Ask John Roberts or Samuel Alito, or any Republican nominee to any position in government since about 1994, when the party completed its ideological shift from ordinary mainstream American political party to front organization for the dark money right.

D’Amato sounds exactly like my late father in law, also a native of Brooklyn. The old man would also have had a tantrum if he hadn’t liked his placement on a plane. New Yorkers are not of this world.

It’s all too true. But the tendency of large populations in failing democracies is not to make the right set of choices at any point, even after they hit rock bottom. Rock bottom is the point when they get out the rock-smashing machines, and break through to the level below the rock.

How weird is it that I worry about Donald less because I think he’s a mere figurehead for a deeply corrupt institutional apparatus which won’t let him do undue harm?

Jesus, Assange and the boys have really gone all Matt Drudge, haven’t they? I half expect these tweets to shriek BREAKING!! and flash some sirens, except that would use up way too many characters.

You think this is a puff piece? I think it’s a hit job. It sure doesn’t make Hillary look good, and it probably isn’t intended to. When that idiot Bruni refers to “revenge and redemption” it’s kind of an accidental, stream-of-consciousness reflection on the Times itself.

“Don’t mourn, organize.” It’s a phrase that comes out of a time (just a century ago—a surprisingly recent moment, in historical terms) when strong, courageous men and women were being rounded up, beaten, deported, imprisoned on trumped-up charges, sometimes killed by officials or by hired thugs working for the…

Let me refine it to say they reinvented him as a decisive and clever executive, a natural leader. This was an image they polished and buffed assiduously over the years: because before that while yes, most of us had heard of him, it was only as a kind of zany, scandalous celebrity name that cropped up in the headlines…

NBC is Donald TV. They invented him. They created his image. He is president-in-waiting only because NBC devoted millions of dollars to phonying up a public persona for the orange son of a bitch, starting with The Apprentice and moving on to The Oval Office, Season I: The Peacock President. Even Donald’s staunchest…

Yes, “shut the fuck up” pretty much sums it up for me. This is the kind of bogus cleverness that always ends up outsmarting itself and screwing the rest of us. As it has in this present instance.

These ghastly Republicans take all the fun out of being a conspiracy nut, what with their crazy, grifty, corrupt, actual conspiracies.

No, stay where you are to create alternative nation-states to which we secret, increasingly uneasy red state leftists can migrate when the fucking Republicans take down the rest of the country and transform it into a post-apocalyptic hellscape, or a bleak feudal oligarchy not unlike the worst and most heartbreaking…

Trump’s team has long since entered Julius Streicher territory (no apologies to the Godwin police, so don’t even try). Between this guy and Steve Bannon and the neo Nazi boys at Breitbart, it’s feelin’ like a White Christmas, all right, God help the poor old country.

Points for pseudo-rationalism, and extra points for smug. You know as well as I do that this isn’t an ordinary circumstance—that these women are being forced, under threat of loss of their jobs, into the middle of a political windstorm, which is not part of their contract.

Well, the CEO of the firm that owns the Rockettes used to work for CAA, the same talent agency that Donald’s talent agent, Ari Emanuel, used to work for, so maybe they all did lunch once and this guy felt obliged to take the call when Donald rang up.

The course’s name strikes you as being the immediate problem here.

There was no probable cause for this warrant in the first place: this was a hunch-driven warrant, coming out of a reactionary element in the FBI. So there’s that.

Calling out racism is The Real Racism.

Me to Scott Baio, and also every Republican: go fuck yourselves. A) you didn’t “win,” and B) in case I didn’t mention it already, go fuck yourselves.

Absolutely. It’s a set of oddly quiet observations, journalistic yet quite personal,and you come away with a deep sense of loss.