Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Who Are They Kidding?

Raw Story asked people on the hill why the Democrats and the press seems so reluctant to cover the Manchurian Beefcake scandal and got some interesting rationales, none of which are the least bit believable.

First:

“The reason that people don’t want to talk about the sex angle in the story is that we all know that the mainstream media will not pick up the story,” the aide said.

The aide said reporters from varying print and television outlets expressed to him that they had felt duped after the sex scandals hyped around former President Bill Clinton.

“I think that you have a different culture with the mainstream media than you did than you did during the Clinton scandal,” he remarked. “I think in some ways that they’ve learned their lesson from that incident and many reporters feel that they were duped during that scandal into the kind of coverage that they were by the salacious nature, and I think there’s a resistance by the mainstream media to go down that road again.”

That would be the liberal media who were duped by Republicans into cruelly exposing to the entire world the sex life of a White House intern whose only crime was talking to that shrieking harpy Linda Tripp. They have learned their lesson and now feel squeamish about exposing the sex life of a gay Republican prostitute who widely advertised his services on the internet and somehow gained unprecedented access to the family values White House in spite of having no credentials whatsoever.

It’s good to know that they’ve finally got their priorities straight. Monica Lewinsky must feel awfully relieved about that.

And as far as the Democrats are concerned, I’m wondering how they can pass a drivers test if this is how fucking dumb they are:

A Democratic Senate aide noted that Republicans had lost their bid to impeach Clinton, and said that Democrats were just being careful.

“The one piece of the Clinton sex scandal that everyone always forgets is that they lost,” the aide said. “Clinton was never impeached.”

Yeah. That whole thing really worked out badly for them didn’t it? I’d sure hate to be in their shoes today!

And what I love about this is that it is utter rubbish. I don’t know how many hits Americablog got to “that post” but I would bet that it was huge and that a very significant number came from DC insiders and journalists. Please don’t tell me that they aren’t interested. Not only is it about militarystuds.com it’s about them, the press corps.

So far, they haven’t had to investigate anything. The blogs are doing that for them. This guy is an internet creation and the internet leaves trails all over the place. But every day new questions are being raised and old mysteries are being solved. Who knows where it will lead? One thing I can guarantee is that if somebody finds it they will eventually find a way to report it. That is how the Lewinsky scandal broke through, after all. They fed the news to Drudge who then broke the story so the mainstream press had a hook. Don’t kid yourselves. The rules haven’t changed. “It’s Out There” hasn’t been retired.

I’ve got a couple of questions that I haven’t seen addressed but would seem to be relevant. How was Gannon being paid? Eberle of GOPUSA stipulated that Gannon was paid a stipend equal to half of his income, according to the congressional press office. Was that true or was he actually a “volunteer” as some have stated? If so, where was he getting the other half?

And isn’t it interesting that the other main character in the White House payola scandal, Armstrong Williams, was sued by his male assistant for sexual harrassment and settled it for an undisclosed sum. (One of the sweeter aspects of that settlement was that the plaintiff was given a nice sinecure at Oliver Stone’s media outfit. Semper Fi, baby.)

It certainly does seem as if the Bush White House is pretty darned tolerant for an administration that mined millions of votes in the evangelical community by being against gay rights. And the Dems and the mainstream press know very well that this is a problem for the Republicans.

George W. Bush’s carefully crafted mystique is built entirely on his manufactured masculinity. In fact, the Republican Party has based its whole image upon the idea that they are the party of macho straight men and the fawning traditonal women who love them. They have spent the last 35 years impugning the manhood of every male Democrat and portraying every Democratic feminist as a manhating bitch — and winning the national security issue pretty much on the basis of what that implied to their bigoted neanderthal base. It never ends. Back in the day it was “I can’t tell if you’re a boy or a girl with all that hair.” Just last year they spent hundreds of millions of dollars convincing a large number of people that a documented war hero (and killer) was a mincing, vacillating “Frenchman.” What do you think that that was all about?

I’ve always believed that one of the main reasons Clinton frustrated them so much was that his womanizing protected him from the ongoing gay-baiting subtext of the Republican appeal. It took one of their most potent arrows out of the quiver. The best they could do was call Hillary a dyke.

Every time the Republicans are called upon to squeal “don’t ask don’t tell” when asked about JimJeff Gannon, it puts another hairline crack in their coalition. Don’t ever think that this does not affect them. It goes to the very essence of who they portray themselves to be.

Update: The above many be the subtext, but here’s the hook.

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Modo Rides The Zeitgeist

There once was a time when our manly preznit was the favorite sex object of bored Manhattanite housewives who love a man in an ill fitting costume. Remember this?

I had the most astonishing thought last Thursday. After a long day of hauling the kids to playdates and ballet, I turned on the news. And there was the president, landing on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, stepping out of a fighter jet in that amazing uniform, looking–how to put it?–really hot. Also presidential, of course. Not to mention credible as commander in chief. But mostly “hot,” as in virile, sexy and powerful.

[…]

I know that I am not the only one who entertained these untoward thoughts. The American media were fully aware of how stunning the president looked last week. And they chose to defuse it by referring endlessly to the “photo-oppiness” of the event. The man uses overwhelming military force to vanquish a truly evil foe, facing down balking former “allies,” and he is not taken seriously as a foreign-policy president. He out top-guns the Hollywood version, and all the media can talk about is the impending campaign commercial…Newsweek called it a photo-op but gave the president what can only be called a centerfold.

Sadly, as the JimJeff scandal unfolds, it’s looking like this might be one more Ricky Martin heartbreak for these ladies. Today as they ponder their favorite sex and the single gal’s probing questions, their hearts are sinking:

How often does an enterprising young man, heralded in press reports as both a reporter and a contributor to such sites as Hotmilitarystud.com, Workingboys.net, Militaryescorts.com, MilitaryescortsM4M.com and Meetlocalmen.com, get to question the president of the United States?

Who knew that a hotmilitarystud wanting to meetlocalmen could so easily get to be face2face with the commander in chief?

Who indeed?

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Wedgies

Two links to Kevin in one day, but he’s on a roll and has some very good advice here, riffing on Noam Schieber’s post today on the abortion/birth control wedge issue:

We need more issues like this. Republicans have used the culture wars to divide liberals and moderates for decades, and we need issues of our own that divide conservatives and moderates. In the end, the best way to win the culture wars is probably to switch gears and force conservatives to fight on an entirely different set of subjects. After all, time is on our side on most culture war issues anyway, and putting conservatives on the defensive in other areas may be a better way to win than a headlong assault.

I actually think this is part of the culture war, but that is neither here nor there. His point is still correct. Republicans have been masters of wedge politics for years, but this tactic goes both ways and there are many openings in a party that has been holding its coalition together with a strange amalgam of nationalism, tax cuts/big spending, rapacious capitalism and religious traditionalism. There are dozens of conflicts within those factions that have been successfully covered over up to now. With power comes the constituencies who expect to be satisfied and they cannot satisfy all of them.

The birth control issue is an excellent example. I would imagine that most of those pro-life married women who voted for Bush are in favor of women having easy access to birth control. Indeed, I would expect that they have no idea that the pro-life movement us run on the institutional level by people who think that birth control is a form of infanticide in some cases and an invitation to female promiscuity in others. They would be very surprised to learn that under all the high flown pro-life rhetoric about abortion there lies a movement that is based upon a belief that it is wrong for women to control their reproductive capabilities. Back in the day, people understood this but it’s been lost in all the pearl clutching about partial birth abortion and the like. It’s never really been about reducing the number of abortions. It’s always been about feminism.

This country is not as conservative as the base of the Republican party. That’s why both of Junior’s cowboy hat ‘n boot campaigns have been as phony as JimJeff Gannon. It’s time to pull down the flap on their big tent and introduce the Republicans to each other up close and personal.

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I Warned Him

I tried to spare him the mind-numbing, soul destroying seige that is Hugh Hewitt’s “Blog”, but Ezra insisted on reading it anyway. He’ll recover eventually. Drinking heavily is probably required.

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Dumb Things People Said After 9/11

Statement One:

“I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America… I point the finger in their face and say ‘you helped this happen.I do believe, as a theologian, based upon many Scriptures and particularly Proverbs 14:23, which says “living by God’s principles promotes a nation to greatness, violating those principles brings a nation to shame”… I therefore believe that that created an environment which possibly has caused God to lift the veil of protection which has allowed no one to attack America on our soil since 1812.”

Statement 2:

Well, really. Let’s get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break…More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I’d really be interested in hearing about it.

Guess which one is hosting Crossfire today?

Doggone that liberal media.

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Freeper Spat

Atrios points to a funny Freeper thread that is up in arms because Sean Hannity apparently dissed them today on his radio show. Hannity said that he hadn’t signed on in two years and that it’s been taken over by the fringe.

That’s interesting. He may not have signed on, but he was the recipient of scoops from a well loved freeper named “Jeff Gannon.” Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Update: Hannity was apparently very enthusiastic about Gannon’s talents. Media Matters has the tape.

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The Company You Keep

Neither Kevin Drum or Matt Yglesias can be considered among the bombthrowing partisans on our side and yet they are both obviously getting a bit alarmed at the increasing frequency of these traitor-talk temper tantrums coming from the right.

I wrote about this last week, wondering “why all the anger?” If it is as Lincoln said, that they cannot feel they have won unless we are “avowedly with them” then we truly are dealing with people who are undemocratic. Evidently, they believe that if they control the institutions of power in Washington that the other side is required to say “Uncle” and disappear, which strikes me as a case of believing your own hype. Just because Rush finds it useful to play to the rubes with the “Democrats are wimps” theme it doesn’t mean we would never wake up and realize that we were being played. In our system of government there is no provision for surrender. You can pass legislation by strict party line majority or you can compromise and try to find common ground with the other side. When you use scorched earth tactics such as comparing your opponents to terrorists don’t be surprised when they get fed up and decide that there’s no margin in cooperation. You’d better be prepared to do what you want to do with no cover from the other side and plenty of criticism.

For those who think that this intemperate liberal baiting is confined to the internets or talk radio, however, it might be worthwhile to pay attention to the CPAC conference that begins today. This is the real Republican convention where the good folks on the right really let their hair down. If past conferences are any guide, this one shouldn’t disappoint even the staunchest eliminationist.

Here’s a report from 2003:

Before Vice President Dick Cheney gave the opening address at the Conservative Political Action Conference, a three-day gathering of the right-wing faithful outside of Washington, D.C., organizers asked vendor Gene McDonald to put away his “No Muslims = No Terrorists” bumper stickers.

McDonald complied, and for the rest of the conference the jolly white-haired Floridian peddled his popular anti-Islam wares from under a table. As the leading lights of conservatism, including some of the most powerful figures in the Republican Party, gave speeches to a packed house, McDonald did a brisk trade, despite official condemnation by CPAC staff. He offered T-shirts with the words “Islam: Religion of Peace” surrounding a photo of a bomb with the word “Allah” on its timer. A towering linebacker of a man attending the conference with his elderly parents bought a mug saying “Islam” in red Nazi-style block lettering, with the “S” replaced by a black swastika. “They’re going to love me at work,” he chortled.

[…]

The conference was packed with events devoted to denouncing the perfidious left. There were panels titled “Modern Feminism: The Bilking of the Taxpayer,” “Real Stories of Real Liberal Bias on Real College Campuses,” “NAACP, the Congressional Black Caucus and other Professional Victims” and “Myths, Lies & Terror: The Growing Threat Of Radical Environmentalism.” Dan Flynn, author of “Why the Left Hates America,” was on hand to sign his book. Ann Coulter, there to push her own book, was greeted with a thunderous standing ovation, after which she ripped into the “treason lobby” — the Democratic Party — whose platform “consists in breaking every one of the 10 commandments.”

[…]

Of course, CPACers are ebullient about the Bush presidency, and they have no doubt that Bush will do their bidding. Their understanding of Bush is very similar to the conventional wisdom on the left: He’s seen as a man whose language and image pander to moderates while his actions serve the far right. Tim Weigel, who was manning the Free Republic booth, described compassionate conservative initiatives like Bush’s plan to address AIDS in Africa as, “throwaways, put out there to keep the left quiet while he takes care of Iraq.” Behind him hung a picture of Hillary Clinton’s head Photoshopped onto the body of a pig.

[…]

…Sheldon, a plump, pink man with pale blue eyes, wasn’t out celebrating the Bush presidency. Instead, the man who has pledged “open warfare” against all things gay, stood in the exhibitors hall before a makeshift carnival game called “Tip a Troll,” in which players were invited to throw gray beanbags at toy trolls with the heads of Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Hillary Clinton and Tom Daschle, or trolls holding signs saying, “The Homosexual Agenda,” “Roe V. Wade” and “The Liberal Media.”

Sheldon, like the rest of the right, isn’t letting success distract from a monomaniacal focus on its foes. Indeed, the overwhelming message at CPAC was that it’s time to toughen up.

At a Thursday seminar titled “2002 and Beyond: Are Liberals an Endangered Species?” Paul Rodriguez, managing editor of the conservative magazine Insight, warned that the liberal beast wouldn’t be vanquished until conservatives learn to be merciless. “One thing Democrats have long known how to do is play hardball,” he intoned, urging Republicans to adopt more “bare-knuckle” tactics. The next day, Frank Gaffney, assistant secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan, told a rapt crowd about the “well-financed media campaign against the Bush White House.”

The rise of Fox News and talk radio has done little to assuage right-wing resentment toward the supposedly liberal media. “It’s amazing conservatives ever win any victories at all with the left’s hegemonic domination of the media,” Coulter told her listeners. She spent most of her talk mocking antiwar arguments (“Why not go to war just for oil? We need oil”) and antiwar protesters. “Scott Ritter, that’s a liberal for you,” began one bit. “Cleans up, cuts his hair and it turns out that it’s to get underage girls.” Bada-BOOM.

For speakers like Coulter, who performs her act as a kind of stand-up routine, much of this stuff just seems like cynical hyperbole, but among the rank and file, liberal-phobia is real and deep. Virgil Beato, a 25-year-old graduate student at American University, spoke of the “mean-spiritedness” of the left, much of which he’d learned about from David Horowitz (the former Salon columnist). “David Horowitz knows how the left thinks,” Beato proclaimed. “He’s trying to send out the message that sometimes we need to play hardball. That’s the message we’re getting from here.”

Here’s the program for this year and it looks to be just as exciting. They will be giving a special award to honor the non-partisan Swift Boat Veterans for Truth on Friday night. The Vice President will once again be speaking along with such luminaries as Ken Mehlman, Karl Rove, Grover Norquist, Senators Rick Santorum, Jeff Sessions, John Sununu, Tom Coburn, Sam Brownback and John Cornyn among many other members of the Republican establishment. Well, except for a few notable exceptions. Schwarzennegger, Pataki, Giuliani, Whitman. But that’s not surprising is it? This event isn’t televised.

I wonder if Instapundit and others would find it the least bit necessary for these elected leaders to disavow the outrageous “fun” described in the article above as they thundered that the left should do with regard to Ward Churchill and Michael Moore. If I were Dick Cheney I might actually be concerned that some of my own followers were handing out bumper stickers that say “No Muslims = No Terrorists” because, you know, that kind of thing isn’t exactly Bush boilerplate and people might just get confused about what our foreign policy is. The Iraqis we just “liberated” are Muslims last I heard. And I surely would worry that someone might take it the wrong way when the most powerful members of the Republican party appear on the same bill as a woman who says liberals should be beaten over the head with a baseball bat.

In our party we have top opinion leaders actively repudiating the flamethrowers of our party because they fear being tainted by their alleged intemperate partisanship. The Republicans, on the other hand, hold a convention where the highest most exalted members of the party mingle shoulder to shoulder with those who think that liberals should be killed. It’s an interesting juxtaposition isn’t it?

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Help Our Friends

Julia of Sisyphus Shrugged tells us that Wampum, the wonderful hosts of our Koufax awards have not received enough contributions to pay for the extra bandwidth they’ve needed these last few weeks and so their ISP pulled the plug.

Julia has their paypal code on her site so everybody head over there immediately and cough up a few bucks. It wouldn’t take long to get them what they need.

These are truly good people, whose least laudable good deed is hosting the Koufaxes. If we don’t take care of our own we really aren’t worth a damn.

Go now.

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Moral Hazards

As I sit here listening to two congressmen on Inside Politics drone on about how we must restore civility to politics (now that the GOP controls all branches of government) I’m experiencing one of those rare times when I truly understand why people become Republicans. It’s because they have political instincts and we don’t. If you are a political animal that is a very compelling trait.

Here is a pretty good example of how the right blogosphere is treating the Manchurian Beefcake story — from Jonah Goldberg :

Until Jordan quit on Friday, the lefty bloggers were dancing around the victory fire chanting in triumph over bagging this Jeff Gannon guy from Talon News. I’m extending this metaphor too far, I’m sure, but their celebration makes me wonder how so many brave warriors can eat their fill off the carcass of a chipmunk. I confess that at first I thought this sounded like a real story. But it’s turned out to be more than a little sad.

Paraphrasing a comment I read somewhere yesterday (apologies to the author) “pay no attention to the naked gay conservative male prostitute sitting in the middle of the family values white house living room.” Goldberg affects a jocular dismissiveness for a reason. He knows what a real story is and he knows how they work. And he is trivializing this one because it is actually quite dangerous.

Meanwhile, on the left we have much handwringing by commenters over this not being a “gay” story and how we should concentrate on the national security angle and how it’s really about access etc, etc. We too are ignoring the naked, gay conservative prostitute in the midde of the family values white house living room. And this is where they get us.

Perhaps it would be instructive to take another little trip down memory lane. Jonah knows very well what a real story is because he was up to his ears in one of the biggest political sex scandals in history. From Michael Isifkoff’s award winning MSM articles on the Lewinsky affair:

There was another guest at Jonah Goldberg’s house in the Adams Morgan section of Washington that day. For some months, Newsweek’s Isikoff had been in touch with Tripp – “hounding” her, Goldberg claims. Aware that Isikoff knew of rumors that Clinton was having an affair with a former White House staffer, Goldberg suggested to Tripp that she play the tapes for Isikoff. Uncomfortable with the whole taping process, Isikoff declined to listen and left Goldberg’s house.

In their many phone conversations that fall, Lewinsky complained to Tripp that she was being neglected by the president… By the fall of 1997, Lewinsky was complaining that Clinton’s ardor for her seemed to be cooling. He wasn’t calling her much, and he rarely returned her increasingly frantic calls. Lewinsky was restless and bored at the Defense Department.

Isikoff listened later, needless to say. So did the entire country. That little meeting at Jonah’s house led to the impeachment of the President of the United States. They came this close to forcing him from office. Goldberg and the entire GOP establishment knew without doubt that they had a story and they were not afraid to lead the media to it by the nose. And just look at what an oozing chunk of soap opera tabloid offal it was.

Fast forward seven short years. We have a man whose biggest cheers on the campaign trail in 2000 were when he would solemnly swear that he would “bring honor and integrity back to the White House” — and everybody knew very well that he was talking about fellatio in the oval office. After his recent reelection in 2004, stories abounded about how the issues of moral values, the impact of evangelical Christians and, most importantly, the movement to allow gays to marry had tipped the balance in what was a very close election. Now we find out that a conservative gay male prostitute was given highly unusual access to that same family values white house. There isn’t a story there?

I hear endless braying about how the Democrats have to “fight back.” And yet… we just don’t seem to to have the heart to play the raw political game they play.

A Republican’s political instincts would tell them instantly that this Manchurian Beefcake story presents an amazingly fertile opportunity to take the Bush White House off message in a way that they clearly despise, sow dissension within the GOP coalition, mitigate a growing moral hazard and most of all, make Republicans around the country examine once again whether their attitudes about gays are really what they think they are.

Number one, it is always a good thing to knock a white house off its message. To do it when the press secretary himself is involved, or seems to be, is even better. In shark infested political waters life doesn’t get any better than making phony family values hucksters endlessly repeat phrases like “we didn’t know he was a prostitute.” First rule — make them talk about stuff they don’t want to talk about. It’s very difficult to get them started, but if you get the media lemmings running in the right direction they’ll do it.

Second, didn’t the religious right just threaten Bush with witholding its support if he backed down on gay marriage? And didn’t the president then dutifully put it in the SOTU? Clearly, after Bush declared his support for civil unions and backed off the FMA after the election, the Christian Right is a little bit nervous about his bona fides on the issue. When Kerry and Edwards mentioned that Mary Cheney was a lesbian, a widely known fact, they were attacked in the most bizarre campaign kabuki in memory because the Republicans know that there is a huge chasm in their party developing on this issue. Lynn and Dick are like a lot of Republicans out there — they have gay family members. And only the most hard core authoritarians like Alan Keyes are willing to disown them for it. (Listen to Lynn Cheney twist herself into a pretzel and then get angry when she’s pressed on it here.)

This is an issue that threatens the GOP.The cosmopolitan conservatives and libertarians don’t have a problem with gays and yet The Christian Right is building a homophobic crusade. A lot of people in the middle don’t know what to think. A party with political instincts would exploit that. It’s not a new concept I’m advocating here. It’s called “divide and conquor.” The Right blogosphere sounds like a bunch of San Francisco ACLU liberals when the issue of Gannon comes up and the smart thing for the left to do is ask the Christian right if they agree with their fellow “conservatives.” (I believe that Aravosis has already discussed this.)

It wouldn’t be nice and wingnuts will call us hypocrites. (It’s a good thing hypocrisy was retired from the political dialog somewhere around the time Virtues “Czar” Big Bill Bennett was laying it all on red, Dave Drier was “dating” Doro Bush and Limbaugh was popping a fistfull of hillbilly heroin or we might have something to worry about.) When the wingnuts complain about how we hate gays, just say “No I don’t. And clearly, neither do you. But James Dobson does. Let’s go have a chat with him, ok?”

It might just force some of these chickenshit libertarians and GOP urbanites to show their true colors and get some GOP parents and siblings of gay people to face up to what they are doing. Can anyone believe that there is no value in showing the country that many of the highest level Republicans in the Bush Administration are actually quite tolerant of gays? Doesn’t that move our agenda forward?

I don’t believe that we advance the cause of gay rights by allowing the right to have it both ways, which they clearly do. We have a tittilating tabloid story, replete with nude pictures and prostitution, that illustrates the fact that they are merely pandering to the religious right on this issue. It would be too bad if we are too squeamish to pursue it because that is exactly what the other side is counting on.

Finally, the biggest reason to pursue this story is because we are creating a terrible moral hazard if we don’t. The Republicans have no incentive to stop the politics of personal destruction if we don’t hold them to their own standards and they continue to be rewarded. Pitchers, batters and Republicans understand this instinctively. So should we.

When I read things like this, I just despair. Folks we can put on a better show than this, we really can.

Update: And if anybody wants to know why this really, really matters beyond partisan politics and jockeying for power, I think Rude Pundit gets it right.

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You Like Me, You Really Like Me

Kevin Drum and Eugene Volokh wonder why actors can’t play smarter political activists. Kevin thinks they are lazy and cites the fact that they can’t be bothered to memorize and believably deliver the five or six lines they are given in an Academy Award nomination speech. I’ve often wonder why in the hell they can’t have somebody write them a decent acceptance speech and deliver it like an adult instead of a gushing 12 year old. I understand that it’s an emotional moment, but these people are supposed to professional performers. And they are being rewarded for being the best professional performers of the year for crying out loud. Halle Berry had me blindly reaching for the Pepto.

As to why they don’t seem to be able to play themselves as intelligent, thoughtful political pundits, that’s simple. They need writers and directors. Democrats, are you listening?

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