The morning after: Why did I do that last night — not blog about Neil Gorsuch?

I'm asking myself that question in the cold dark of pre-dawn. All I wrote last night was "UPDATE: Gorsuch." Not even an exclamation point after "Gorsuch."

But this is good. Talk about normalizing Trump! Trump named someone on his pre-vetted list, just as he said he would do. The man, by all observable indicia, appears perfectly appropriate, including the humble demeanor.*

Trump looked and sounded very presidential in the classic East Room setting. Those who want immediately to trash anything Trump does were invited to look like fools.

I was watching CNN, and the first (and only) attacks I heard were about Gorsuch's opposition to assisted suicide. I laughed. The Trump antagonists are going to rage about the value of suicide?!

We're supposed to get outraged because Gorsuch is against suicide? The Trump-haters think they can rally us with our enthusiasm for suicide?! Maybe they think they can. After all, younger folks may hanker for euthanizing us baby boomers, and arguments about suicide resemble arguments about abortion. Knock yourself out, Gorsuch opponents, you crazy nuts.
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* If I had live-blogged my every thought last night, I would have dinged him for wearing a plaid tie and wiping his nose a few times and turning the pages of his written speech with undue amplitude. I'd have complained about his incantation of all the usual pieties,** but that wasn't enough to get me up out of my comfy TV-watching chair last night. Perhaps Trump planned it that way. Make it a prime-time TV show and people will be deactivated in their comfy chairs. They'll watch and feel that Gorsuch is a very fine man. Look at his education credentials. Clerked for Whizzer White and Anthony Kennedy. And doesn't his wife look like my high school teacher in that white blouse and a-line skirt? Zzzzz.
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** "'Pieties' — is that not a word?" I ask the room as Blogger impugns it as a typo. Before looking it up and ensuring that it is indeed a word — it is — I'm distracted by its silliness — "pie ties," just as I'm writing about the man's tie. I'm contemplating the American slapstick/protest history of pies in the face of dignified tie-wearing men....





... it's so perfectly the opposite of pieties. But the dignified men of the present are well-defended nowadays, and I haven't seen a classic pie-in-the-face protest in a long time. The one in those 2 pictures is a mayor deliberately taking a pie-in-the-face challenge.***

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*** The answer to the old question Can a footnote have a footnote? is: Yes!

Trump speaks directly to the people with a no-frills YouTube video.

Stylistically, this is startlingly primitive. YouTube may be up-to-date technology, but it's always had a DIY feel to it. You can propagate very polished video with it if you want and as Trump did in his final campaign ad. But this new message has the stilted, unrefined look and sound of a middle-of-the-night infomercial on cable TV. That doesn't mean this is not a slick move. The decision to go rough can be slick.

The new message is the second video posted on a new YouTube channel called "Transition 2017." (Those of you who love to say Trump is a narcissist who can't resist slapping his name on everything should observe that the word "Trump" does not appear in the channel name.) The first video was the cheesy "My Dad," which is good if you like photos of long-haired blond boys and sentimental, tinkly piano noodling.

Oh, do you want to talk about the substance of the message? Below is a transcript to help you with that. What's most important is what's left out, which can be hard to notice. So, I'll just say: immigration.