The news of nothing.

Drudge has looked like this for quite a while:



That links to a Daily Mail story — "Obama rules OUT sending troops back into combat in Iraq but promises to review military options – including air strikes" — that includes an effort to extract a comment from George W. Bush:

Former President George W. Bush has been reluctant to weigh in on the latest developments in the region where he spent years deploying military assets that Obama would later pull back.

A request for comment from the former president was met with a non-response from his communications director Freddy Ford, who told MailOnline: 'I don’t have a comment for you. When he left office President Bush decided not to criticize his successor.'

Everyone already knew that, but the Mail made it into something that could be reported, and Drudge is featuring what is, essentially, the news of nothing.

With so many newsworthy things happening right now — the VA scandal eclipsed, the Bratquake reduced to a 1-day story, the Lois Lerner spoliation, Bergdahl (Bergdahl? Who's Bergdahl?), Hillary snapped — the news of nothing rises to the top and just sits there.

What is the ever-enigmatic Drudge trying to say?

Nothing?

"There’s no GOP establishment/Tea Party divide, and there never has been."

Wrote WaPo's Greg Sargent last May.

So today, when incumbent Republicans are threatened from the right by Tea Party challenges, they don’t react by moving right in any substantive way. Not only would it be all but impossible for most of them, it isn’t necessary to shift their positions on issues. Instead, they react with displays of attitude, amping up their pose of confrontation with Barack Obama. You say you’ll shoot Obamacare with a gun? I’ll fry it with a blowtorch! And it turns out that that kind of posturing can be enough to stave off the challenge.

I'm sure there are a thousand equally obsolete columns.

Tooling along, the GOP car was making good time, headed for its destination: Victory in November.

DRIVER: Hey! What happened? Did we get off the 2014 Interstate? Was there an off-ramp back there? What does the polling app say? Is it re-routing? But the polling app didn't warn us before the road got weird looking. I don't trust this app to re-route. We could get even farther afield.

PASSENGER: If we're off the Interstate, we'd better stop and ask for directions. Look, there are lots of people around who seem like they might be helpful.

DRIVER: What, just stop and ask somebody?! We're driving the GOP car, and you want some guy by the side of the road to give us directions to Victory in November?

PASSENGER: Well, clearly we are lost. MAN BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD looks like he's concerned about our predicament, looks like he knows the routes around the Political Landscape...

As the GOP car scoots to a stop, MAN BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD scrambles up, smiling, as if he's delighted at the opportunity to help.

How the Democratic Party is leveraging Eric Cantor's loss: "This guy isn't extreme enough for the GOP... the Tea Party is now in charge."

That arrived in the email a couple hours ago, from the Democratic Party. At the linked website, the line is: "Tea Party Republicans have taken over the GOP — and they'll stop at nothing to win complete control of Congress. You don't want to imagine what a Congress run entirely by the Tea Party would look like."

"[I]t’s not easy to box Brat into a neat caricature of an anti-immigration zealot or Tea Party demagogue, or, in Time’s hasty reporting, a 'shopworn conservative boilerplate.'"

"If Brat ascends to Congress, which is quite likely given the Republican-leaning district that he’ll run in as the GOP nominee, he may actually continue taking on powerful elites in Washington."

Writes Lee Fang at The Nation.

Do you want to ask how Cantor went wrong or do you want to listen to the Professor?

There's a lot of post-mortem on Cantor, and I assume his crushing loss was about him, and Professor Brat was not so much a specific person as he was Not Cantor, but I'll leave that to others right now, because I want to hear from the Professor.

There's a blog post at the Wall Street Journal by Reid J. Epstein titled "David Brat’s Writings: Hitler’s Rise 'Could All Happen Again,'" that begins ominously:

David Brat, the Virginia Republican who shocked House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R., Va.) Tuesday, wrote in 2011 that Hitler’s rise “could all happen again, quite easily.”

Mr. Brat’s remarks, in a 2011 issue of Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology, came three years before he defeated the only Jewish Republican in Congress.

One might read that and feel that it means that Brat is a fan of Hilter's and that anti-Semitism made him run against Cantor. But that's not what Professor Brat says at all. In fact, Brat is making a brilliant libertarian point about the importance of not off-loading morality to government:

I don't watch the news on TV. Can anyone tell me how to pronounce "Brat"?

I searched Google news for "how to pronounce David Brat," but I only got a few uses of the verb "pronounce" in phrases like "Immigration 'has been pronounced dead many times over the last..." I checked a couple Wisconsin newspapers on the theory that it's only the people around here who notice that there are 2 ways to say "brat." I found nothing but realized that nothing is sufficient basis to infer that the amazing Professor Brat says his name like the word Samuel Johnson's 1755 "Dictionary of the English Language" defined as "A child, so called in contempt."

By the way, remember the "Brat Pack"? Here's the old New York Magazine cover story from 1985, "Hollywood’s Brat Pack":

It is to the 1980s what the Rat Pack was to the 1960s—a roving band of famous young stars on the prowl for parties, women, and a good time. And just like Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Peter Lawford, and Sammy Davis Jr., these guys work together, too—they’ve carried their friendships over from life into the movies....

We easily remember Frank and the others, but can you remember the Brat Packers? Try to fill in the names:

The Hottest of Them All...

The Most Beautiful Face...

The Overrated One...

The Only One With an Oscar...

The One Least Likely to Replace Marlon Brando...

The Ethnic Chair...

The Most Gifted of Them All...

Anyway, since David Brat doesn't seem to be much of a Tea Partier, if he collects some followers, they can be called — perhaps they already are — The Brat Pack.

"God acted through people on my behalf... It’s an unbelievable miracle."

Said Dave Brat.

Eric Cantor loses primary to a Tea Partier!

Whoa!!

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor was defeated Tuesday by a little-known economics professor in Virginia's Republican primary, a stunning upset and major victory for the tea party.

Cantor is the second-most powerful member of the U.S. House and was seen by some as a possible successor to the House speaker.

His loss to Dave Brat, a political novice with little money marks a huge victory for the tea party movement, which supported Cantor just a few years ago.

Love the name, btw, Dave Brat....