I’m just leaving that classic bit here for your enjoyment on Christmas morning. It never gets old. But if you’re interested, please click over to this great piece by Jeff Maurer breaking down why it’s so great. An excerpt:
In my opinion, this is still funny after 38 years, which is remarkable. One reason why it perseveres might be because it’s all wit and no cheats: It’s not a song or an impression, there are no costumes or pop culture references or celebrity cameos. It’s just a fucking guy sitting in a chair talking — the only “cheat” is that the guy is Steve Martin
So: The writing is doing all the work. And the writing is an especially clean example of the three steps of sketch writing, which are: 1) Establish the game, 2) Heighten the game, and 3) Blow it out.
Read on for what he means by that. It’s fascinating.
And since we’re talking about comedy and tonight is the first night of Hanukkah, here’s another holiday comedy classic:
There are many changes Democrats might and should undertake going forward. Not because of Donald Trump. Because of Democrats. Among them, replacing their gerontocracy with younger leaders with 21st-century media skills. But we’ve been over that. Another is finding a work-around for conservative media dominance. While Democrats’ branding and message discipline is slowly improving, no amount of narrative brilliance will penetrate the public mind until they’ve addressed their “when a tree falls in the forest” problem.
It is an idée fixe on the left that politics is about kitchen-table issues and policies. So many post-mortem criticisms explain Donald Trump’s November win as Kamala Harris focusing too little on this or too much on that. Focusing too much on this group and not enough on another, as though minor tweaks (more attention to the critic’s complaint) might have changed the outcome.
Typical is a Jacobin article floated yesterday on a lefty listserv: “No, Economic Populism Did Not Lose This Election.” Economic populism works, the authors argue. Populism is popular. Polls show it. Studies show it across “a variety of statistical specifications, and accounting for an array of district characteristics,” etc.
So why did Harris lose? Because her campaign was insufficiently populist. Because she was insufficiently populist. And Joe Biden too. While his Build Back Better plans started out that way, “the policies that ultimately passed — the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the CHIPS Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act — while steps in the right direction, were simply not ambitious enough to demonstrate that the party is serious about delivering for the working class.” Etc. And “Biden was simply not capable of connecting with the people to convey his economic vision.”
The critique triggered a memory of something Rick Perlstein observed about conservatives almost 20 years ago while presenting at a Princeton University conference, “The Conservative Movement: Its Past, Present, and Future.” The event featured a roster of conservative luminaries and one liberal turd in their punchbowl: Perlstein. Conservatives, he argued, debate whether this or that figure claiming the mantle is or is not a “real” conservative. He later wrote (emphasis mine):
In conservative intellectual discourse there is no such thing as a bad conservative. Conservatism never fails. It is only failed. One guy will get up, at a conference like this, and say conservatism, in its proper conception, is 33 1/3 percent this, 33 1/3 percent that, 33 1/3 percent the other thing. Another rises to declaim that the proper admixture is 50-25-25.
It is, among other things, a strategy of psychological innocence. If the first guy turns out to be someone you would not care to be associated with, you have an easy, Platonic, out: with his crazy 33-33-33 formula–well, maybe he’s a Republican. Or a neocon, or a paleo. He’s certainly not a conservative. The structure holds whether it’s William Kristol calling out Pat Buchanan, or Pat Buchanan calling out William Kristol.
Or a critic at Jacobin or The New Republic or The Nation calling out Harris and Biden for not being a real populist or a real progressive. As Digby once observed, “‘Conservative’ is a magic word that applies to those who are in other conservatives’ good graces. Until they aren’t. At which point they are liberals.” Per the horseshoe theory of politics, the same dynamic explains how the left accounts for its own failures and defends its political dogmas.
Read the room, people. Look who a majority of Americans just elected president again knowing all they know about him. Yet it is an idée fixe on the left that politics is about kitchen-table issues and pet policies. On TikTok, @legaldad confronted the notion directly: All the policy stances MAGA says it cares about, it doesn’t really care about. They’re not what drives voting behavior. Deeper urges do. Yes, some of them are economically tinged.
The same day, the Washington Post ran a story that Latino men flocked to Trump’s puffed-up image of success driven by the prosperity gospel:
“Kamala said, ‘Trump is for the rich, I fight for the poor.’ But I don’t want to be low-class — I hope that’s not a bad way to say it. But I don’t want to be there,” said Christian Pion, 31, referring to Vice President Kamala Harris. He became a U.S. citizen last year, a decade after coming to the United States from the Dominican Republic, and cast his first presidential ballot for Trump. “God doesn’t want you to be poor.”
[…]
In the past half-century, driven by larger-than-life pastors, it has overtaken other more traditional theologies centered on God’s priority being poor and disenfranchised people, some experts said. This belief system, they said, helps explain what exit polls showed was a significant shift among Latino Christian voters to Trump, who they see as an uber-successful, strong and God-focused striver.
Policies that deliver tangible results matter. They instill confidence that government can be a force for good in people’s lives. But these days, policies don’t drive voter behavior as liberal intellectuals think they should. When Covid relief checks landed in people’s mailboxes with Trump’s name on them, voters credited Trump with delivering money that Congress appropriated. It wasn’t the policy that won him support so much as the marketing.
Do Democrats need to win back more of the working class? Sure. But in an identitarian era more than ever, nobody wants to be seen as poor. Populism may be popular in polling, but voting behavior is not economic policy-driven, if ever it was. So long as the left fails to question its political dogmas and address grittier structural issues and voters’ psychological drives, we’ll be seeing the same critiques Perlstein saw again and again, only on the left.
Merry Christmas from your once and future president. He’s just trying to bring us all together:
He takes every disgusting, imbecilic thing he does, anything that makes the decent half of the country sick to its stomach, and doubles down on it to own the libs.
The show was sponsored by @CocaCola who after seeing Charlie Brown on the 1965 cover of Time, asked about the possibility of sponsoring an hour-long animated holiday special. CBS and Coke only gave them $76,000. pic.twitter.com/goanheEMoc
The Gävle Goat is currently being protected by 24-hour guards who patrol the perimeter nonstop, two security fences, CCTV, and the constant vigilance of volunteers around the world who watch a streaming image of it to detect and deter any malfeasance.
“While the town of Gävle diligently tries to protect its magnificent Goat, it rarely succeeds. In the last 57 years, the Goat has survived intact until New Year’s just 19 times.”
From the first Sunday of Advent, the thirteen-meter-tall Gävle Goat lights up Rådhusesplanaden in Gävle – a beloved landmark and symbol of our Christmas tradition. With its central location, the goat becomes a natural gathering spot along the bustling holiday walkways, inviting people to explore Söder’s cozy shopping district. Be sure to visit Agnes Cultural House as well, welcoming Gävle locals and visitors with inspiration and culture from December 6.
If you can’t access Klaas’s more colorful account, there’s some history here, including the town’s efforts to keep vandals from burning down the goat, part of an unsanctioned local tradtion of destroying the symbol of Christmas. Check and see if it’s still there via the goat-cam.
This charming song and arresting video by local artist Lord Stryrofoam (Robert Henderson) is a holiday tradition in our household. Notice the sun traverse at 1:35.
It seems His Lordship survived the hurricane (Nov. 6): “All I can do is try to be compassionate and truthful, even though those things are now completely out of fashion.”
I wish I could say with confidence that a headline like that (on Christmas Eve no less!) Matt Gaetz is toast but I’m afraid I just can’t. Even that headline in the Wall St. Journal probably doesn’t hurt his chances of winning office or becoming a Fox star. MAGA loves him. I could easily see him becoming the Governor of Florida.
It’s possible that the only thing normal people will get out of this disgraceful episode is Gaetz’s departure from the back bench of the House and some moments like these:
Tom and Jerry in The Night Before Christmas (1941) The toys under the tree accurately represent what was available at the time. This is also the first time Tom and Jerry called a truce. If they can do it, maybe we all can. Merry Christmas, everyone. 🐈🐭🎅 pic.twitter.com/DMzxFH3b1m
Tom and Jerry in The Night Before Christmas (1941) The toys under the tree accurately represent what was available at the time. This is also the first time Tom and Jerry called a truce. If they can do it, maybe we all can. Merry Christmas, everyone. —
Thanks again, folks, for your generosity. I appreciate it from the bottom of my heart. Here’s hoping you have a lovely Christmas Eve, whether you celebrate with friends and family or are happily solo relaxing and enjoying the long winter night. (Or for those of you in the southern hemisphere, enjoying the beautiful summer weather!” )
