"This week, the notion of Trump as the leader of a distinctively white movement became harder to defend...."

"Although exit-poll data can be unreliable... [his coalition is] unusually nonwhite.... For instance, Trump became the first Republican in more than a century to win Starr County, along the Mexican border in Texas, which is almost entirely Hispanic; he did similarly well throughout the state’s majority-Hispanic border counties.... Late in the campaign, during a Trump rally at Madison Square Garden, one of his opening acts, the antagonistic comedian Tony Hinchcliffe... made a joke about Puerto Rico being a 'floating island of garbage,' which for a time became the campaign’s top story.... But... Osceola, a majority-Hispanic county in Florida with a large Puerto Rican population, swung from a fourteen-point Biden victory in 2020 to a narrow Trump victory this year.... [P]erhaps Trump’s coalition will help Americans rethink the assumption that 'white' and 'Hispanic' are mutually exclusive categories, and will boost a new version of the old white identity. But, as far as we can tell, Trump’s America is a place that is more polarized by education than it used to be and less polarized by whiteness and non-whiteness—by race, broadly understood...."

I'm reading "How Donald Trump, the Leader of White Grievance, Gained Among Hispanic Voters/In 2016, the idea that Trump was a cloaked white supremacist made him seem like a fringe character. What does it mean that his popularity has increased?" by Kelefa Sanneh, in The New Yorker.

I don't know how much postmortem I'm willing to read. If your perception and analysis are so good, why didn't you see this before the election? I guess that's another way of saying hindsight is 20/20. But I chose this little essay to quote because it's not purporting to understand what happened and it is pretty modestly conceding confusion. That's appropriate. I would like to see much stronger criticism of Democrats. They were boosted by mainstream media, which either pretended not to notice how awful they were or just didn't see.

By the way, is "antagonistic comedian" a standard term? I've heard "insult comedian."

Anyway, to escape from elite media for a moment — I mean for 3 hours — I listened to Joe Rogan and Dave Smith talking about Tony Hinchcliffe (go to 00:04:00):

"I love that they became friends because they both played Vegas and neither wanted to cheat on their wives."

Said Judd Apatow, quoted in "Judd Apatow’s 'Bob and Don: A Love Story'/Watch a short film about the lifelong friendship between Bob Newhart and Don Rickles, who were not an obvious match" (The New Yorker).

“What’s so different about them is Bob was a real writer. He wrote those routines, which were, like, one-man sketches. . . . Don came from working really hard playing lounges and strip clubs, figuring out how to do crowd work, doing multiple shows a night into the wee hours in Vegas. Bob just got huge immediately..... [Don] came from a time when his theory was, It’s O.K. to make fun of people as long as you make fun of all of them,” Apatow explained....

The New Yorker writer, Bruce Handy, quips: "Think of it as a very old-school version of D.E.I."

ADDED: I've given the impression that I think "very old-school version of D.E.I." is quite clever, but I don't. It's a variation on the cliché wisecrack: "I'm an equal opportunity offender."

Urban Dictionary has an entry for "equal opportunity offender": "One who bashes and trashes any and every different type of person known to earth; including the basher's own race. Don't call me racist, I am an Equal Opportunity Offender."

Goodbye to Don Rickles.

"Well into the era of political correctness, Rickles continued to target his trademark jabs at everything from audience members' weight problems to their ethnicities."

“There's a real Italian; you can smell the oil right here,” he said on stage at the Stardust in Las Vegas in 2006 when he was 80. “There's a definite odor in this area. Like a Polack gone bad. ...

For Rickles, everyone was fair game; the bigger the better.

He was a relatively unknown comic performing at Murray Franklin's, a small club in Miami Beach, Fla., in the 1950s when Frank Sinatra came in with his entourage.

“Make yourself comfortable, Frank — hit somebody,” said Rickles as the notoriously moody singer paused, and then broke up with laughter.

Pressing on, Rickles said: “Frank, believe me, I'm telling you this as a friend: Your voice is gone.”...

Much more at the link (which goes to the L.A. Times). Rickles was 90. 

"Why don’t they get a life and talk about something else? People deserve better."

From a list in Politico titled "Harry Reid’s insults: 10 greatest hits." That headline makes it sound as though he was some sort of master of the insult, perhaps not an Oscar Wilde, but at least a Don Rickles. But the closest he comes to saying anything striking/offbeat is...

When [George W.] Bush invited Reid for coffee in the Oval Office in the final weeks of his presidency, the president’s dog walked in, and Reid says he insulted the president’s pet. “Your dog is fat,” he said.

Also, this one isn't an insult per se...

“[Reid] was wowed by Obama’s oratorical gifts and believed that the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama — a ‘light-skinned’ African-American ‘with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.’”

... or not an insult to Obama anyway. It is an insult to Americans in general and it's a hurtful statement indirectly aimed at black people.

People do deserve better. 

Emmy winners.

The list.

A lot easier to read the list than to watch the damned show. Did you watch? Do you care about anything on this list? I guess it's mildly interesting that Paul Giamatti won a best actor award "John Adams." I still haven't been able to plow through to the end of that thing, and I have the DVD set (which HBO sent me for free). I found it so alienating, the way everything seemed so small -- as if Abigail ran the farm without any help and President Adams ran the country through various one-on-one arguments with petulant egotists. And now I see that Giamatti won over Ricky Gervais in "Extras." That's just stupid.

Now, this is funny:

INDIVIDUAL PERFORMANCE IN A VARIETY OR MUSIC PROGRAM

Jon Stewart, “80th Annual Academy Awards” (ABC)
David Letterman, “Late Show With David Letterman” (CBS)
* Don Rickles, “Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project” (HBO)
Tina Fey “Saturday Night Live” (NBC)
Stephen Colbert, “The Colbert Report” (Comedy Central)

Stewart and Colbert will likely be hilarious on the subject of losing to Rickles. And Tina Fey, otherwise the darling of the night -- she won 3 Emmys -- lost to him too. Ha ha.

What was daytime TV talk like in the 1970s?

I'm trying to remember, as I see that Mike Douglas just died. See him in action here, talking to Frank Zappa in 1976. And here he is with Johnny Cash... and Don Rickles. Cash calls Rickles a "great spiritual leader," and Mike asks Cash if he always wears black.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono co-hosted the show for a week. Here's what Douglas had to say about one of the guests they picked out, Jerry Rubin:

He just got on my nerves. It sounded like this guy hated the president, the Congress, everyone in business, the military, all police and just about everything America stands for.

RIP, Mike.

UPDATE: Now you have to go to the links. The embedded videos were making this page too slow-loading.

"Sit Down Comedy."

That's a new talk show, on TV Land, with David Steinberg:

Mr. Steinberg was a director of the early-80's sitcom "Newhart." And, he recalled, one of the highlights of working on that set was the chance to eat lunch with Mr. Newhart and other funny people - including Mr. Newhart's friend and fellow comedian Don Rickles, who would often drop by - and to sit back and listen to them talk, joke and reminisce about life in the comedy business.

"That was almost my childhood ideal of what show business would be, those lunches," Mr. Steinberg said in a telephone interview from his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. "That kind of experience is so memorable, and so rare."

Nice idea. I'll set the TiVo.

"Casual" is the watchword for the series itself. In contrast to "Inside the Actors Studio" and its scholarly, well-prepared host, "Sit Down Comedy With David Steinberg" is concerned less with serious analysis than with giving Mr. Steinberg and fellow comedians - some, like Mr. Newhart and Martin Short, old friends; others, like George Lopez and Jon Lovitz, performers he admired but did not know personally - the chance to riff off of each other.

"I'm not interested in the craft of comedy," Mr. Steinberg said. "I don't think that's interesting to an audience. I just wanted to show the audience how funny these people can be."

Mike Myers is the first guest, tonight. Larry David is the second guest, next week. What more do you need to know? This is perfect!