Last week my online friends were happily anticipating family visits for the holidays. This week they are fixing newfangled appliances and furniture broken by visitors and enjoying quiet relaxation in their comfy chairs now that the gang has returned home. I saw this too late for the Christmas and Chanukah gatherings, but this sometimes off-color rant by Mary Poppins Perfect Piercing might still be useful to memorize for New Year’s parties:

"Nation still deeply divided day after vote” Yeah, I love that trick. The nation's always "divided" when Dems don't get what they want. I was forced to go to a Christmas party over the weekend and had to listen to some jackhole whine about how "divisive" Trump was and lament that we couldn't "come together." I unloaded on that nickelf*cker -- "You want to talk divisive? I hated that dog-eating Kenyan crackhead every moment of the eight years he infested the White House. But you know what I didn't do, a**hole? I didn't riot in the streets. I didn't scream "HE'S NOT MY PRESIDENT!" I didn't gin up some phony, childish "Resistance." I didn't go into every damned restaurant and public space where Obama or any of his cabinet were and scream in their faces. And I sure as hell didn't hijack the FBI to create a phony dossier to impeach him 49 hours after he was inaugurated! YOUR filthy party did all of that and more, right from the moment the polls closed and you knew that drunk, morally leprous hag of yours wasn't going to win. So you can take that f*cking 'divisive' talk and your crocodile tears about unity and shove them up you’re a** until you sh*t blood for a week!" Fortunately, I work at home, so I don't have to run into that clown more than perhaps once a month. But got-DAMN, I am sick of Dems blaming Trump for their own diaper-soiling meltdowns.

The mainstream media has little to look forward to as their fanciful reportage comes undone. Newsrooms are shedding staff and the papers facing lawsuits by the Covington kids are getting thinner and thinner. The movie Richard Jewell exposes the media incompetence and partisanship at the cost of truth. The Washington Post is now so slim my free neighborhood flyer has more copy than it does.

Rachel Maddow

Maddow was the Rosa Luxemburg of cable news, touting every half-baked bit about the President in support of an American-style putsch. Even the Washington Post took aim at her.

Reviewing her two-year pumping of the Steele dossier, the Post’s media critic Erik Wemple concluded:

When small bits of news arose in favor of the dossier, the franchise MSNBC host pumped air into them. At least some of her many fans surely came away from her broadcasts thinking the dossier was a serious piece of investigative research, not the flimflam, quick-twitch game of telephone outlined in the Horowitz report. She seemed to be rooting for the document. And when large bits of news arose against the dossier, Maddow found other topics more compelling. She was there for the bunkings, absent for the debunkings -- a pattern of misleading and dishonest asymmetry. In an October edition of the podcast “Skullduggery,” Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News pressed Maddow on her show’s approach to Russia. Here’s a key exchange: Isikoff: Do you accept that there are times that you overstated what the evidence was and you made claims and suggestions that Trump was totally in Vladimir Putin’s pocket and they had something on him and that he was perhaps a Russian asset and we can’t really conclude that? Maddow: What have I claimed that’s been disproven? Isikoff: Well, you’ve given a lot of credence to the Steele dossier. Maddow: I have? Isikoff: Well, you’ve talked about it quite a bit, I mean, you’ve suggested it. Maddow: I feel like you’re arguing about impressions of me, rather than actually basing this on something you’ve seen or heard me do. After some back and forth about particulars of the Mueller report and the dossier with Isikoff, Maddow ripped: “You’re trying to litigate the Steele dossier through me as if I am the embodiment of the Steele dossier, which I think is creepy, and I think it’s unwarranted. And it’s not like I’ve been making the case for the accuracy of the Steele dossier and that’s been the basis of my Russia reporting. That’s just not true.”

Alas, poor demagogue, she accused the conservative site, OAN, of being “literally paid Russian propaganda.” They sued, and her defense is preposterous:

According to Culttture, her lawyers argued in a recent motion that "…the liberal host was clearly offering up her ‘own unique expression’ of her views to capture what she saw as the ‘ridiculous’ nature of the undisputed facts. Her comment, therefore, is a quintessential statement ‘of rhetorical hyperbole, incapable of being proved true or false." Oh, it's capable of being proved false, alright. Maddow had previously claimed, on air, about one of OAN's reporters: “In this case, the most obsequiously pro-Trump right wing news outlet in America is really literally is paid Russian propaganda,” and added, “Their on-air politics reporter (Kristian Rouz) is paid by the Russian government to produce propaganda for that government.” The testimony of UC Santa Barbara linguistics professor Stefan Thomas Gries, however, stands at odds with Maddow's defense. Gries said: “It is very unlikely that an average or reasonable/ordinary viewer would consider the sentence in question to be a statement of opinion.”

MSNBC

The Washington Free Beacon put together a video of MSNBC’s most preposterous reports.

From the Swalwell online fart and the lame attempts to argue the sound viewers heard was a mug scraping across a desk, to the big news that Trump was “mining data from merchandise sales” to ever more ridiculous assertions that there wasn’t a “strain of racism” on the left (ignoring, among other things, the Democrats’ hard-to-miss increasingly virulent anti-Semitism and the bizarre utterings of Joe Biden), the channel marched on. It showcased a guest who warned that if the Green New Deal wasn’t immediately enacted “people will die.” (Congress didn’t, people didn’t die, except from unsanitary conditions in places like San Francisco where street pooping is creating a public health menace.) Chris Hayes whined while defending Katie Hill, whose unconventional sex life forced her resignation, “it really seems like the bad guys won here.” Another featured guest blamed the President for Epstein’s death while in federal custody and the phony baloney Jussie Smollett hoax received almost nonstop coverage.

The New York Times

The paper continues to live in an Upper West Side of Manhattan fairyland. Take Bret Stephens' advice this week to readers on how Trump can be beaten, fisked so beautifully by law professor Ann Althouse, Stephens' advice, summed up by Althouse:

“[T]he winning Democrat will need to make Trump’s presidency seem insignificant rather than monumental -- an unsightly pimple on our long republican experiment… not a fatal cancer within it. Mike Bloomberg has the financial wherewithal to make Trump’s wealth seem nearly trivial. Joe Biden has the life experience to make Trump’s attacks seem petty. Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar have the rhetorical skills to turn Trump’s taunts against him. As with most bullies, the key to beating Trump is to treat him as the nonentity he fundamentally is. Wouldn’t it be something if his political opponents and obsessed media critics resolved, for 2020, to talk about him a little less and past him a lot more? When your goal is to wash your hands of something bad, you don’t need a sword. Soap will do.

Althouse’s key rejoinders are hard to dispute:

1. Isn't this how they tried to defeat Trump the last time around? Diminish him. Insist that everything about him is small -- hands, penis, brain, worldview. Donald Trump can't possibly be President! Isn't that less likely to work when Trump actually is President?



2. Biden can run by standing in place, embodying "life experience"?! He's "experienced" to the point of old age, and we're wondering if he currently has what it takes.



3. Who cares if Bloomberg is richer than Trump? I don't think Trump won because people simply admired him for his wealth. Bloomberg might be able to use his wealth to run ads that work to some extent, but those ads are likely to minimize the significance of his stature as a very rich man, not vaunt his wealth in comparison to Trump's -- my pile of money is bigger than yours. If size matters, Bloomberg is the one who will look small compared to Trump when we see them on the debate stage together.



4. I find it very hard to believe that anyone could -- in real time, on a debate stage -- best Trump in a game of trading taunts, and it just seems silly to posit that Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar could do it because they have "rhetorical skills."

The Impeachment

It looks as if Nancy Pelosi, who argues that the President was such a threat to the life of the Republic that he had to be speedily impeached in a show trial in which Schiff and Nadler prevented a real defense, now thinks that, like a president who can veto a bill by tucking it away without signing it, she can avoid a Senate overview and vote by failing to appoint managers for the impeachment and send it up to the Senate. It hardly matters, though -- the exercise in futility by the House Democrats has padded the Republican larder with a tsunami of contributions, raised Trump’s approval in poll after poll, greatly diminished support for impeachment, energized the thousands of people (about 20% of whom identify as Democrats) to wait for hours even in cold and inclement weather to fill his rally venues. The stock market has hit a new high, unemployment a new low.

As the Democratic primaries approach, the field keeps shifting, and to me a deadlocked convention looms.

Apparently it also does to the DNC, which is already fiddling with the rules to let the superdelegates once again pick the nominee (albeit it only if a second ballot proves necessary). Translating from Yiddish my grandmother’s thought -- Nothing will help them.