To War with the Pundits We Have

National political pundits rarely have much useful to say. In the heyday of blogging twenty years ago, it seemed to me that blogger amateurs were statistically more likely to be accurate than Cokie Roberts or Ruth Marcus or Tom Friedman or.... Or maybe I just chose well from the frothy, overflowing, mad-dog blogosphere.

Now that corporate mass media has retaken political punditry, it's even more true that the paid pundits are terrible at presenting the least tiny insight. Sure, they know that Joe Biden is old, and it's an easy column to write about that again and again and again. To be sure, Biden gives them plenty of chances to observe his age -- a news hook!

Because Trump floods the zone with Steve Bannon style bullshit, the national punditry hasn't settled on his epithet. May I suggest the Mafia Don of MAGA? Use that in every piece about him like "but he's 81" or "but her emails".

At present, the same punditry that touted Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley a month ago as alternatives to Trump wants to push Haley out of the Republican Primary race with the Mafia Don of MAGA. As ever, pundits fail to understand why anyone besides the Don of MAGA is still in the race. James Pindell of the Boston Globe continues his lame attempts to analyze this political race from any other perspective than a seventh grader's.

All along, the 2024 Republican Presidential Primary has been very simple: DeSantis and Haley have wanted and planned from the very beginning of their well-funded but poorly-voted campaigns to be there to pick up the pieces when the Mafia Don's Teflon finally starts sticking to every bit of ketchup he can fling at a wall.

Campaigns are almost never a sure thing. Shit happens during the campaign, turning obvious winners into unlucky losers or obvious losers into lucky winners. Trump won his first campaign, despite his obvious loserdom. Jimmy Carter came out of nowhere and won. Hillary Clinton lost because of Trump's free media and James Comey's October surprise (as well as a huge dollop of misogyny). John Kerry lost because he was so bad at politics he failed to respond to the dishonest attacks of the Bush/Cheney campaign.

In the immortal words of Risky Business, sometimes you just gotta say what the f*ck. That's what DeSantis and Haley have obviously been doing. Mafia Don is a chaos agent, and sometimes chaos agents face-plant, even when the Republican base is immune to reason and to its own gag reflex.

It might've worked, if only Merrick Garland had appointed Jack Smith in the spring of 2021.

But he's had too many birthdays!

The media is focusing almost exclusively on Joe Biden's superannuation, just like they focused on Hillary Clinton's emails. Reporters like this kind of story. It's simple enough for a tween to understand, and that's about the level of the American electorate. Reporters don't have to learn anything about it that would require effort; they can file in thirty minutes and get home to the fam in time for supper.

America's political media is worse every election, and Democrats like me are really bad at tempering our perennial expectations that they'll learn from the past and do better. Except that they have no desire to do better.

The truth is that everything Trump touches he destroys. That should be the theme of American political journalism. That dipshit failed to make money in casinos, which should be a license to print profits, but oh no, he was too busy gilding his toilet. Now he wants to destroy NATO.

Trump has already touched American democracy, and it's in deep trouble. If he gets his "short-fingered vulgarian" hands on it again, well, we'll all need to develop the skills citizens of fascism have to have to survive.

You call that an insurrection?!

Now the Supremes will rule that Trump can't be excluded from the 2024 Presidential ballot. This has been coming for some time. As I've said before, a Court that's more politically reichwing than even the Court that made an indefensible and extremely poorly reasoned decision to help its political allies in 2000's Bush v. Gore is never going to put Trump into a timeout.

I can only hope the Supremes set a standard for what actually would constitute insurrection that would trigger Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. They probably won't. They'll probably punt to Congress, which will render Section 3 toothless. The reichwing will love this, since they'll know that they can try their christofascist white supremacist mob rule again.