No! I don’t want to say bye-bye to Elizabeth Warren!

But I have to — Warren is dropping out of the race. It’s a rational response given her weak showing in the primaries to date, and also because it is clear the media was never going to take her seriously. I hope that whoever ends up getting the nomination does, though, and gives Warren and some of the other candidates significant positions in their administration.

Now it’s a two-person competition for the Democratic nomination, between two very old white men. This is not a good position to be in. What is this, a racist, sexist gerontocracy? (Rhetorical question: yes, yes it is.)

Bye-bye, Michael Bloomberg

Even a delusional billionaire can see the writing on the wall. Bloomberg is out.

One interesting promise:

Bloomberg has pledged to pay his massive staff to continue to work through November to support whoever becomes the eventual Democratic nominee.

If he does that, I’ll forgive him his narcissistic attempt to buy the presidency.

Of course, he endorses Joe Biden on his way out. Cancel that forgiveness thing.

I know some people defend caucuses, but…

I’ve defended them myself. We want more participation, not less, and caucuses discourage too many voters. Minnesota switched to a presidential primary election since the last time we did this.

With 85 percent of precincts reporting at press time, nearly 815,000 Minnesotans cast ballots in Tuesday’s presidential primary. In 2016, just 318,000 people participated in caucuses statewide.

Caucuses had long been criticized as being more appealing to party insiders rather than the typical voter. Long lines and slow results also frustrated participants in 2016.

I don’t know that Minnesota was as prepared as they should be. I talked to a few people who live in more rural counties (even more rural than Stevens county, where I live), and they simply had no designated polling places at all — all votes had to be done with a mail-in ballot. They were rather jealous of the fact that I was wearing an “I VOTED” sticker, and isn’t getting that sticker the whole point of going to vote?

But yes, we felt like the turnout was huge in 2016, with chaotic milling mobs at the bar where we caucused, but apparently that was less than half the number who participated this year.

Tired of living in my worst dreams

Oh, man, what a nightmare. I dreamt that it was November, and I had just unenthusiastically voted in the presidential election. Joe Biden had swept all the primaries, had picked some unmemorable, faceless white man as his VP, and bumbled his way through a few ugly debates. The Democratic party had successfully doused the flickering flames of progressive activism in this country, inserting their establishment apparatchik into the running for the highest office, and he was prepared to appoint a phalanx of bankers and insurance executives into his cabinet. On election day I voted for that stooge, dreading the next four years of either his toothy smug grin or a repeat of the orange fascist, and, while I was unhappy with either choice, my decision was forced. And now I was just waiting for the election results. I felt exactly as I did on election day in 2016, grim and doomed.

Then I woke up.

My doctor had warned me that my toradol injection would wear off after about 6 hours and I’d have to fall back on ibuprofen for my achey bones, and she was right. Ouch. So I just took some painkillers and am waiting for them to kick in, and thought I’d write up my horrible dream.

It was just a nightmare, right? I’m not going to look at the election news. I need to get back to sleep.

Bones rattled, vote cast

Yes I voted.

Then I dragged myself to the doctor and got a CT scan. Nothing is broken or bleeding; the doctor even said my brain looks good, so I’m thinking I ought to get that testimonial tattooed on my body somewhere. Even as I was sitting in the waiting room, though, I could feel my back and neck starting to freeze up into painful rigidity, so I think I’m going to be feeling this for the next several days.

But not right now. I got a shot of the good drugs, I might just pass out for a while.

The only political punditry you need

I vote in the Minnesota primary tomorrow, along with lots of people in states all across the country. There is a stultifying mass of punditry hovering over the country: ‘experts’ are all telling you who to vote for based on this mysterious thing called “electability”, on prognostications about matchups next November, on how many other people are voting for candidate X vs candidate Y. Your goal is to get on the winning bandwagon early, because as we all know, whoever guesses which candidate will win tomorrow gets fabulous prizes.

Oh, wait, no they don’t. You win nothing for picking the same candidate the most people pick.

So I have some advice for you. Ignore your friends and families. Never mind the statistics and the odds. Drop-kick FiveThirtyEight into an open sewer manhole. Fuck the commentators on CNN and Fox and MSNBC. Don’t trust me to tell you who to vote for.

Instead, be totally selfish, and think exclusively about which candidate you like best, who supports the policies you favor. The calculus of figuring out who your neighbors and the people of California and Texas will vote for is totally irrelevant. Go into that booth and vote your conscience. That’s all.

Wasn’t that easy?

Then go kick Chris Cilizza and whatever other goofball has been calling the horserace. That’s the fun part.

Why does Chris Matthews still have a job?

He’s always been this way: unpleasant, obnoxious, poorly informed, and just generally been a grating presence on the news. I don’t know what segment of the population he’s supposed to appeal to — I don’t think he’s liked by either the right or the left — and Matthews has a serious misogyny issue.

This tendency to objectify women in his orbit has bled into his treatment of female politicians and candidates. He has repeatedly lusted over women in politics on air, including remarking in 2011 that there’s “something electric” and “very attractive” about the way former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin walks and moves, and noting in 2017 that acting attorney general Sally Yates is “attractive, obviously.” But he has reserved a particular contempt for the woman who made it closest to ascending the heights of American political power, Hillary Clinton, calling her “witchy,” “anti-male,” and “She-Devil.” The Cut obtained footage of him joking in early 2016, just before a live interview with then candidate Clinton, “where’s that Bill Cosby pill,” referring to the date-rape drug. In 2005, he openly wondered whether the troops would “take the orders” from a female president; after another interview, he pinched Clinton’s cheek; and in another, he suggested that she had only had so much political success because her husband had “messed around.” This evening anchor, in addition to everything else, has repeatedly challenged whether women are legitimate politicians or could be president at all. “I was thinking how hard it is for a woman to take on a job that’s always been held by men,” he said of Clinton in 2006.

When MSNBC was constantly being labeled as a left-leaning news channel, I just had to look at Chris Matthews to wonder what they were smoking.

I guess he’s been yanked from all of MSNBC’s election coverage, at last. Now they just need to fire him.

The media have lost the plot

Last week, Donald Trump gave a couple of press conferences that were the apotheosis of Trumpian incoherence and inanity — he rambled on in his usual stream-of-consciousness style, exposing the fact that he didn’t have a clue what he was talking about, and announced that the person who was in charge of the COVID-19 response was Mike Pence, who is the opposite of a responsible, informed choice (put him in charge of the Prayer Team, OK?), and later took direct action by announcing a crackdown on Mexican border crossings (our cases of COVID-19 are not coming from Mexico). Yet at the same time, our media blandly treats this as routine.

Wednesday’s briefing was arguably the most abnormal moment yet in a profoundly abnormal presidency.

But top news organizations, rather than accurately representing Trump’s alarming behavior, made it sound like nothing untoward happened at all.

They made it sound like some real news was made: That Trump put Vice President Mike Pence in charge of the government’s response to the coronavirus; that the president urged calm.

But even the Pence “news” appears to be a sham, and a clusterfuck: In addition to being basically a fuck-you to the medical community — given Pence’s proud defiance of scientific truths — it was apparently a last-minute decision based on political optics that blindsided Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, who at the same time insisted that he was still in charge.

This one really wasn’t hard. It was obvious to anyone listening to Trump’s rambling, often incoherent, self-centered, stream-of-consciousness ad-libbing – much of it straight out of his political rallies — that:

  • Trump had no real understanding of what he was talking about.
  • He had no sense of what was required of him as president.
  • He sees this as being all about him.
  • There are only so many things that can come out of his head.

    • No, the New York Times is not pointing out the idiocy of this president.

    But at the New York Times, Michael D. Shear, Noah Weiland and Katie Rogers engaged in something even worse than stenography: The cherrypicking of quotes that weren’t incoherent, that in no way whatsoever indicated the true nature of the briefing. They led off:

    President Trump named Vice President Mike Pence on Wednesday to coordinate the government’s response to the coronavirus, even as he repeatedly played down the danger to the United States of a widespread domestic outbreak.

    Nothing in that story told readers what they most needed to know.

    Even in a sidebar on Trump’s credibility, Annie Karni, Michael Crowley and Maggie Haberman simply called Trump’s briefing “casual”. Then they punted:

    Mr. Trump could face a moment of reckoning. Maintaining a calm and orderly response during an epidemic, in which countless lives could be at stake, requires that the president be a reliable public messenger.

    There was also a cutesy sidebar by Katie Rogers about Trump’s self-declared germophobia.

    Inexcusable.

    It’s maddening. The more serious the media outlet, the more likely they are to pretend the drooling clown at the top of the country as a serious thinker, because the Newspaper of Record would find it beneath their dignity to expose a madman.

    Although I will say that I watched a little bit of CNN on Friday night, and they were discussing the reasons we should be concerned about a COVID-19 pandemic, and they did come right out and say that one of the exacerbating factors for this disease is “incompetent leadership”. That ought to be the lead story in every newspaper every day. “THE PRESIDENT IS INCOMPETENT”, 72 point bold font, all the time until he’s run out of town on a rail.

    P.S. The president also put Katie Miller, Stephen Miller’s new wife, in charge of all coronavirus communications. He’s not only incompetent, he’s corrupt and handing out jobs to cronies. No one will care.