ll win with Obama-esque margins. I certainly hope so.

  33. 33.

    Brachiator

    Will we ever see political punditry this bad again, now that we live in a Sam Wang/Nate Silver world?

    Oh, hell yes!

    We still have David Brooks. And Little Freddie DeBoer is one of the upper and comingest of the up and coming future idiot pundits of America.

    @Turgidson:

    This is true. I enjoy a good point-and-laugh at Noonan’s expense as much as anyone, but I will grant that she has a writing style that is unique and, if possessed by someone who wasn’t such an insufferable Republican ditz, might be effective.

    I don’t know. She reminds me of a caricature out of a lost political Tennessee Williams play.

    “I have always depended on the kindness of pundits.”

  34. 34.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    Peggy’s wikiquote page is a rich field

    I do not know what the Democratic Party spent, in toto, on the 2004 election, but what they seem to have gotten for it is Barack Obama. Let us savor.

    Because she jumbles up so many cultural categories, because she is a feminist not in the Yale Gender Studies sense but the How Do I Reload This Thang way, because she is a woman who in style, history, moxie and femininity is exactly like a normal American feminist and not an Abstract Theory feminist; because she wears makeup and heels and eats mooseburgers and is Alaska Tough, as Time magazine put it; because she is conservative, and pro-2nd Amendment and pro-life; and because conservatives can smell this sort of thing — who is really one of them and who is not — and will fight to the death for one of their beleaguered own; because of all of this she is a real and present danger to the American left, and to the Obama candidacy.
    this “thang”

    “fight to the death”, or you know, quit halfway through

  35. 35.

    hovercraft

    Dame Peggy is always wrong, her vodka/gin infused view of who America is, has no relation to the view the rest of us have.
    I haven’t looked recently, but this doesn’t strike me as a view that would fit in with her vision.
    Trump Goes Fully Negative On Election Eve: ‘The World Hates Us’
    In one of a handful of final campaign rallies before Election Day, Donald Trump painted a grim picture of the state of America, saying “the world hates us,” and promising his administration would catalyze a radical transformation of the country.

  36. 36.

    Bobby D

    @Gindy51: That was Dowd, who tops my personal “most odious pundit” list, just edging out McArglebargle, Douchehat, Yglesias (seriously, how does this kid have a job?), Jen Rubin, and George “The OG Liar in a Bowtie” Will.

  37. 37.

    Turgidson

    @BGinCHI:

    At the NYT, let’s start with David f’ing Brooks, Ross DoucheHat, and Tom “What I Learned From My Cab Driver” Friedman, and see how much money that frees up.

  38. 38.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @David ?▶️?Blue Wall?▶️? Koch: I don’t watch Tweety regularly any more, but I can’t remember the last time I heard anybody quote her, except for the dishonest pot column. Maher fawns over her too, I thought that her lying about pot might piss him off, but he just did a cutesy little riff on how she should’ve called on her famous pothead friend.

  40. 40.

    Dave C

    Was Peggy Noonan also responsible (no pun intended) for the infamous, “It would be irresponsible not [to speculate]”? That is still one of the stupidest things I’ve ever read.

  41. 41.

    trollhattan

    @dmsilev:
    The Sad! thing for us is MoDo becomes more, not less prominent because her mean girl chops can soon be unleashed on the president for four-to-eight years. Ugh.

  42. 42.

    cokane

    definitely one of my favorite bits of politics as well Doug. Empirically answerable questions are taken up by pundits who are too lazy to even try some basic arithmetic.

  45. 45.

    trollhattan

    @Dave C:
    I get konfoozed on my memes and thought it was McGargle. Nooners is definitely the source for “Let us savor.” Which I’m ready to.

  46. 46.

    NotMax

    Kristol probably has more wrongs and words committed to print than Noonan.

    Erick bin Erick is poised to give her a run for the money as the years pass.

  47. 47.

    different-church-lady

    The only inaccurate thing about “Idiocracy” was that Judge was off by about 480 years.

  49. 49.

    Capri

    For sheer idiocy and complete lack of basic understanding of anything, Mark Halpern is second to no man or woman. Even though his statement saying that calling out a Mexican judge can’t be racist because Mexico is a country, not a race gets most attention, I’m not sure he can ever top his “insider, you-heard-it-here-first” opinion that Hilary was going to pick a moderate republican as a running mate.

  51. 51.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @David ?▶️?Blue Wall?▶️? Koch: Sadly, on the other hand, the totebag liberals love to read and email Bobo

    I think it was Ezra Klein who said he was heading to a SEnator’s office for an interview and on the elevator with two Dem Senators, one asked the other, in a Concerned tone, “did you read Friedman today?” I’d be willing to bet most of them, and I mean Dems, don’t read Krugman, and if they do, they don’t get it. They’d rather wallow in the Understanding of the Moustaches

  52. 52.

    dmsilev

    @Capri: Let us never forget that Mark Halperin gave us the immortal “actually, this is excellent news for John McCain”.

  53. 53.

    Lee

    @Facebones:

    There is another website I frequent (fark) that has some pretty good insight on Nate this election. This is really the first time he is driven by clicks to his website (other times he was under a more substantial parent). So of course it behooves him to keep the ‘horse race’ going as long as he can so that people visit his site more frequently. The other thing they mention is that he got really burned by Donald winning the nomination (the data supported it but he couldn’t believe it) and he really doesn’t want to get burned like that again.

  55. 55.

    Hal

    Not one, but two separate posts on Facebook by friends of mine to either pray for our country and make the right choice (Trump) or to make the right choice and not pick the morally corrupt candidate (hint: rimes with Linton).

    That these two people think the moral choice is Trump is mind boggling, but laughable at the same time.

  56. 56.

    aimai

    @Dave C: I think it was peggy who said “just walk on by” about torture. Her signature move is to avert her eyes from the ugliness that is her own party, and to demand, in a passive tone, that every right thinking person do so with her.

  57. 57.

    Brachiator

    @hovercraft:

    In one of a handful of final campaign rallies before Election Day, Donald Trump painted a grim picture of the state of America, saying “the world hates us,” and promising his administration would catalyze a radical transformation of the country.

    I have this picture of an editorial cartoon. Trump has made the world drop to its knees in front of him. All around him is rubble and destruction.

    But Trump’s happy because he has made America great again.

  58. 58.

    hovercraft

    Here is a good commentary about the election.

    Donald Trump Cannot Be President of the United States
    By Jesse Berney, Rolling Stone

    America has flaws as deep as its founding, when the men who laid down basic principles of human rights – principles that have endured 240 years – were fed and clothed by human beings they owned. That paradox still defines the fault lines of our nation, and it’s along those lines we are drawing the ugliest election in modern history.
    It isn’t just economic anxiety or trade deals or the opioid epidemic driving the mostly white, mostly male movement behind Trump’s campaign. It is the existential fear of displacement from a world that has slowly – too slowly, for too long – been chipping away at white male supremacy.
    The “grab ’em by the pussy” moment was disastrous for Trump’s campaign; it reinforced the defining narrative of his sexism. But it drew his strongest supporters even closer to him, because it reminded them of the world they’re losing. They want to live in an America where they can grab women by the pussy and brag about it to their friends. They want to casually use the n-word – just for the bad ones; they’re not racist! – without being set upon by the PC police. They want what’s coming to them, what’s owed them.
    And they are willing to burn down the world to get it.
    Donald Trump is the worst major-party candidate for president in American history. This is not a close call. By virtually any measure, he is unfit to lead a Cub Scout troop, let alone the nation with the world’s most powerful military.
    It’s worth going back and reading the transcripts of his debates with Hillary Clinton just to remember how he speaks when he’s answering questions off the cuff. It’s breathtaking how incapable he is of forming a single coherent thought. The expectations for him were so low that there was little to no coverage of his failure over four-and-a-half hours to say anything intelligent about any issue important to the American people. He meanders, he interrupts, and he whines. He is uninformed and unprepared.
    Trump’s values are, in a word, deplorable. He launched his campaign calling Mexican immigrants rapists, issued a call for a ban on immigration by Muslims, and said women should be punished for getting an abortion. He lies, constantly, about everything. He stokes anger and fear and even violence among his supporters. He nurtures their very worst instincts.
    He brags he has the best temperament, but that’s nonsense. He’s lashed out and punched down, attacking the parents of a dead soldier, a former beauty pageant winner who gained weight, countless reporters and anyone he perceives as insulting him.
    It is impossible to predict exactly how deep a disaster Donald Trump’s presidency would be, but there’s no limit to the potential for horror. Think how much we still don’t know about Trump – how he hasn’t released his taxes, how many women there likely are who haven’t come forward – and you can imagine the scandals and corruption that lie in wait. Consider how thin his policy knowledge is and how impulsively he reacts to insults, and imagine his twitchy little fingers on the nuclear button.
    Donald Trump cannot be president of the United States.
    And while Trump has a considerable movement of supporters who see him as a great conquering hero, who believe every word of his lies, no matter how outlandish and easily disproven, there are many people, even at this late hour, who are torn about whether they can support him. Maybe they’re deeply conservative Republicans who despise what they believe Clinton would do to the country. Maybe they’re independents who see constant stories about her emails and have genuine fears about her judgment.
    But now is the moment for every last American to decide what it truly means to be a citizen. You can be reluctant about Hillary Clinton. You don’t even have to vote for her (though I did, without doubt or hesitation).
    What you cannot do is vote for Donald Trump and pretend that this is just another election, and he is just another candidate. It is your minimum duty as a citizen not to support a racist, sexist, unqualified, dishonest, corrupt manchild who celebrates everything that’s ugly about America and not a single thing that’s great about it.
    No matter how left out or left behind you feel, voting for Trump is nothing short of a moral failure. It’s a vicious act against the human beings, mostly women and people of color, who would suffer miserably under his presidency.
    It’s an act of violence against America itself, whose greatness has always been about progressing from more oppression to less – slowly, sometimes haltingly, but forward.
    The promise on those red hats is to turn back in the other direction. The greatness they sell is a lie.

  59. 59.

    hueyplong

    Does anyone on planet Earth think that a Trump America would be LESS hated around the world?

    If he were anyone else, medical health professionals would be applying their craft to him as we speak.

  60. 60.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @hovercraft:

    Daniel W. Drezner Retweeted Jeremy Diamond
    1) The world doesn’t hate us. Unless Trump wins tomorrow;
    2) A few more Marine battalions will take care of this how?,
    Jeremy Diamond @ JDiamond1
    Trump: “The world hates us. The world hates us. So we’re going to increase Marine battalions…”

  62. 62.

    clay

    @Capri: To give Halpern some (I think) deserved credit, of all the daytime pundits on MSNBC, he was the only one who seemed absolutely appalled by the original Comey letter.

    The others only wanted to focus on how the letter might influence voters, but Halpern was pointing out that this was an unprecedented and damaging move by the FBI.

  63. 63.

    japa21

    I will be leaving in a little bit to do the initial set-up of the polls at the precinct I was assigned to. Then back again at 5 AM to finish the set up. Then work until polls close at 7 PM. Then handle the breakdown of the equipment and getting everything to the collection center, so will be home around 8:30 PM. Having wife text me with state by state calls. Am hoping that by the time I get home, the only question will be size of victory so I can go to bed.

  64. 64.

    Chris T.

    @aimai:

    Things don’t happen in Noonan world, they kind of percolate, bubble, foam, mist and then evanesce.

    Much like carbonated ethanol….

    (Mimosas for everyone!)

  65. 65.

    bystander

    Can anyone guess what magnitude on the Insufferable Scale Noonan would hit if she ever did win a Pulitzer?

  66. 66.

    Ruckus

    Which one is worse? Isn’t that like trying to rate your second lobotomy to see if it was better than the… what?
    What’s the point, they are all horrible. As I sit here, the day before the second major historic election in 8 yrs of this countries entire life, contemplating the horribleness of horrible commentators is low on my list of things to do (or not!) today. Like last on the list low.

  67. 67.

    Brachiator

    @Lee:

    This is really the first time he is driven by clicks to his website (other times he was under a more substantial parent). So of course it behooves him to keep the ‘horse race’ going as long as he can so that people visit his site more frequently.

    This is irrelevant to whether his analyses are sound or BS.

    The other thing they mention is that he got really burned by Donald winning the nomination (the data supported it but he couldn’t believe it) and he really doesn’t want to get burned like that again.

    Silver got burned because there was no data to rely on and he was trying to play pundit.

  68. 68.

    Turgidson

    @dmsilev:

    I came to the conclusion earlier in this election cycle that Mark Halperin is actually Bryan Cranston in disguise. I’m not sure if the real Mark Halperin met an untimely demise or if perhaps there never was a real Mark Halperin and Cranston just took over the role from someone else once Breaking Bad wrapped up. But that’s my current theory.

    At some point in this election cycle, Halperin crossed over from his historic brand of “smug contrarianism that everyone on the planet except him realizes is laughably stupid” to “no, really, does this guy have severe head trauma? I’m worried for him.” I’m wondering if Trump injected him with some sort of mind control device when they took that helicopter ride together.

  69. 69.

    Enhanced Voting Techinques

    @Grumpy Code Monkey: eh, show me were Silver takes out the old magic wand, shall we say, and sticks deep into the subject like this jewel of Noonan’s

    All the vibrations are right…

    There is a difference between admitting to one’s anxieties and posting political slash fiction.

  72. 72.

    Shell

    Well, saw Dick Morris over at NewsMax. (Guess even Fox won’t have him on anymore.) He has a book, supposedly about how Trump can beat Clinton. Great timing, having him one day before the election.

  75. 75.

    JMG

    I think Silver is just going by his model, but I also think his model was created to reflect less certainty about outcomes and to kind of drag the frontrunner down closer to the trailer. This may or may not be correct. I mean, he may have looked at this 2012 forecast and said, “it shouldn’t have been that certain.” He strikes me as a straight shooter, but naturally he dislikes his competition in this field will probably be obsolete by 2020 anyway.
    PS: Just did phone banking for Arizona. Most were no answers, but out of 25 calls, I got six, “yeah, we’re voting for Clinton tomorrow.” Not a bad haul.

  76. 76.

    David ?▶️?Blue Wall?▶️? Koch

    Donald Trump surrogate Scottie Nell Hughes has done some memorable interviews during the presidential campaign, but a gaffe on CNN Sunday night may have been the topper.

    While defending a Trump attack on Hillary Clinton supporters Jay Z and Beyoncé, she referred to Jay Z and Kanye West’s 2012 video for “No Church in the Wild,” which featured a Molotov cocktail.

    Only Hughes didn’t say “Molotov cocktail.” She said “mazel tov cocktail.”

    Oy vey.

  77. 77.

    aimai

    I will be in classes from 2 tomorrow afternoon until 9:00 pm, I’m hugely bummed but I can’t take time off to go to NH to do GOTV. I already voted but my whole precinct is true blue and mostly votes without help. But I just want to be home in the early evening watching the returns–oh no, maybe I don’t–maybe its ok to get home at 9:30? Will it all be over by then?

  79. 79.

    Turgidson

    @Shell:

    Fox learned the hard way in 2012 that elections are one of the few events that can’t be distorted, obfuscated, or lied about in order to conform the actual facts to the preconceptions of the epistemically closed bubble they create for their viewership. (What a) Dick Morris made them look pretty stupid when he confidently predicted a landslide for Willard Mitt “Mittens” Romney.

  80. 80.

    Barbara

    @Bobby D: I agree that Dowd is most odious, but it’s not easy to pin down why. Maybe it’s because everything is supposed to be a joke except that her jokes aren’t funny. Maybe it’s because the level of disrespect she shows to the president is so obviously racially tinged. Maybe it’s because Brooks and Noonan for all their badness do come down on a side, whereas Dowd is always trying to avoid pinning herself down (though I suspect that she more or less reliably votes Democrat). And in a moment of excessive ancillary Godwinism, my thought was, she is the Leni Riefenstahl of op-ed columnists. That’s why she won’t tell us where she stands at the end of the day. She never wants to give anyone with power an excuse not to invite her into their confidence.

  81. 81.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    I hope I’m not triggering the new round of flame wars, but this cracked me up

    Owen Ellickson ‏@ onlxn 25m25 minutes ago
    SARANDON: Monsanto.
    HILLARY: What about it?
    SARANDON: MONSANTO.
    HILLARY: I need more than the word, hon. Work harder on this one

  82. 82.

    TS

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist:

    for old times’ sake, best I can find since the original is behind the WSJ pay wall

    Just google the headline of the story & click the link – works for many sites & definitely for the WSJ

  83. 83.

    Steeplejack

    @Doug!

    Is there anyone out there who’s going to challenge Noonan’s record?

    As Douthat curdles into middle age and beyond, increasingly out of step with a changing society, I could see him really exploring the edges of the pundit space.

  84. 84.

    hovercraft

    Rolling Stone has an excellent column urging voters not to vote for Trump.
    Jesse Berney

    ……..It’s worth going back and reading the transcripts of his debates with Hillary Clinton just to remember how he speaks when he’s answering questions off the cuff. It’s breathtaking how incapable he is of forming a single coherent thought. The expectations for him were so low that there was little to no coverage of his failure over four-and-a-half hours to say anything intelligent about any issue important to the American people. He meanders, he interrupts, and he whines. He is uninformed and unprepared…….

    …….What you cannot do is vote for Donald Trump and pretend that this is just another election, and he is just another candidate. It is your minimum duty as a citizen not to support a racist, sexist, unqualified, dishonest, corrupt manchild who celebrates everything that’s ugly about America and not a single thing that’s great about it.
    No matter how left out or left behind you feel, voting for Trump is nothing short of a moral failure. It’s a vicious act against the human beings, mostly women and people of color, who would suffer miserably under his presidency.
    It’s an act of violence against America itself, whose greatness has always been about progressing from more oppression to less – slowly, sometimes haltingly, but forward…….

    Go read the whole thing.

  85. 85.

    Major Major Major Major

    @JMG:

    this field will probably be obsolete by 2020 anyway

    Can we dispel once and for all with this fiction that a computer’s ability to predict the future will any time soon be fully computerized? You still need somebody to, you know, train it. It’s actually very hard.

  86. 86.

    Brachiator

    @aimai:

    Will it all be over by then?

    Some pundits are predicting a long night. But I think that seconds after the polls close in California at 8 pm, there will be an announcement. And then the only question will be what time Trump delivers his concession speech.

  88. 88.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Barbara: One of the old school SNL writers, a Republican IIRC, said the trouble with Obama for comics is you can’t really get a hook in him. There’s almost nothing to mock, beyond ‘uh’ and “let me be clear’. I think MoDo’s inability to get a hook into him drove her crazy, somehow broke her. FTR, I thought she had hooks into Bubba and Dumbya..
    In ’08, when she was trying out her “Obambi and the Dominatrix” schtick, I wrote her an email suggesting a sabbatical. Resent it a few times. She never answered. I was hurt.

    ETA: @TS: Thanks

  89. 89.

    Gin & Tonic

    I hope that someone explains to Trump that the reason the DJIA was +371 today is because Wall Street is now confident of a Clinton victory. I hope it pricks a big hole in that obese ego of his.

  92. 92.

    patroclus

    Noonan’s time was back when Reagan was President, but it’s been more than a quarter of a century since then and Republicans can’t even get elected statewide in California anymore and the Democrats, after tomorrow, will have won 6 out of the last 7 national elections by similar margins. She clearly doesn’t understand the current electorate and doesn’t appear to even have tried to understand it. The Cold War ended; women and minorities dominate the voting public now and there are 21st century issues that need to be addressed. America has changed; Noonan never did.

    Poblano is still okay in my book, but his model needs tweaking. It overweights uncertainty and discounts those who actually lead in polls. And the polls are under-estimating substantial parts of the Obama/Hillary coalition. He IS forecasting a Clinton election despite his model’s flaws, so whatever his punditry, he won’t be too far off.

  93. 93.

    Kyle

    Yes, Noonan and her ilk are awful and dumb, but it’s their encouragement that enables the deplorables to believe they have a chance, and that enabled the best Tumblr ever: White People Mourning Romney. That thing had me in stitches for days after the election, and I’m looking forward to the 2016 version. http://whitepeoplemourningromney.tumblr.com/

  95. 95.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Brachiator:

    This is irrelevant to whether his analyses are sound or BS.

    Au contraire, mon frere.

    It’s relevant because everything in the US media is driven by sales/ratings/clicks. Whether or not it is actually factual is a distant second to the need for revenue. That need colors every bit of information put out there by corporate owned/controlled media.

  97. 97.

    Barbara

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: Did you see Michelle’s send up of him with Steven Colbert? Obviously, it was loving, but it was also funny. No, Maureen’s problem is that she doesn’t just want to be funny, she wants to be mean.

  98. 98.

    patroclus

    @Brachiator: Agreed. The polls closing in California and the West Coast at 8 00 p.m. Pacific time should be, like it was for Obama, the decisive moment.

  100. 100.

    Fair Economist

    @patroclus:

    The polls closing in California and the West Coast at 8 00 p.m. Pacific time should be, like it was for Obama, the decisive moment.

    That’s probably when they’ll call it, but we all know how the Left Coast will vote. The decisive moment will be calling a substantive tossup state for Clinton – Florida or NC. Most likely FL, based on the early vote.

  102. 102.

    Brachiator

    In catching up on some of the last election confessionals, I admired that the guy from The Young Turks made his case for Hillary, and called on third party hold outs to have their come to Jesus moment and vote for the Democrat.

    I thought that Bill Maher did a great job not only denouncing Trump, but also laying out the reasons why people should vote for Hillary. And he seemed somewhat in awe of the president during his interview of Obama.

    On the other hand, conservative guest David Frum still seemed stunned at Trump’s winning the Republican nomination, and had no clue as to how the GOP could climb out of the ditch into which The Donald has driven the Republican klown Kar. Frum kept babbling nonsense about respecting the institutions of government. And he just could not answer or even come to terms with a critical question: why have so many GOP leaders who claim to be appalled by Trump fallen in line so placidly? Is it fear of the Republican base? A craven attempt to retain some power?

  104. 104.

    trollhattan

    @Dave C:
    Good to be corrected on that one–it’s clear our lady of the magic dolphins has achieved a great legacy, possibly great enough to stop already.

  105. 105.

    Steeplejack

    @Dave C:

    To read the full article one has to do the Google end run around the WSJ paywall. Go to Google and search for this text:

    site:wsj.com noonan "why did they do it"

    The article will come up as one of the top hits, and when people click on it they will get the full article (which they won’t from your link above).

    ETA: Just checked, and you can also do a Google search for the text of the URL that you supplied. Put it in the Google search field—​not the address bar—​and you’ll get the same results, from which you can click the article to read the full version of it.

  107. 107.

    Roger Moore

    @Brachiator:

    Silver got burned because there was no data to rely on and he was trying to play pundit.

    Sure there was data to rely on. There were plenty of polls that consistently showed Trump doing better than any other candidate in the primary, and there was enough information about how the primary process worked that a good analyst should have been able to work through the delegate math. It’s just that Silver decided to ignore that stuff and focus instead on the series of hurdles Trump would have to overcome to win the nomination. IOW, he chose punditry based on his expectations of how things ought to work rather than hard data showing how they actually were working.

  111. 111.

    trollhattan

    @different-church-lady:
    I could easily see him shoving Meliana out to do the dishonors. Uday and Qusay won’t and daughter #1 has a bidnez to attend to. It will be hilarious to see how Pence handles things.

  113. 113.

    Chris

    @BGinCHI:

    Somewhere in the universe, a powerful alliance of aliens have been weighing the merits of whether human beings should be allowed to survive.
    …
    I fear the last few decades, culminating in the last year, are going to bring us a nice, shiny death ray.

    “Oh, humanity isn’t going to die tonight, Cyclops. Just America.”
    – Ultimate Magneto

  114. 114.

    LurkerExtraordinaire

    Increase Marine battalions? Pretty sure the Marines are limited to a certain number of personnel….

  115. 115.

    trollhattan

    @Shell:
    Networks have a “gentlemen’s agreement” to not call races until west coast polls close (screw you, Alaska and Hawaii, you half-states) but in the meantime are champing at the bit to be firstest to declare the winner. It’s hilarious, actually. Karl Rove can’t wait.

  118. 118.

    greennotGreen

    @hovercraft: I read it, but I think he’s mistaken about Trump’s supporters. They don’t care that he bullshit his way through the debates because they don’t understand Hillary’s actual well-articulated and reasoned answers, so in their minds, it’s a draw. And they believe that Hillary is a crook, such a crook that she’s been able to evade indictment for decades, that’s how crooked she is. Whereas they probably don’t even know that Trump has been sued many, many times, but if they do, well, he’s a successful businessman, it comes with the territory.

    In other words, they’re irrational. They aren’t going to do what’s best for America because they have no idea what that is.

  119. 119.

    Chris

    @hueyplong:

    Does anyone on planet Earth think that a Trump America would be LESS hated around the world?

    Well, depends by whom. Boris Johnson, Viktor Orban, Vlad the Impaler, and all the attendant constituencies would certainly like it more.

  120. 120.

    Turgidson

    @Brachiator:

    And he just could not answer or even come to terms with a critical question: why have so many GOP leaders who claim to be appalled by Trump fallen in line so placidly? Is it fear of the Republican base? A craven attempt to retain some power?

    All of them, Katie.

    But seriously, strong polarization/partisanship when matched up with a weak, factionalized political party. You’d never know it from the media’s fawning coverage of the Paul “Zombie-Eyed Granny Starver” Ryan, but the GOP base by and large has no use for him or his cruel trickle down bullshit agenda. He does not have his finger on the pulse of anyone in the party other than the Koch brothers and Grover f’ing Norquist. Yet he’s the closest thing to a leader the party has other than the Trumpenfuhrer. That’s how a party ends up with an orange drooling dolt like Trump as their nominee.

    Frum has come further than most right-leaning gasbags in recognizing that resentment and white identity politics has become the only source of energy for that putrid mess of a political party, but he still can’t quite wrap his hands around it all or acknowledge that his nationalist fear mongering speechifying on behalf of GWB had a small part to play in all this. But at least he’s not pulling the “this is Democrats’ fault because they were mean to Romney” or “Trump is bad mostly because he’s a dirty liberal” card that many of his colleagues are playing. Because that shit is just pathetic.

  122. 122.

    Enhanced Voting Techinques

    @hovercraft: This, that’s it; both Right and Left view America as about self improvement – our collective immigrant ancestors may have been the trash of the rest of the world but America gave us that second chance. Trump just sneers at that and says if you aren’t born to the right gender, race and social class, you’re just trash.

  123. 123.

    Barbara

    @Brachiator: I work with someone like this. He is still in shock, and very depressed. They are definitely still in the denial stages of grief, but I think they would progress beyond denial if there were an obvious path forward, but there isn’t.

  125. 125.

    Roger Moore

    @trollhattan:
    I think the actual agreement is not to call any state until the polls close in that state. It’s just that the way elections work out these days, it’s very hard for any candidate to get 270 EVs until those of us on Pacific time have weighed in. The Democrats would need a landslide of the size they haven’t seen since 1964 to get there, and the Republicans would need to do better than they’ve managed since the 1980s.

  127. 127.

    Mary G

    I don’t want to think about this right now. I am hella thrilling to Obama’s speech. Every birther thing that has come out of Rapey Orange Shitgibbon’s mouth over the years is getting paid back tenfold. It’s good to see our president having so much fun. After the eight years of obstruction, bullshit, hatred, and lying, he’s having the last laugh.

  128. 128.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    Watching Chuck Todd’s panel, because I am an addict, where the Democratic party is just as riven as the GOP. They’re all trying to figure out populism and the WWC– no mention of Social Security and Medicare.

    Tom Brokaw looks not long for this Earth.

  129. 129.

    Chris

    @David ?▶️?Blue Wall?▶️? Koch:

    OBama in NH live on CNN
    …
    they crowd is going full cathartic.

    Obama voters, now becoming Clinton voters… The most ignored, under-reported, contemptuously dismissed section of the electorate, despite the fact that it was by far the largest bloc of voters in the primary season.

    Knock on wood, it’s about to prove to the assholes again that they were wrong to dismiss it. And they still won’t understand.

  130. 130.

    Woodrowfan

    any other BJuices working as election officers tomorrow/ I’m precinct chief again. Going to be a loooonnngggggg day

  131. 131.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Chris: as Digby said yesterday, the most diverse coalition in American history is about to elect the first woman president in American history, but all the talk among pundits is, “but what about white men?”

  133. 133.

    hovercraft

    Tom Brokaw wants to know why the GOP didn’t take the Scott Walker approach to MI,WI, and MN, attack the unions which are weaker than they used to be. Take advantage of that weakness to compensate for democratic gains in the south. This was in response to Chucky asking why the GOP hasn’t responded to changing demographics in the south by breaking the mid-west blue wall.

  136. 136.

    Gelfling 545

    It was kids’ vote day at a friend’s elementary school today. 100% Clinton. Not a single Trump ballot.

  137. 137.

    GrandJury

    There is no doubt Hillary is going to win big tomorrow but, even if Dems win the Senate, they are going to get slaughtered in 2018. There are a bunch of vulnerable Dem senators up for re-election and the left doesn’t show up for midterms.

    So if Dems get the Senate they will only have it for 2 years.

  138. 138.

    Brachiator

    @Villago Delenda Est:

    It’s relevant because everything in the US media is driven by sales/ratings/clicks. Whether or not it is actually factual is a distant second to the need for revenue. That need colors every bit of information put out there by corporate owned/controlled media.

    As opposed to where? The Guardian, along with other newspapers and online media properties all around the world, is hemorrhaging money, cutting back, and laying off staff. More and more people are getting their news, such as it is, from FaceBook and Twitter. And even Facebook monetizes news social engagement, while Twitter cannot find a way to stay afloat and may end up unplugged or folded into some other product.

    I watched a video podcast where tech morons kept pitching for some idiotic fan based subscription model a la Patreon and babbling that somehow crowd sourced amateur journalism can magically succeed in a new media market (TWIT, Sunday episode). Meanwhile the New Jersey newspaper which investigated Christie’s bridge scandal and even the Wall Street Journal unit which did followup are laying off veteran reporters.

    Meanwhile, some of the better news commentary comes from profitable corporate entertainment entities, like HBO’s John Oliver program.

    Worse, there is pushback against fact based journalism by the public, which rushes to tribal propaganda sites from which it can cheer its avatars and bash its enemies. But no ads. They don’t want ads and are not willing to pay for content.

    There may have been brief golden ages where even corporate asswipes put good journalism above profit, but if you can’t sell it and no one will buy it, it doesn’t much matter whether you are offering unicorns of truth or click bait nonsense.

  139. 139.

    Chris

    @Brachiator:

    And he just could not answer or even come to terms with a critical question: why have so many GOP leaders who claim to be appalled by Trump fallen in line so placidly? Is it fear of the Republican base? A craven attempt to retain some power?

    Yes and yes – but really, what are they supposed to disagree with him on? Are they supposed to say that Mexican immigration isn’t bringing crime and economic disaster to the nation, that we shouldn’t be profiling Muslims, that Hillary Clinton isn’t the Lady Macbeth of America? They’re Republicans. For all that Trump is saying the quiet parts out loud and being more obsessed with identity politics than his predecessors, you really can’t repudiate him without in the process repudiating decades of evolution in the Republican Party.

    When Barry Goldwater beat Nelson Rockefeller, Rockefeller could denounce him because there really were a ton of fundamental differences between their wings in the GOP. Rockefeller could credibly claim that BG stood in opposition to everything he’d worked for throughout his political career. Nobody who’s still alive, Republican, and active in politics can claim that of Trump.

  141. 141.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @SiubhanDuinne: that made me sad, I always liked her. I hope she got an early ballot in.

    Much as I dislike Tom Friedman– since the topic is dumb pundits– I do remember him saying that in the Elian Gonzales affair, she showed Democrats how to stand up to emotion-driven nonsense

  142. 142.

    Cermet

    You Doug! are no different than Noonan if you really think we aren’t better than past generations – there are vastly fewer wars, deaths from ALL causes, religious strife (terrorism is minor compared to what occurred long ago) and far, far more people aren’t just better educated but vastly better educated. PLEASE – stop the stupid stuff and just accept that many educated people are still racist, willing to believe any falsehood that support’s their beliefs but even the large majority of these people WOULD NEVER resort to real violence or really accept what was typically tolerated just 70 years ago – read lynching!!!

  145. 145.

    Peale

    @hovercraft: I like how they keep talking about populism like its something they could support. Yeah, Trump is all about cutting taxes for people like them….I’m sure they like that kind of populism.

  148. 148.

    Chip Daniels

    Maybe someone already mentioned it, but my favorite Noonanism was the “Let Us Savor” comment about a young newcomer named Barack Obama.

    I swear to God, I want to that to be her epitaph.

  149. 149.

    Schlemazel

    @patroclus:
    What is going to be painful is as results roll in from PA, FL, MI and OH and it becomes more and more obvious that Clinton has already won watching the networks try not to admit the obvious.

  150. 150.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Gindy51:

    Isn’t she the one who went to Colorado, ate a shit pot full of dope candy and freaked out? Or was that Dowd… I get the two mixed up.

    That was actually Dowd, although I can kind of understand why you might conflate the two.

    Our Lady of the Magic Dolphins writes in (as someone else noted above) pure cotton-candy prose. MoDo is equally vapid but there’s always that tinge of last night’s leftover anthrax and tire rims.

  151. 151.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    Tommy Vietor ‏@ TVietor08 3m3 minutes ago
    I heard the Fired Up! Ready to Go! story six times a day for a year of my life and still love it. God bless Edith Childs and her Church hat.

    Jon Favreau ‏@ jonfavs 9m9 minutes ago
    Obama now telling the Fired Up, Ready to Go story for the very last time as president.

    ETA: anyone know what time the OBama-Springsteen rally starts?

  153. 153.

    hovercraft

    @greennotGreen:
    From the piece I quoted:

    It isn’t just economic anxiety or trade deals or the opioid epidemic driving the mostly white, mostly male movement behind Trump’s campaign. It is the existential fear of displacement from a world that has slowly – too slowly, for too long – been chipping away at white male supremacy.
    The “grab ’em by the puzzy” moment was disastrous for Trump’s campaign; it reinforced the defining narrative of his sexism. But it drew his strongest supporters even closer to him, because it reminded them of the world they’re losing. They want to live in an America where they can grab women by the puzzy and brag about it to their friends. They want to casually use the n-word – just for the bad ones; they’re not racist! – without being set upon by the PC police. They want what’s coming to them, what’s owed them.

    That’s the reason reality does not sway them. Click the link

  155. 155.

    Steeplejack

    @cokane:

    I’ve noticed that, but also that he comes up with increasingly odd theories to explain it. He could really run with that.

  158. 158.

    Brachiator

    Ah. Here is a cool bit of news. I was hoping something official might happen.

    Susan B. Anthony’s Grave Will Be Open Late for Election Day Visitors

    The upstate New York cemetery where Susan B. Anthony is buried will stay open hours later than usual tomorrow—on election day, [prayer hands emoji], we’ve so very nearly made it—so you can pay your respects/leave your “I Voted” sticker.

    GOTV

  159. 159.

    Bobby D

    @Barbara: I think for me it’s a combination of endless vapid, nagging bs columns, with no particular intellectual ability backing it. I’ll read someone I disagree with, regularly, if I respect their intelligence and seriousness. Daniel Larison is an example for me. Dowd just strikes me as not particularly bright, not insightful, petty, and insecure. No value added, no honesty, no insight. I want meritocracy in commentary, and we have exactly the opposite.

  162. 162.

    JPL

    @Chris: Cspan stayed for awhile until he left, and showed him in the crowd . One woman sorta leaped in order to hug him. He hugged her back, and I so jealous.

    Fired Up and Ready to Go

  164. 164.

    Anne Laurie

    Doug, I think you seriously underrate Ross Doubthat. Sure, he’s posing as a “logical Christian” right now, but give his vagina-terrified soul a couple years of President Hillary, and it’ll be full-blown Magical Dolphins (and probably Magical Martinis) in Douthat’s columns. He’s already got Noonan’s gooey romanticism about ‘well-preserved’ authoritarian figures — if Trump weren’t such an obvious ugghh Ross would be tongue-bathing him in public. So I’m guessing Paul Ryan, Zombie-Eyed Granny Starver, just needs a few more years of getting banged up by his Freedom Caucus cohorts seasoning before Doubthat goes full fondling-Reagan’s-tiny-vulnerable-feeties fanboi on the Janesville Jupiter.

  165. 165.

    Schlemazel

    @Michael Bersin:
    My oldest has asked us all to not wear our “I Voted” stickers but to give them to him. He has a couple wingnuts at his work & he intends to piss them off as much as possible

  169. 169.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @gogol’s wife: as far as his Sunday Morning VSP ilk go, Friedman is (was?) one of the few who even acknowledges climate change as an issue. I admit I gave up on him years ago.

  172. 172.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @hueyplong:

    Does anyone on planet Earth think that a Trump America would be LESS hated around the world?

    Yes. Most conservatives believe that bullying is the only definition of strength and way to get respect. It is obvious to them, needing no facts for confirmation, that the rest of the world holds Obama in contempt for not swaggering and threatening to wipe out all evil Muslims. It is equally obvious to them that Trump’s ‘Give me all the money or the world gets it’ will be admired (and simultaneously feared) worldwide as courageous leadership.

  173. 173.

    Brachiator

    @Chris:

    They’re Republicans. For all that Trump is saying the quiet parts out loud and being more obsessed with identity politics than his predecessors, you really can’t repudiate him without in the process repudiating decades of evolution in the Republican Party.

    That’s odd. I’ve watched newspapers which endorsed Republican candidates for centuries denounce Trump. I’ve watched Republican grandees denounce Trump.

    In Utah, you can legally push one button and vote straight Republican ticket, and yet Mormons have taken the lead in refusing to go along with Trump (unlike hypocritical evangelicals who think that they define Christianity).

    Former New Hampshire senator Gordon Humphrey, an arch conservative and tea party advocate, is on record as having voted for Hillary

    And yeah, there are Republicans who do not realize what they have done to themselves. And others who are as happy as pigs in slop with Trump. And you have a new, and nasty tilt to the right in Europe and elsewhere. The Republicans who profess not to like Trump, but who voted for him anyway, or who say that Hillary is worse, are beyond hope. And who knows, the GOP may let this opportunity lapse. Hell, Republicans in California seem to enjoy being the ineffectual permanent minority party, and are happy to have a few crumbs tossed their way.

    But the GOP has also seen what happens when you whip your base into a frenzy of resentment, but refuse to satisfy them. Problem is, the fools don’t know how to stop or redirect what they have started. And it will remain a problem for all of us if the GOP cannot get its act together.

  176. 176.

    West of the Rockies (been a while)

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist:

    Oh, HRC should totally appoint Comfy Comey AG to reach across the aisle and support healing. It has worked so well, after all, every time Barack has done so these last eight years.

  177. 177.

    Ruckus

    @Cermet:
    I sort of have to disagree with you. Yes there is a large percentage of people who don’t get in bar fights over nothing, yes we have more equality, even if not nearly enough yet, but to say/imply that everything is better is well a bit candy coated. Humans do bad things, not all of them but enough of them. This will never change completely in a free society because to be free we have to allow people to do things and then punish them for doing the bad things. And we certainly don’t punish people equally or even wait to find out if they are guilty. That’s not an improvement at all and I don’t see that changing a whole lot anytime soon, although I’d like to be wrong about that. We are better but we aren’t there yet. And there is an awfully loose term in this case. Look who more than 1/3 of our country is going to vote for. That’s the exact opposite of a healthy country or race of beings.

  181. 181.

    Ruckus

    @Bobby D:
    People listened to WF Buckley because he sounded intellectual. But he was really no different than the current crop of right wingers. Other than speaking in a pompous, intellectual manner, his bullshit was still bullshit.

  182. 182.

    different-church-lady

    @Roger Moore: I remember pretty well on election night 2008 one of the anchors (can’t remember which one) made a sort of point in saying, “The polls on the West Coast will be closed 10 seconds from now.” And then he gave a very deliberate pause, and then said, “It is now 8 PM on the West Coast, the polls there have just closed, and ABC is projecting that Barack Obama has been elected…” He was all but saying, “We’ve known this for hours, but we had to wait for this very second before we were allowed to actually announce it.”

  186. 186.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Bobby D: there were rumors a couple years back is that MoDo wants to be reassigned to a TV/pop culture beat. I can’t imagine why that doesn’t happen.

    @hovercraft: Grazie

  187. 187.

    Steeplejack

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist:

    I know it’s not everybody’s cup of tea, but I have really enjoyed Ellickson’s tweet-saga. He doesn’t hit it out of the park every day, but there have been lots of unexpected funny bits and side trips: Julian Assange’s ongoing battle with the old lady over the one computer in the Ecuadorian embassy library; Paul Ryan’s alleged fondness for Grimm and John Boehner’s liking for all the trash TV shows he has found in retirement; Hillary doing debate prep by standing in a wind tunnel and facing the kraken; Guggo the clown. I liked the couple of times that all of the Baldwin brothers had a conference call to iron out Stephen’s objection to Alec’s Trump impression. They even got Kim Basinger in to arbitrate. And I like Ivanka’s “whiny teen” voice:

    TRUMP: Is it true?
    IVANKA: Is what true, Daad?
    TRUMP: You want us to bury the ads where you support me?
    IVANKA:

    IVANKA: Jared and I . . . look, I have a very upscale brand.
    TRUMP:
    IVANKA: Overt white supremacists don’t buy a lot of stilettos, OK, Daad?

    TRUMP: I don’t believe it. First Vince, now my own daughter. The GOOD one!
    IVANKA: I know. I’m sorry. I’m making my pout face.
    TRUMP: I hear.

  190. 190.

    Brachiator

    @different-church-lady:

    And what better way to celebrate the first female president than to exhume Susan B. Anthony!

    You’re right!!! Hope they revise that headline. On the other hand, I think that in Madagascar, there is a ceremony in which family members bring the dead up and bring them up to date on current events.

  191. 191.

    Anne Laurie

    @? Martin:

    Male superiority is just a side-effect of the christianist worldview.

    Nah, patriarchy’s a lot older than the Paulists who codified ‘Christianity’. If you whole-heartedly believe that Biggest Bully Wins is the foundation of everything good in the universe, your Bully-in-Chief God is very liable to be a masculine figure.

  194. 194.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @hueyplong:

    If he were anyone else, medical health professionals would be applying their craft straitjackets to him as we speak.

    Fix’d.

  195. 195.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @hovercraft: Yamiche Alcindor and a local Philly reporter with some potentially useful insights, and he’s wasting time with Ed Rendell.

    Rendell says Clinton’s praise of Obama is for “African-Americans”. He has 56% approval ratings, you dumb fuck.

    ETA: @David ?▶️?Blue Wall?▶️? Koch: If it were up to me, it would be a Midnight Rally in Georgia.

  196. 196.

    OGLiberal

    Magic dolphins from God will deliver Florida for Trump. Why? Because the all have Trump signs on their lawns, not one Clinton. And when you shake their fins on the rope line you just know Trump is going to be president and it’s happening before eyes.

  197. 197.

    hovercraft

    @TS:
    Tweety is having a sad, he keeps lamenting what could have been. If only Trump had stuck to his three big things:
    -Trade
    -Immigration
    -No more stupid wars

    Tweety loved those issues and agrees with those issues. If only Trump had just stuck to that he could have won. Tweety also believes that democrats must come over to Trump’s positions on these three things, it’s the only way to get the reagan democrats back.

  199. 199.

    Chip Daniels

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist:
    I found the original, and realized it is the source of one of our tags:

    Was Mr. Clinton being blackmailed? The Starr report tells us of what the president said to Monica Lewinsky about their telephone sex: that there was reason to believe that they were monitored by a foreign intelligence service. Naturally the service would have taped the calls, to use in the blackmail of the president. Maybe it was Mr. Castro’s intelligence service, or that of a Castro friend.

    Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

  203. 203.

    trollhattan

    @Roger Moore:
    My recollection–perhaps it was the second crowning of St. Ronaldus–that the presidential race had been called before the PST polls closed, with at least an anecdotal drop in left coast voting afterwards.

  205. 205.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @hovercraft: -No more stupid wars

    You wonder what Tweety hears when Trump says he’s gonna bomb the hell out of’em and take the oil

  208. 208.

    trollhattan

    @hovercraft:
    Jeez Tweety, if only Tip O’Neil had been on Trump’s team he could have WON THIS THING.

    Shut the fuck up, DonnyTweety. Heck, add Donny back in.

  209. 209.

    OGLiberal

    @David ?▶️?Blue Wall?▶️? Koch: No way! She is stamina-less.

    At midnight tonight Trump will be tip toeing though his Trump Tower apartment, trying to slip his phone out of Ivanka’s sleeping hand without waking up Jared, who has nodded off in the gold plated recliner across the room. Melania doesn’t care – she’s downing a bottle of vodka in the kitchen wondering if maybe a middling model career would have been better than this. Uday and Qusay are at Scores with Howard Stern, Jackie Martling and Fred.

  212. 212.

    hovercraft

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist:
    He knows that Trump lied about not supporting Iraq and Libya, but he only supported the wars, she voted for them, and she is a hawk, so he doesn’t trust her on foreign policy.
    @Major Major Major Major:
    As an extra special bonus for election eve, he’s on an hour early. Yay, two whole hours of Tweety.

  213. 213.

    Mikefromarlington

    Warching BBC news on the election. So far it’s been a chick a tight leather jacket to argue for Trump from Breitbart and Coulter. Coulter about had a meltdown trying to claim trump supporters care about the issues.

  218. 218.

    TS

    @hovercraft: I will NEVER understand why political pundits think democrats should govern on republican policies – yet they also think that republicans should govern on republican policies. They will forever blame Pres Obama because the GOP refused to negotiate anything with him. It was Obama’s fault that the GOP spent all their time trying to make him a 1 term President.

  220. 220.

    Another Scott

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: Dowd and Martin on the DR Show:

    MARTIN

    Okay. And our — before we took our break, we took — we were talking a bit about Donald Trump. And your, how can we put it, on-again, off-again, kind of relationship with him. He — I don’t mean personal relationship. I mean the fact that you at one point had quite a lot of access to him. And now he’s not pleased with you. Let’s talk about Hillary Clinton. First of all, I have to say that in preparation for this program, I was reading back a lot of your columns and also reading things that have been written about your columns. There does seem to be a through-line where people think that you are — some people — who are these people, right?

    11:20:58
    MARTIN
    But I just have to say that there’s a through-line of criticism that says you are somehow — you are unfairly negative toward Hillary Clinton. I assume you’ve heard that before and I wanted to ask you, you know, what do you say about that?

    11:21:09
    DOWD
    Yeah. I don’t — I think because we’re both women, we still have this meme in this society about cat fights. So I think a woman writer who criticizes a woman can be perceived as being harder. And also I write for a newspaper that’s considered liberal. So, you know, that can be perceived as being harder. And also, as you know, because we used to be out on the campaign together, I’ve covered the Clintons for a long time. So, you know, there’s more muscle memory or whatever. But I guess what I think is, I don’t write an ideological column. So I’m not coming from the left or the right. And I know that disappoints a lot of Times readers. But I don’t know how to do it any other way.

    11:21:57
    DOWD
    Because I was a political reporter for so long, I’m just a political reporter who’s a columnist. So I wish I did sometimes. Because then you’d have this warm group who loved you, you know, to come back to. But somebody’s always mad at me, including my family, who are conservatives. We’re not — you know, they’re mad at me when a Republican president is in. And when W was president, one of my brothers said — got mad at me at a family dinner and said, you know, if there was a hurricane, you’d blame it on W. And then there was and I did. You know, Katrina. So…

    11:22:34
    MARTIN
    What is the frame of your column? How do you see it? What do you see as your mission?

    11:22:40
    DOWD
    I think of it as a watchdog. Because I always think politicians, you know, have hundreds of people surrounding them that are paid a lot of money to make them look good and to spin their story. And so I just feel like I want to be the advocate for the reader, to try and get behind the veil and just say, you know, what’s really going on, if there’s something that’s wrong or, you know, something that they said they would that they’re not doing.

    I don’t think she’s successful if that’s really her aim, but …

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  222. 222.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    @Bill E Pilgrim: A better link, this one with paragraph breaks.

    Flat n All That

    Remember Friedman’s take on Bush’s Iraq policy? “It’s OK to throw out your steering wheel,” he wrote, “as long as you remember you’re driving without one.” Picture that for a minute. Or how about Friedman’s analysis of America’s foreign policy outlook last May:

    The first rule of holes is when you’re in one, stop digging.When you’re in three, bring a lot of shovels.”

    First of all, how can any single person be in three holes at once? Secondly, what the fuck is he talking about? If you’re supposed to stop digging when you’re in one hole, why should you dig more in three? How does that even begin to make sense? It’s stuff like this that makes me wonder if the editors over at the New York Times editorial page spend their afternoons dropping acid or drinking rubbing alcohol. Sending a line like that into print is the journalism equivalent of a security guard at a nuke plant waving a pair of mullahs in explosive vests through the front gate. It should never, ever happen.

  223. 223.

    OGLiberal

    @hovercraft: It seems when Tweety goes home after work he crawls into Tip’s dead arse and hangs out drinking whisky with the ghost of Pat Moynihan, watching a looped video of Reagan saying, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall” remaining blissfully ignorant of how the world has changed, bemoaning that Obama lost Scranton in 2012 because he ignored white working class men even though he won it with 65+ percent of the vote.

  225. 225.

    Mnemosyne

    @Chip Daniels:

    Don’t forget, the only possible reason for returning a child to his father after his mother dies in a foreign country is that the president is being blackmailed. Because what father would actually want to raise his own child in Cuba, amirite?

  230. 230.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Another Scott: I think because we’re both women, we still have this meme in this society about cat fights.

    in ’08, when HRC teared up in New Hampshire, Dowd wrote that a woman watching in her NYT office said, if she cries during a campaign, how is she going to stand up to bin Laden?–words to that effect. I’ve always suspected Dowd was writing about herself in that moment.

  231. 231.

    Latino J

    Again, we’ll see tomorrow, but these poll aggregators might need to start rethinking these partisan polls.

    Since the conventions, Clinton has never been behind or tied in a single poll in Penn. Now, on the last day, Trafalfar has Trump up by 1 and Harper has them tied.

    Florida is certainly tight. But there have been 9 polls on RCP that include at least 1 day in November. 7 have been non partisan. Hillary leads in 6 and is tied in another. But the (R) pollsters Remington and Trafalgar have 2 polls that have Trump up by 4 and 3. So Trump has a .2 lead and the state is currently red. He leads in 2 of 7 November polls and is favored to win the state.

    I know RCP is pretty Republican, but other aggregators use similar polls. I don’t like having to rely on Huffpost or even TPM because it feels like confirmation bias. So, I’m still partially relying on RCP and 538 to at least give me the box scores on the polls. And their histrionics are getting to be a bit much.

  232. 232.

    Peale

    @hovercraft: someone please ask Tweety if he thinks there are too many hispanics in the country and what problems would be solved with fewer. Also if companies are too large and we should no longer allow executives at those companies the ability of selecting where their manufacturing plants will be located. Let’s see how deeply his populism runs.

  233. 233.

    Turgidson

    @TS:

    Back when the entire political class was convinced that Bush’s nailbiter reelection win in 2004, during wartime, with a not-yet-imploding economy, meant that the GOP would have unified control of the federal government for the next eleventy billion years, it made at least a shred of sense to say “well maybe the Democrats need to move towards the GOP on [issue] if they want to win next time.” It was bullshit, but at least it was bullshit that was defensible in light of the last couple elections.

    But they kept saying this, in various ways, (STILL A CENTER RIGHT NATION) after Obama won in a minor landslide in 2008 and again when he won fairly easily again in 2012 in spite of the entire GOP’s nonstop attempt to delegitimize and destroy him and cripple economic progress for partisan gain. And now, in the face of the Trumpocalypse, which demonstrated to anyone who cared to notice that EVEN GOP BASE VOTERS THINK GOP POLICIES ARE MOSTLY SHITE, they’re still schtupping that poor, poor, chicken. Gee, it’s almost as if the pundit class itself might have something to gain from the acceptance and implementation of certain GOP policies. Surely a coincidence.

  234. 234.

    TS

    @SiubhanDuinne:

    then the only question will be what time if Trump ever delivers his concession speech.

    Yeah. Like that’s gonna happen.

    Pence will deliver the concession speech while Trump, Giuliani and Rove are debating results and saying the election is rigged. Meanwhile Christie will rise from under the bridge & say he voted for Clinton.

    Trump will close all his campaign accounts so no-one will get paid, Melania will file for divorce and the SS attachment will – with much relief, head out of the arena after letting the media out of their pen.

  235. 235.

    MCA1

    @BGinCHI: Why? Said alliance of aliens is probably either so entertained by our idiocy that they’d never want the show to end, or figures “Why the hell would we waste a valuable gamma ray asset on a planet/group of beings that’s doomed to kill itself, anyway?”

  237. 237.

    shortribs

    @SiubhanDuinne: I’m willing to bet when Trump loses, he’ll try to bigfoot Hillary’s acceptance speech expecting the media to cut to him…and at least one major news organization will fall for it. Concession speech or not, he’ll still be the biggest loser in all the land.

  238. 238.

    hovercraft

    McGinty is not a very good public speaker, but coming after Casey she doesn’t sound half bad. Yo PA can’t you find any inspiring speakers?

  241. 241.

    FlipYrWhig

    @TS:

    I will NEVER understand why political pundits think democrats should govern on republican policies – yet they also think that republicans should govern on republican policies.

    It works like this. Pundits like Democrats who want to cut “entitlements,” that sort of thing, because they think inflicting pain on people is serious. Promising decent treatment, well, that’s just pandering–that’s what everyone wants to hear!

    But pundits like Republicans who are assholes, because they’re sure that Democrats pander, and being an asshole is the opposite of pandering, and a fella can respect that.

    So a Democrat who embraces Republican policies is serious, and a Republican who embraces Republican policies is a tough-love hardass who knows how the game is played. But a Democrat who embraces Democratic policies just wants everyone to like him. Which is too easy, so screw him.

  242. 242.

    BruceFromOhio

    What I like best about politics is the abject idiocy of commentators.

    So starts the post with 240 comments as of 6:57pm EST. *snarf*

    Oddly, what you like best about politics is the thing I fucking detest with most of the fibers of my existence. A few fibers are left for the excessive drinking caused by the other fibers, so there is a balance there, of sorts.

    ETA: To be fair, there is a distinction to be made between ‘commentators’ and ‘commenters.’ The juice emporium sports a splendid facet of the latter to which I aspire.

  244. 244.

    MCA1

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: Good point. There’s nothing about him personally that’s terribly funny, and to add to it he’s self-deprecating, so it has to be the context around him that’s humorous. Like his technically imaginary but almost undoubtedly real Anger Translator. I’ve always been surprised no one put him in a Ward Ceaver sort of context, with the Beav as stand-in for Republican Congress burning his house down on a daily basis. I mean, if there’s anything to mock about him it’s his responsible, sober, never over-the-top or overreactive, somewhat quaint and square seeming demeanor. I don’t know that there’s comic gold there, but I’m not a funny guy, either, so maybe there could be.

  246. 246.

    different-church-lady

    @Latino J:

    …but these poll aggregators might need to start rethinking these partisan polls.

    It’s quite obvious to me that since poll aggregation became the new standard, there would be polls specifically created to game the aggregators.

    Better mousetraps, better mice, repeat, for all of eternity.

  249. 249.

    Latino J

    @different-church-lady:

    I’ve lived in the South too long and was too polite in my language.

    These idiots have been doing this BS since at least Bush/Kerry. These nonsense Republican polls are nothing new. Plenty of them have been banned. But at this point, folks need to stop using any poll that they deem worthy of having an (R) next to it. I’d say do the same thing for PPP, except that they seem to be in the business of just putting out good polls and have a good track record. So no need for artificial fair balance when only one side is putting their finger on their scale.

  251. 251.

    J R in WV

    @Kyle:

    That was sad and hysterically funny at the same time!

    And, yet, and yet, we are still free, we still work hard and earn our keep, we still have guns, those of us who want to. The trust fund babies are even richer than before, as their stocks and bonds rose with the markets as Obama cut the deficit.

    So Obama didn’t steal everything from America. In fact he gave tens of millions of us health care! Well, he made the insurance companies sell us health care, actually, no socialism there to speak of, except for the really poor working class folks. In spite of the obstruction of the Republicans, Obama did a great job, so far.

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