"... put the Democratic Party in this position in the first place.… The Biden family — and the disconnected reality that they and their ineffective little circle live in — is responsible for the Trump sequel and the wilderness the Democratic Party finds itself in today.... These people drank so much of their own Kool-Aid... that they believed — and still seemingly believe — that an 82-year-old man with a 38% approval rating on a good day, who can’t sit down for a simple traditional 10-minute pre-Super Bowl interview, was the answer for Democrats in 2024 and now this same group thinks the Bidens are the answer for Democrats now? The fact that they continue to surround themselves with the same cast of clowns who delivered them nothing but the most devastating humiliation in modern political history — a president’s own power taken away by his own party — is all you need to know about them. They’ve learned nothing and they are the absolutely last and worst remedy for what ails the party in 2025 and 2026."
Did the Bidens "put the Democratic Party in this position" or did the Democratic Party put the Bidens in the place where they found themselves? What happened "in the first place"? The Democratic Party has itself to blame for forcing Biden on the country in 2020 and for everything that happened down the line.
ADDED: Dana Carvey captured the essence (on last night's new episode of "Real Time"):
It goes a little long, but stick with it, because one person is much funnier than everyone else...
... and he's not a current cast member.
They did not repeat the inanity of their response to the 2016 election — the sorrowful "Hallelujah" performance by the Hillary impersonator. And I think they realize that as a comedy show, they are better off having Trump as their raw material rather than the dreary, awful Democratic Party.
The basic comedy idea used in the "SNL" cold open last night is very similar to what the brilliant comedian Tim Dillon used in his new podcast, released earlier in the day: Trump detractors are terrified that now Trump will come after them.
Scroll ahead if you must — to 10:23 — but don't miss Dana Carvey:
Also — beginning at 2:22 — Jim Gaffigan as Tim Walz.
Maya Rudolph does Kamala Harris well, but the show's urgent need for us to love Kamala makes it too hard to like what Rudolph is able to do. The show presumes we agree politically and will simple-mindedly experience fun as "Kamala" has "fun" (and that's how Harris's campaign feels to me). I resist feeling the candidate's emotions as enacted on the political stage. And, for political satire, I want to laugh at her. Speak to me as someone on the outside. Don't treat me like a willing guest at her party.
Sample line, spoken by the Trump impersonator: "We had this in the bag, but then they did a switcheroo and they swapped out Biden with Kamala. And now everything is chaos. They're eating the dogs. They're eating the cats. They're taking your pets, and they're doing freak offs. They're doing freak offs with the dogs, and they're making the geese watch. It's very sad. It's very sad. They're doing a Diddy."
ADDED: Mixing the P. Diddy story with the Haitians-in-Ohio story: Is that racist? It would be considered racist if Trump did it. It's in the black-people-remind-me-of-black-people mode. But in the sketch they have the Trump character combining the 2 topics, so if it's racist, it looks as though the racist is Trump. Clever? That's how you (try to) get away with it.
ALSO: For clarification, I substantially rewrote first 2 sentences of the paragraph that begins "Maya Rudolph does Kamala Harris well...."
[T]he Democrats in Chicago were singing a redemption song. It had three parts: valediction, malediction, and benediction....
Having taken a break to listen to "Redemption Song" (see below), I will concentrate on the malediction:
[B]ad-mouthing Trump at a Democratic convention is not that hard. Yet it too had its complications. Just as the Democrats had to navigate between loving Joe and giving him a jubilant cheerio, they had to figure out how to manage another contradictory feat: cutting Trump down to size while retaining a clear sense of the threat he poses to the very existence of the American republic...
They seemed — to O'Toole — to be trying "to reconfigure Trump as the Wizard of Oz, a little man who has conjured an illusion of MAGA magnitude."
Even the renegade Republican Adam Kinzinger was entirely on message when he called Trump “a weak man pretending to be strong. He is a small man pretending to be big…. He puts on quite a show, but there is no real strength there.”
Treason indeed! Ushering in vast numbers of illegals is why Secretary Mayorkas was impeached by the House.
They are importing voters. This is why groups on the far left fight so hard to stop voter ID requirements, under the absurd guise of protecting the right to vote. https://t.co/WhtVFyS6sa
By the way, Elon's position — that Democrats are rigging the 2024 election by strategically dispersing immigrants (presumably to cities in swing states) — feels like a new version of the 2020 "election denial." He's getting the jump on the accusation of "treason."
"... and beyond the occasional 'C’mon, man,' his conversational manner too muted and self-effacing, to give the parodists much to work with. Trump supporters and Fox News pundits would undoubtedly attribute this to the media’s liberal bias. And to be sure, Trump was viewed by the (mostly liberal) satirists not just as an irresistible comic target but also as a dire threat to the nation. Biden’s pleasantly boring presidency has been a welcome return to normality — but hardly great material for parody."
I realize it's not meant as a pregnancy metaphor and we're supposed to think more in terms of a fortress. It's not normal to say that sterile women are "impregnable." The original meaning of the word is (from the OED): "Of a fortress or stronghold: That cannot be taken by arms; incapable of being reduced by force; capable of holding out against all attacks." Then there's the figurative meaning: "That cannot be overcome or vanquished; invincible, unconquerable, proof against attack."
So the assertion here is that Biden is so neutral and featureless that an impersonator has nowhere to go. He's like a giant wall with no footholds. What can you do?! He's normal, so pleasantly boring. This is why I don't watch "Saturday Night Live" anymore. They're too lazy! Trump was ridiculously easy. I guess they loved not being challenged.
How about observing Biden and finding what is distinct and capable of mockery? I think the problem is really that they don't want to expose his flaws, that they're committed to the idea that he's normal and pleasant. But they ought to see this as a fantastic opportunity. The best presidential impersonation in this history of "SNL" was Dana Carvey's George H.W. Bush, and H.W. had the same problem of superficial ordinariness.
"... before it progressed to an engagement. At the time, I didn’t fully understand what was missing from that relationship, but I did know that my partner loved me despite my weird wildness, while I yearned to be with someone who loved me because of it. To further confuse matters, I didn’t even know exactly what my 'weird wildness' entailed, partly because I had spent so much time in relationships that were not conducive to personal and sexual growth."
"You kind of assumed they would lean more left and liberal, but now the cat's out of the bag they are completely against Trump, which I think makes it less interesting because you know the direction the piece is going... Carvey played it respectfully... To me, the genius of Dana Carvey was Dana always had empathy for the people he played, and Alec Baldwin has nothing but a fuming, seething anger toward the person he plays.... I don't find his impression to be comical... I know the way his politics lean and it spoils any surprise. There's no possible surprise. He so clearly hates the man he's playing."
Said Rob Schneider, who was on "Saturday Night Live" back when the cast included Dana Carvey, Mike Myers, Chris Farley, Chris Rock, David Spade, and Adam Sandler.
And here's a NYT article published on November 6, 2016, anticipating that evening's "The 2016 S.N.L. Election Special," and going over the way the show had treated everything in the election, which was almost entirely the sort of thing Schneider is talking about. Almost. There was one sketch — and the NYT (before it knew Trump would win the Election) recognized it as the best sketch of the season — “Black Jeopardy!”:
Doug [Tom Hanks], to everyone’s shock, got one response after another right. Prompted with the answer, “They out here saying, the new iPhone wants your thumbprint ‘for your protection,’” he answered, “What is: ‘I don’t think so. That’s how they get you.’”...
This blue-collar white guy was on the same wavelength as [the black contestants], suspicious of authority, anxious to make ends meet, unimpressed with skinny women. It was cathartic, almost moving. Despite all the vitriol out there, maybe they weren’t all that different?...
This wasn’t just the best sketch of the “S.N.L.” election season. It was some of the best political analysis of the campaign, making a nuanced point about white Trump supporters and minorities, race and economic anxiety. Doug and his black counterparts, it said, have real issues in common — and a real, ultimate difference they may not be able to get past.
It's especially interesting to revisit that great sketch this week, when Kanye West has been so conspicuously sending his love to President Trump:
(Randomly encountered on Youtube this morning. There's no context to why I'm sharing this, just something I liked a lot. What a great cast SNL had in 1989. The assumption that everybody remembers "Fatal Attraction" isn't good 3 decades later, but that's how it is.)
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