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.”
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.
ReplyDelete"Lawrence O'Donnell gets it right!"
Whoa, if true, that'd be the first. But then it's bullshit of course. Retarded Democrats never get anything right.
"Trump is president again because Democrats didn’t seem to be living on the same planet as most voters."
Duh. Not only they, shape-shifting alien Reptiloids, don't seem to be living on our planet, they simply don't live on our planet.
How do I know that? Hello? Because they are shape-shifting alien Reptiloids!
Trumptard! One more outburst like that and I'm canceling your playdate with Don Jr.
DeleteNormal people are fine with or can give two shits about transvestites. Child rapists on the other hand.
ReplyDeleteTranspeople are not transvestites. A transvestite is a heterosexual person who gets sexual pleasure from dressing up as the opposite sex. A transperson is someone who feels uncomfortable in the gender assigned at birth and feels more comfortable as the opposite gender. There is no sexual pleasure involved and no motive beyond matching one's appearance and gender role to one's sense of identity. A child rapist is someone who is sexually attracted to young children and acts on that impulse. Children are legally unable to give consent so all sex with children is rape.
DeleteI’m a transformer.
DeleteWhat have Dumb Dems accomplished? Trump polling has dropped through the floor. Every not crazy person hates the dirt bag, and his scumbag enablers. About time.
ReplyDelete"Dems need to mount Phase 2 of this promising Pushback Campaign."
ReplyDeleteJust like the underpants gnomes from South Park whose Phase 3 of "profits" was the result of Phase 1 "collecting underpants" and Phase 2 "???????"; the Dems have no idea what is their Phase 2 to get to their Phase 3 of "beating Trump." lol
You wish! Phase 2 is to win the midterms and retake the House and Senate.
Delete'beating Trump' will happen by letting Trump be Trump.
DeleteI think that Democrats have demonstrated that nothing is more important to GOP than starving their constituents and denying them healthcare.
ReplyDeleteHere's an interesting sidenote: Trump's cockamamie idea of replacing ACA subsidies with a 20K payment to individuals. On the one hand, this nonsensical half-baked idea amply demonstrates that Trump has no earthly clue how American healthcare operates and what the costs are. On the other hand, if you were to take it a step further, and actually pool the billions of dollars that this would amount to with medicaid, you could could create a path to an actual medicaid for all type insurance. In other words, Trump's ignorance could lead to something interesting.
I heard it was $2K not $20K.
DeleteWhat’s an order of magnitude among friends?
DeleteIncreasingly, I am coming to believe that Somerby is not just advancing right wing talking points, but may be a member of the Nazi-supporting Groyper right. I think Somerby has been embedding neo-Nazi dog whistles in this blog for years, giggling at his own clandestine cleverness while his readers take his essays at face value.
ReplyDeleteHere are some of the bread crumbs I've been noticing:
1. Somerby's over-praise of My Antonia echoes White Supremacist critics who idealize Antonia as the epitome of American white womanhood. Cather was much admired in Nazi Germany.
2. Many right-wing neo-Nazi followers are obsessed with studying Homer's Iliad, includig Troy, ancient Greece and the Roman Empire, admiring its warrior culture and standards of manhood. They are also obsessed with Medieval culture to the point that academic medievalists have developed strategies for dealing with their enthusiasm.
3. Rachel Maddow published a history of Nazis in America and how they almost took over our govt. She is anti-Nazi and her purpose was to warn our society about current events. Somerby is a relentless opponent of Rachel Maddow, attacking and denigrating her in ugly ways.
4. White supremacists believe that white womanhood must be protected but also that the race might die out if white people do not out-reproduce other races. To this end, they encourage earlier marriage to younger women (girls) and removal of birth control to allow as many births as nature will allow. This puts them as fellow travellers with incels and pedophiles who push for younger sex and marriage. Somerby defended Roy Moore's admiration of 14 year olds and argued that our culture supports may-december alliances.
5. These attitudes about white womanhood are in conflict with feminism, which supports women's right to choose their family planning and career goals and participate widely in our culture. Somerby takes every opportunity to mock feminism, attack female professionals (journalists to Ketanji on the Supreme Court) and he repeats the Gutfeld jokes daily, especially the ones attacking women's appearance (fat jokes). He attacked both Hillary and Kamala. His misogynist attitudes often leak when discussing subjects affecting women (such as Brock Turner's rape conviction and Stormy Daniels).
6. Neo-nazis are blatantly racist. So is Somerby, increasingly in the last few years.
7. Talking about the photo of Anne Frank being worth the price of her biography is offensive given that she was killed by Nazis during the Holocaust. But smirking over her death is par for today's neo-Nazis.
8. Somerby has defended vigilante shooters who have killed minority race members (Michael Ferguson, George Floyd, the Racine protesters, Trayvon Martin), such as Kyle Rittenhouse and George Zimmerman. His victims and heroes align with racial classes.
9. Somerby defends and protects Trump, who grew up in a Nazi home and expresses overtly Nazi sympathies, attitudes and beliefs, especially against immigrants (dividing them into good and shithole countries by race).
10. Somerby is obsessed with the film Eyes Wide Shut, which is based on the Nazi occultism and cult of Jack Parsons. Parsons led a real life sex cult like that shown in the film (but with more occult theology). His cult was the basis for the movie. It was also the basis for scientology (through his early friendship with L. Ron Hubbard, and for Stranger in a Strange Land by Heinlein, who knew Hubbard at that time. Parsons worked first at JPL, was fired and then worked as a pyrotechnicist in movies. He developed his cult based on Nazi occultism in Germany, gleaned through his associations with Nazi scientists who immigrated after WWII to work at JPL. (See Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons, by John Carter.)
Cont.
DeleteNeo Nazis love to display their secret hand signs in photos and stick Pepe the Frog and other symbols into their memes. These largely unexplainable and weird ideas are Somerby's gang signs. Because the Nazis are so destructive to our society, Somerby's insertion of nihilism and offhand comments such as democracy is not worth defending, our national experiment has failed, democracy is a fuzzy concept, etc. are not harmless pranking but an attack on our system of government by a fascist, racist, unAmerican movement that has no place in America.
I believe this is the reason why Somerby keeps blogging despite having nothing to say that makes any sense. He is platforming Groyperism and undermining the left while advancing the exterme right wing. It isn't cute, it isn't funny, and it definitely isn't smart.
"These largely unexplainable and weird ideas are Somerby's gang signs."
DeleteSomerby's gang have pompadours and wear black leather jackets with "Future Anthropologists in Caves" written on the back.
7:00-7:01 -- Here's an alternative theory: You're a crackpot.
Delete7:37 -- Where can I get one of those jackets?
What is your explanation for why a man aged 79 would keep returning to discuss My Antonia, a book about adolescents on the prairie assigned in high schools. Cecelia buys that Dems are Troy and Repubs are Achaeans. Can you explain why it isn't vice versa with the Dems on the Beach winning the battle? Recall that Somerby began saying this while Dems were in the majority/presidency, not with Trump.
DeleteIf you can provide alternative explanations for each of my pieces of evidence, you can call me a crackpot. Otherwise you are just defending Somerby, again. And he really doesn't deserve it.
For example, why would Somerby say that Rachel Maddow stuffs money down her pants, but not say that about Tucker Carlson who was making $10 million more per year?
My cabdriver said Somerby is a member of the NSDAP.
Delete