"... I’ve written pretty harshly about Vance.... But I thought he actually did himself and his ticket some good."

"Vance came into this debate with a mission, which was to make himself and his running mate seem more reasonable, less extreme and more respectful of women. He knew exactly what he wanted to achieve, and he was just really good at it. He calibrated his tone really shrewdly. Whereas, I don’t think Walz had an objective other than to answer the questions and talk a lot about Minnesota.... He didn’t seem to want to achieve any one main thing, and so he didn’t really achieve much of anything, other than to do no harm.... And I was very surprised that Walz didn’t... point to the pretty extreme things Vance has said about women. I guess he was waiting for the moderators to do it. But the first half-hour of a debate is when viewers are really locked in, and Vance has a serious vulnerability there. I think I would have made that my main objective. The phrase 'cat ladies' never even came up."

Says Matt Bai, in "Did Tim Walz miss a crucial moment at the VP debate? The governor didn’t seem to have a clear objective in his face-off with Republican JD Vance." That's a free-access link, so you can read the whole conversation Bai has with Megan McArdle and Gene Robinson.

At one point, Megan McArdle talks about watching the debate with the sound off. Vance looked "much more composed." What Matt Bai noticed with the sound off was "how deeply concerned Walz looked about everything, as if he feared bad news." Which is basically the same point. McArdle asks "At a visceral level, who wants a president who looks anxious?"

I did the opposite mostly. I watched without looking at them.

"[T]hree different sets of jurors have concluded that Jan. 6 was no spontaneous riot. It was planned, organized, incited..."

"... and led by individuals and groups in a conspiracy against our democratically elected government... Evidence at the trial showed that three of the men convicted Thursday of seditious conspiracy — Ethan Nordean, Joe Biggs and Zachary Rehl — led a group of about 200 Proud Boys away from the Ellipse rally and toward the Capitol even before Trump had finished speaking, or ranting. The defendants themselves did not participate in the worst of the violence at the Capitol; Tarrio wasn’t even in Washington that day. But prosecutors argued — and jurors agreed — that Tarrio, Nordean, Biggs and Rehl were the leaders who sent other Proud Boys to commit some of the most violent acts of the day.... Trump... complains that the Justice Department is persecuting patriotic Americans who were doing nothing more than exercising their right to peacefully protest. That is an outrageous, disgusting lie.... Jurors are getting it right. Leaders of the insurrection should face the most serious charges and suffer the most severe punishments. Now we wait to see whether the man without whose incitement Jan. 6 never would have happened — Donald Trump — is made to face his day in court as well."

Writes Eugene Robinson in "The Proud Boys jury got it right on Jan. 6 seditious conspiracy" (WaPo).

I did not sit through the trial and don't know what evidence was presented, but Robinson asserts that the "[e]vidence at the trial showed" the defendants led a large group — known to be members of the Proud Boys — to the Capitol where and that group went beyond vocal protesting and committed acts of "violence." I still have the question: What evidence proved that this was "sedition"? I'm trying to understand how political protests come to be understood as "sedition." 

Here's a post of mine from January 2022, quoting Jeannie Suk Gersen in a New Yorker article asking whether a sincere belief that the election would undermine the charge of "sedition":

"Her brief tenure should be remembered as the hyphenate premiership: all-in on supply-side, laissez-faire, trickle-down economics."

Writes Eugene Robinson, in "Liz Truss’s fall is a warning to populists everywhere" (WaPo).

Is supply-side, laissez-faire, trickle-down economics populist?

Robinson ends with this warning:

When you hear Republicans in this country say “secure the border” or “crack down on crime” or “America first,” keep in mind how easy it is to write a bumper sticker and how hard it is to actually govern in a complex, interconnected world. GOP leaders, pay attention: Britain’s Conservatives have pandered their way into ruin.

Well, “secure the border” or “crack down on crime” and “America first” sound populist, but every single one of those things is not supply-side, laissez-faire, trickle-down economics.

Seems like Robinson is mixing up the categories of right-wingers. You could easily blend left-wing economics with securing the border, cracking down on crime, and putting America first.

"Disinformation Governance Board?... I can see how disinformation requires monitoring. I can see how it requires fact-checking and refutation. But governance? How do you govern lies?"

Writes Eugene Robinson in "The Disinformation Governance Board is a bad name and a sillier idea" (WaPo). 

I agree that "governance" is a ludicrous term here. The first word in the phrase that bothers me, however, is "disinformation." I've noticed that, lately, Democrats and others of the left have forefronted a concern for misinformation, offering it as a counterweight to the interest in freedom of speech. Misinformation is a much larger category than disinformation. Is this new board concerned narrowly with the deliberate use of bad information to manipulate or just everything than anybody is saying that's wrong? Misinformation is everywhere. We live in it and must learn to deal with it. 

The only way for the government to go about its "governance" is to be selective and to choose which wrong statements to go after. Obviously, it should concern itself with the disinformation the enemy spreads in wartime, but you wouldn't set up a "disinformation governance board" to perform that function. Setting up the board is a theatrical show of going after something... but what? Claims of election fraud? Claims of election fraud made by Republicans but not claims of election fraud made by Democrats?

Robinson writes:

"Republicans would be wise to lay low, knowing that whomever Biden puts on the court, the conservative majority remains intact."

"But in today’s scorched-earth political environment, I’m not sure that ambitious GOP senators will be able to restrain themselves, especially if the party’s — scratch that, I mean the cult’s — unhinged leader, Trump, eggs them into fighting a battle they cannot win.That, of course, would only outrage and further motivate the Democratic Party’s base.... Momentum matters in politics, and so does enthusiasm. For no good reason, Democrats have sunk into a sour, defeatist mood. The chance to name Breyer’s successor on the Supreme Court is an opportunity to change the narrative...."

Eugene Robinson — in "Breyer’s retirement is an opportunity for Democrats to rally. They shouldn’t squander it" (WaPo) — offers Republicans advice. He doesn't want to help them though, obviously, so is it presumptively bad advice. 

So what's the good advice?

"I remember that day well" — the day Roe was decided — "because it was also the day when former president Lyndon B. Johnson died."

"I was one of the editors of the Michigan Daily, the student newspaper at the University of Michigan, and we had a passionate argument that went late into the evening over which should be our lead story. Should it be legalized abortion across the nation? Or the man who sent tens of thousands of young Americans to die in the Vietnam War? Most of the female editors saw the historic importance of Roe and understood the impact it would have on women’s lives. Most of the male editors — myself included, I confess — could not see past Vietnam and pushed hard for LBJ. We won, sort of: The paper ended up stripping Johnson’s death across the top of the front page and putting the Roe decision right beneath it, still above the fold, with a boldface two-line headline. For history’s sake, I thought that was the right call. I was spectacularly wrong. Johnson was indeed a towering figure, but he’d been long out of office and had to die at some point anyway. Roe was like a bolt from the blue, and with it the nation took a giant stride toward treating women as full and equal citizens under the law. The decision’s impact continues to this day — but perhaps not for many days longer."

Writes Eugene Robinson in "If the Supreme Court throws out ‘Roe v. Wade,’ it will tear the country apart" (WaPo).

I was a student there at the time, so I know I read that edition of the Michigan Daily. I didn't follow the Supreme Court, and I remember being completely surprised that the Court would do something so dramatic, to change so much about our experience of life. 

Isn't it interesting that the editors split by sex — everyone dominated by the  importance of sovereignty over one's own body?

As for the assertion in today's headline — who knows? Will overruling Roe "tear the country apart"? More than it's already torn apart? We may find out. I think it will help the Democratic Party, but you don't hear Democrats expressing hope for this gift of overruling.

"[W]e should continue the airlift as long as we can. But that won’t be forever, as conditions deteriorate... and not everyone who desperately wants to get out will be able to do so."

"That is tragic. But it would be true, I believe, whenever and however the U.S. mission ended. The images we’re seeing from Kabul are shocking, heartbreaking and embarrassing. But the real stain on our national honor was in making promises to Afghans that we never had the intention or even the ability to keep. Twenty years of U.S. blood and treasure gave Afghanistan not a secular democracy but its flickering illusion. And history will see this withdrawal, painful as it is to watch, not as ignominious but as inevitable."

Writes Eugene Robinson in "What’s happening in Afghanistan is horrible. But how else was U.S. involvement going to end?" (WaPo).

I'm quoting this because it's what I assume is the administration's position, though they won't say it to us so bluntly. It can be put more bluntly: It's going to be a nasty few days, but we'll get past it, and Americans have permission to look away and not agonize over the details.

AND: To put it more inanely, "I want to talk about happy things, man." That's a quote from Biden, something he said on July 2d, when reporters pressed him on the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and his idea was to talk about the economy. Because it's always the economy. You can count on Americans to recenter ourselves on the economy. As they say in politics, "It's the economy, stupid." They're talking to us. 

Remember when making Juneteenth a national holiday was a Donald Trump campaign promise?

From September 25, 2020: "President Donald Trump made a series of promises at a campaign event in Atlanta on Friday in a bid to woo Black voters, including establishing Juneteenth, which commemorates the end of U.S. slavery, as a federal holiday" (Reuters).

Of course, it was just "a bid to woo Black voters" when Trump promised to do it, but now that the members of Congress and the new President have actually made Juneteenth a national holiday, is anyone minimizing the achievement as pandering to black voters?

And then there was a time — just before Juneteenth last year — when Trump asserted: "I did something good: I made Juneteenth very famous." If only Trump were still on Twitter — don't you think he'd be claiming credit for the new holiday? But the truth is, Juneteenth was already a holiday in 47 states (and the District of Columbia) when Trump made his campaign promise last September.

ADDED: I'll answer my own question — "is anyone minimizing the achievement as pandering to black voters?" — with a qualified yes. Eugene Robinson at the Washington Post is minimizing the achievement but only of the Republicans who voted for it: 

Do people who want Trump to fail ever get tired of posing as if they're offering to help him avoid failure?

I'm reading Eugene Robinson over at WaPo:

President Trump’s increasingly frantic attempts to smear former president Barack Obama reek of panic. As disgusting as these efforts are, they are likely to backfire, perhaps in spectacular fashion.

Maybe there are readers at WaPo who lap this stuff up. They want Trump to be going nuts and they'd like to see his attacks backfire spectacularly. But there's no way an interpretation like this could influence Trump. He's not going to think: I'd better calm down and realize that attacks on Obama will only hurt me. It makes much more sense for him to interpret a column like that to mean that his attacks are effective.

Maybe Trump just cannot abide the fact that Obama is a Nobel laureate, respected around the world, while he has had to endure being snickered at by world leaders and portrayed as hapless and ignorant by the “fake news” media he claims to hate yet compulsively devours. Increasingly, his imagined victimizer is Obama himself. Trump even tries to blame Obama for his own administration’s botched response to a disease that did not exist when Obama was in office.

I thought everyone knew you don’t tug on Superman’s cape....

And yet, you're doing just that.

By the way, the line "you don’t tug on Superman’s cape" comes from Jim Croce's "You Don't Mess Around With Jim," and the question why Superman wears a cape — what good does it do him? — has long plagued readers of comic books who think too much.

IN THE COMMENTS: Calypso Facto said:

"Jim" also gets his ass handed to him by the upstart "Slim" at the end of Croce's song. Maybe more on point than Eugene Robinson intended? (And isn't Slim a great nickname for Trump in response to Pelosi's failed fat-shaming?)

Camp.

At what stage of life does one acquire a “camp”? https://t.co/XTtiC3JfX0

— Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) November 8, 2019

I'm interested in the language question — "camp" — but it's also a good time to mention the possible newcomers to the Democratic primary race — not just Michael Bloomberg but Eric Holder. Newsweek has this:

Eugene Robinson claimed on social media last night that the Obama-era attorney general had spoken with strategists about running in the already crowded Democratic 2020 primary field.... The analyst's claim was also repeated on MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show yesterday evening, following several reports that former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is also considering pitching himself against frontrunners Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders....

[Rachel Maddow] said: "If Eric Holder is in the mix, and Mike Bloomberg looks like he might be in the mix, well jeez, just when you thought it's all over, it's never over."

What's the latest anyone ever entered the race and went on to become the nominee? Have we ever seen anything like this huge collection of candidates in one party where no one seems to have decent support? (Biden has been in the lead for a long time, but he seems to represent the idea I'm here waiting for a standard-model Democrat who reminds me of the old days when Obama was President.)

On the language question, a "camp" is "A body of troops encamping and moving together; an army on a campaign." I'd say you have a camp when you are organized to do battle. You've got a metaphorical army. And it's got to be on the move to be called a "camp." If it's a camp, you've got a campaign. Ergo, he's running. Or people are using the wrong word.

This is actually a headline at The Washington Post: "The GOP’s bootlicking cowardice knows no bounds."

On the front page too.

Jeez. Speaking of things that know no bounds.... The GOP-hating of The Washington Post knows no bounds!

I don't really care what's under that headline, but just for your information, it's a column by Eugene Robinson, and it begins:

President Trump’s defense against impeachment is bombastic, full of lies and incoherent to the point of lunacy, which is no surprise. Republicans are beclowning themselves to pretend Trump is making sense — and that, sadly, is also no surprise....

"'What I said was accurate!': Trump stays fixated on his Alabama error"/"Trump’s Sharpie-doctored hurricane map belongs in the Smithsonian."

Those are 2 headlines, both on the front page of The Washington Post, but not right next to each other.

I'm putting them side by side for humorous effect. Because: Who's fixated? Trump or the anti-Trump press?

Trump is hitting back, which is what he always does, and which the anti-Trump press likes to portray as mentally ill and unpresidential. (They're "fixated" on that characterization of Trump.)

So Trump hasn't dropped it — the subject of the Alabama-inclusive line on a map about the hurricane — but the press has also not dropped it. They seem to think it's a category-5 big deal. And now here's a WaPo column — it's by Eugene Robinson — portraying it as a monumental object worthy of display in the Smithsonian Museum.

So how is Trump "fixated"? He's just declining to sit back and take the beating like a turn-the-other-cheek Christian, in the manner of George W. Bush, who presided over the press's  Golden Age of Unanswered Attacks.

An hour and 30 minutes have passed since the first post of the day.

It was that thing about the vasectomy cake, which might make you think I have a low standard, but in fact the vasectomy cake met a very high standard, and I have been looking ever since to find something else that meets my standard.

I really mean it when I say better than nothing is a high standard. The vasectomy cake was in fact the only thing in an hour and a half of reading that was better than nothing. I considered and rejected:

1. "The U.S. must take Greenland by force!" by Dana Milbank (WaPo). Who cares how Milbank hits a softball?

2. "Trump is melting down. Again" by Eugene Robinson (WaPo). First line: "Uh-oh. President Trump is in such a state of panic about his dimming reelection prospects that he’s getting his lies mixed up and occasionally blurting out the truth." I considered a post title like "Uh-oh, WaPo is in such a state of panic about the Democrats' dimming reelection prospects that..." and then I just felt disgusted with the me who would write like that. A computer could be programmed to write a blog that just flips the partisanship of every headline.

3. "Conservative Scholar: The Real Racists Are People Who Call Trump Racist" by Jonathan Chait (NY Magazine). So the conservative scholar flipped a liberal meme to make it anti-liberal and liberal Chait will flip it back. Am I supposed to expend my cruel neutrality on such low-effort stuff? Chait has to write a column. He's paid to do it. I don't and I'm not.

4. "A Party Room and a Prison Cell Inside the Friends writers’ room," a book excerpt by Saul Austerlitz (at NY Magazine). I'm interested in "Friends," and the article is long. I read it. But that doesn't mean it has to become a blog post. It's less interesting than the vasectomy cake. And a vasectomy cake would be a great plotline for a "Friends" episode.

5. "Neil Young’s Lonely Quest to Save Music/He says low-quality streaming is hurting our songs and our brains. Is he right?" I love Neil Young. Nice black-and-white photograph of Neil Young. The first sentence is "Neil Young is crankier than a hermit being stung by bees" and we were just talking about bees, but the article is about digital audio, a topic he's been perseverating about for a quarter century. I make a mental note to pull out "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere" for the next time we get together to play records.

"Dear Democrats... Stop fretting and second-guessing... The great blues artist Muddy Waters put it best: 'You can't spend what you ain't got. You can't lose what you ain't never had.'"

Writes Eugene Robinson in "Democrats Have Nothing to Lose -- but a Majority (Or Two) to Win" (Real Clear Politics).

The appropriation of Muddy Waters for Democratic Party politics is irksome. That song came out in 1964. Lyrics here. Waters sang about losing "a pretty little girl," his "money in the bank," and his "sweet little home," then consoles himself with the line "You can't lose what you ain't never had."



When I heard the first verse, about the girl, I thought he was admitting that he never "had" the girl and he was looking at the bright side: At least he didn't lose her. But when I got to the money and home verses, it's clear that he had those things, so he must have had and lost the girl too, and the meaning of "You can't lose what you ain't never had" must be something like: 1. At least I once had these things (which can be reworded "Tis better to have loved and lost/Than never to have loved at all" or, more mundanely, It's better to be a has-been than a never-was), or 2. What I thought was good wasn't even good, because it only set me up to feel the pain of losing (basically, the opposite of #1).

In Robinson's use of the song, the man, with his elemental personal needs (love, money, and shelter), is replaced by a conglomerate, a party, and its drive for political power. The man lost what he had and is comparing his predicament to that of a person who never had anything. But in Robinson's deployment of the line, the political party ought to feel motivated by the idea that it has nothing now and therefore has nothing to lose. He says, "Democrats, who have so little to defend, can and should play offense with abandon."

Now, it seems less Muddy Waters and more football. The best defense is a good offense. Ah, there's a Wikipedia article on the subject. And it's not as football-based as I'd thought:

George Washington wrote in 1799: "…make them believe, that offensive operations, often times, is the surest, if not the only (in some cases) means of defence".

Mao Zedong opined that "the only real defense is active defense", meaning defense for the purpose of counter-attacking and taking the offensive. Often success rests on destroying the enemy's ability to attack. This principle is paralleled in the writings of Machiavelli and Sun Tzu.

Some martial arts emphasise attack over defense. Wing chun, for example, is a style of kung fu which uses the maxim: "The hand which strikes also blocks."

During World War I, Germany planned to attack France so as to quickly knock it out of the war, thereby reducing the Entente's numerical superiority and to free up German troops to head east and defeat Russia.

That has so little to do with what Muddy Waters was singing the blues about, but is it what Robinson is trying to explain? The column is padded out with the usual things — Trump is awful and the Democrats need to get out the vote. Then Robinson offers the advice "Don't be dour and doubtful, Democrats. Be joyous and determined," which seems more "Happy Days Are Here Again" than Muddy Waters singing the blues.

In his penultimate sentence, Robinson tries to drag the Waters line in again: "Stop worrying about losing what you 'ain't got' and focus on winning elections district by district, state by state." But in the song it's not "ain't got" — despite those quotes — it's "ain't never had." That it's "ain't never had"  doesn't seem to matter to Robinson. I suppose that's because he's a politics guy, and the meaning of words and the value of art don't count for much.

Robinson has one more sentence: "Don't let Republicans bluff you into folding. You're playing a very good hand." Now, the metaphor is poker, and now, the Democrats have got something, "a very good hand." How utterly tedious.

But I presume it's tedious for Robinson too. He's been writing in newspapers for 42 years. I looked up his Wikipedia page. He began his professional career writing about the Patty Hearst trial.

Just when Democrats are pushing the talking point that the FBI should not be disparaged...

The talking point is so blatant that, on "Meet the Press" this morning, NBC News political analyst Eugene Robinson was laughing about it:

It is fascinating that you see people on the left of the Democratic Party saying, "How dare anyone attack the F.B.I." And you see people and people on the right, of the Republican Party, or virtually the entire Republican Party saying, "The F.B.I. is violating our civil liberties!"

Obviously, that's some very partisan reaction to the Nunes memo. But given the intensely strong Democratic Party commitment to demanding respect for the hardworking rank and file of the FBI,* I want to give the NYT some neutrality credit for frontpaging the story, "As F.B.I. Took a Year to Pursue the Nassar Case, Dozens Say They Were Molested":

For more than a year, an F.B.I. inquiry into allegations that Lawrence G. Nassar, a respected sports doctor, had molested three elite teenage gymnasts followed a plodding pace as it moved back and forth among agents in three cities. The accumulating information included instructional videos of the doctor’s unusual treatment methods, showing his ungloved hands working about the private areas of girls lying facedown on tables.

But as the inquiry moved with little evident urgency, a cost was being paid.... The silence at times drove the victims and their families to distraction, including Gina Nichols, the mother of the gymnast initially known as “Athlete A”: Maggie Nichols, who was not contacted by the F.B.I. for nearly 11 months after the information she provided sparked the federal inquiry....

The F.B.I. declined to answer detailed questions about the speed and nature of its investigation, or to provide an official who might put the case in context.... The agency left unaddressed the oft-repeated claim by U.S.A. Gymnastics officials that after initially presenting the sexual assault allegations to the F.B.I. in July 2015, they came away with the impression that federal agents had advised them not to discuss the case with anyone. The ensuing silence had dire consequences, as the many girls and young women still seeing Dr. Nassar received no warning.

____________________

* Here's former C.I.A. Director John Brennan on the same episode of "Meet the Press": "And the ones I'm concerned about are the families of C.I.A. officers and F.B.I. agents. They're the ones who sacrifice on behalf of their loved ones. And to hear people like Mr. Trump and others denigrate the work that they do, and they're trying to make distinctions between the rank and file and the senior members, well, I think, you know, C.I.A. officers and F.B.I. officers know that these are institutions that I believe have been well-led over the years and that really are so important and critical to keep this nation safe and secure. So I just am appalled by the things that are being said."

"Is [Carly Fiorina] really, truly so filled with rage? Probably not."

"When she ran unsuccessfully against Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) in 2010, she was a moderate, pro-business Republican. That erstwhile profile would get her nowhere in this year’s presidential race, however, when everyone is scrambling to get to the right of everyone else and 'moderate' is a dirty word. One has to wonder if the showy posture of ultraconservative anger isn’t the biggest lie of all."

Writes Eugene Robinson.

I wonder if Hillary Clinton is watching Fiorina's rise and trying to learn something about how a woman can present herself in an exciting, compelling way. Robinson, I suspect, would only like to say that it's those terrible Republicans who respond to anger, but Democrats are responding to Bernie Sanders and he always sounds and looks angry. (Take any video of him, pause it randomly and repeatedly, and marvel or giggle at how every freeze frame is another angry face.)

And on "Meet the Press" the other day, when asked whether Hillary Clinton is "in tune with the mood of the electorate," Andrea Mitchell said no, because "She's not angry enough." Mitchell seemed to think it would be too hard for Hillary to feed the hunger for rage: "[I]t's hard for her to be angry because then you've got, you know, Donald Trump saying, 'She's shrill,' which is a sexist word, let's face it. But she has to get around that. But the anger, the passion is all on people going on the attack, whether it's, you know, whether it's Donald Trump, whether it's Carly Fiorina, or whether it's Bernie Sanders."

If Carly can do it, why not Hillary? Carly undermines that pro-Hillary sexism argument, that if Hillary displays emotion, she'll be judged according to standards that are only imposed on women. There are reasons for a candidate to eschew the anger mode, but Carly makes it harder for Hillary to claim she must be flat and bland lest people see her as a screeching harridan.

"How are you going to win people’s votes if your introduction to them is ‘all you folks want is free stuff’?"

Said WaPo columnist Eugene Robinson, quoting something Jeb Bush did not say.

Jeb said: "[O]ur message is one of hope and aspiration. It isn’t one of division and ‘Get in line’, and ‘We’ll take care of you with free stuff’. Our message is one that is uplifting, that says: ‘You can achieve earned success … we’re on your side."

Shame on those who'd twist that. 

"Why are black boys expendable?" is the heartwrenching question on the front page at the Washington Post.

But when I click through the link, I just find a column (by Eugene Robinson) that portrays the verdict in the George Zimmerman case to mean: "Our society considers young black men to be dangerous, interchangeable, expendable, guilty until proven innocent."

Legally, that makes no sense. If Trayvon Martin were on trial for beating up George Zimmerman and had argued that he acted in self-defense, the jury would have had to view Zimmerman as guilty until proven innocent. I'm sure Robinson knows that, which is why he said "Our society considers" instead of sticking to the confines of court procedure, even as he appropriated the legal lingo of burden of proof.

If the legal doctrine that governed the jury's decision-making precludes the interpretation that the jury found Trayvon Martin to be dangerous, interchangeable, and expendable, what is the basis for the assertion that our society considers young black men to be dangerous, interchangeable, expendable? Robinson's next sentence is "This is the conversation about race that we desperately need to have — but probably, as in the past, will try our best to avoid."

Okay, let me attempt that conversation, Mr. Robinson.

"Republicans shouldn’t worry that President Obama is trying to destroy the GOP."

"Why would he bother?"

Subtext: It should be destroyed. It's already destroyed. Please think that. They're hopeless. All hope lies within the Democratic Party. No hope outside the Party.

The "most popular" article in WaPo right now is "Romney's distortions about Obama do us a disservice."

But when you click on those words, you get to a column titled "Romney’s pants on fire."

The 2 different headlines go to such opposite extremes of phoney politesse and dopey childishness. Who writes that stuff... and what's the thinking about which attitude goes where?

I didn't read the attached column, though I did glance at the last sentence: "He seems to believe voters are too dumb to discover what the facts really are — or too jaded to care." I really identified with those last 4 words: too jaded to care.