THURSDAY: Lawrence O'Donnell gets it right!

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 2025

Times columnists bring in the snark: Lawrence O'Donnell has been on fire in the past quite a few weeks. 

Last night, holy cow! Rep. Khanna (D-Calif.) credited O'Donnell's program with launching the request which led to yesterday's release of all those Epstein emails:

Khanna Credits O’Donnell’s MSNBC Team with Epstein Emails Release: ‘Only Reason They’re Public’

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) credited MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell and his team for helping trigger the release of emails from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate by House Oversight Democrats on Wednesday that mentioned President Donald Trump.

The three bombshell emails, part of more than 23,000 documents recently obtained by the House Oversight Committee, included Epstein referring to Trump as the “dog that hasn’t barked” and talking about how an alleged victim “spent hours at my house with him.”

And so on from there.

So it went on last evening's show. On Monday and Tuesday evening's shows, O'Donnell blasted those who have been calling for Senator Schumer's head.

He said there isn't a single Democratic senator who is looking to replace Schumer as Senate minority leader. Last night, Senator Whitehouse (D-RI) appeared on The Last Word and seemed to agree with that claim.

Based on experience, O'Donnell may have some idea of what he's talking about. He served, for quite a few years, as top aide to the very powerful Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan during the Clinton years.

He's been inside those Senate rooms behind those closed Senate doors. He says he knows how the Senate works, and we aren't inclined to doubt him.

We're inclined to agree with those who think that the government shutdown had run its course as a strategy for Democrats—that the time has come for Dems to plan and execute the second part of their ongoing pushback against the provisions of The Big, Beautiful Bill. 

Does anyone really believe that President Trump was ever going to relent and reinstate those Obamacare subsidies? We don't think was going to happen—but in a weird two-voice echo, Bruni and Stephens are taking turns today beating up on the latest bungle by those laughable Dems:

The Conversation
Welcome to the Washington Demolition Derby

Bret Stephens: Hi, Frank. The Senate finally voted on Monday to reopen the government, and the House just agreed to do the same. So what—other than dividing their own caucus and canceling a lot of flights and terrifying people on food stamps and (with their entirely predictable capitulation) infuriating their base—[what] did the Democrats accomplish with the shutdown?

Frank Bruni: Here’s what Democrats accomplished, Bret: They exceeded my expectations when it comes to their talent for self-injury. After last week’s elections, the party was riding high, and the big political stories were President Trump on the ropes and ugly MAGA infighting over Nick Fuentes. Now we have ugly Democratic infighting over an end to the shutdown without any continuation of Affordable Care Act subsidies. By either not being able to hold ranks or not making sure at the start that Democrats were all on the same page, the party has snatched discord from the jaws of victory. Impressive stuff, don’t you think?

Bret: Reminds me of the great Will Rogers line: “I don’t belong to any organized political faith. I am a Democrat.” But maybe the party will catch a break if the latest Jeffrey Epstein disclosures manage to stick to the president—though I tend to doubt they will.

And so on from there. Bruni was full of conventional wisdom and snark. Stephens matched him stride for stride.

(Full disclosure: Gail Collins is no longer past of the weekly colloquy known as The Conversation. Where once it was Stephens and Collins, today it's Stephens and Bruni. The attempts at humor persist.)

What positive outcome would have occurred if the Democrats had persisted with the government shutdown? We don't have the slightest idea, and the pair of nattering nabobs never quite tried to say. At this juncture, we remind you of a basic fact:

The GOP still controls the White House, the House of Representatives and the Senate. Republican victories were narrow last fall, but Democrats still hold no institutional power. 

Democrats hold no institutional power! Eventually, Stephens explained why that is, and Bruni correctly agreed:

Bret: The other imperative is for parties to meet their voters where they are. Trump is president again because Democrats didn’t seem to be living on the same planet as most voters. Until last year, they were the party that wanted to pretend there was no crisis at the southern border, that inflation was “transitory,” that Joe Biden was fitter than a fiddle, and promised that “every transgender inmate in the prison system would have access to the medical care they desire and need,” as Kamala Harris put it in 2019. Now candidates like Sherrill and Spanberger are saying: We want better schools and lower costs and an executive who doesn’t scare the bejesus out of you—like a certain exterior decorator in the White House.

Frank: Before I respond more fully, Bret, what is a bejesus? I’ve used the word myself many times and now realize I have absolutely no idea. And does a bejesus do battle with Beelzebub?

Bret: No, Bejesus was a discarded character from “Beetlejuice.”

Frank: As for Democrats opening the door to Trump by tacking too far left on various social and cultural issues, you know I agree with you on that. One thousand percent. But that’s not the only moral of Sherrill’s victory or of Spanberger’s. And I’d note that the examples you just gave mash together “wokeness,” bad governance, aloofness and lies. The border: terrible governance. The claim that inflation wasn’t a big deal or would soon pass: suicidally dismissive. The insistence that Biden was at his peak: the summit of mendacity. What I see in much of that isn’t far-left madness. It’s the arrogance of power.

In the great "bejesus" exchange, you see one of the attempts at humor to which we've referred. That said, we agree with the list of ways those of us in Blue America managed to put Candidate Trump back in the Oval Office. 

We agree with Stephens and Bruni's list. That said, we did put President Trump back in the White House, and we did lose the Senate and the House, if only narrowly in the case of both Trump and the House. Given those realities, it seems to us that there was nothing we could expect to gain—and much that we could potentially lose—from an unending shutdown.

Dems need to mount Phase 2 of this promising Pushback Campaign. Sadly, we Blues got ourselves into this mess, in precisely the ways the two boobirds described. 

Now we Blues need to work our way out. It would help if we could wrap our heads around these basic facts:

We managed to do this to ourselves. There will be no magic way out.