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.
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