Even when you know in advance that it’s going to happen and that they’re going to do it (although to be fair, my money was on Mark Halperin to be first out of the gate) there’s still that awful moment when it does happen and they do do it, and you wish to Christ that you’d been wrong for once.

This is what a real, and courageous, left movement looks like. People who come back day in, week out, month in, year out, in the face of lousy press, official repression, actual physical, personal and professional danger, and stinging sanctions by Church and State.

Jeepers. “We are all grateful for the gesture.” Bam!!!

In my case, I only wish I were still speaking with my ghastly, manipulative, deeply racist 91-year-old mother in law and my even more ghastly, still more manipulative, and staggeringly more deeply racist brother in law, both ardent Trumpistas, so that I could stop speaking to them all over again.

The entire right-wing movement is organized around propaganda, including very clever, frighteningly effective appeals to a sense of grievance and perpetual victimhood. The impact is especially widespread among white boys like this kid, not because of some innate tendency to fascism, but because kids are vulnerable,…

They’re always there. Some of them are also out there offering elaborate but entirely fabricated descriptions of the assault itself—they describe a scenario in which this poor, terrified young man, beset by violent antifa thugs, desperately tries to escape, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah: and you can bet the…

Your criticism is not without merit—for an advice columnist, this stuff is pretty aloof, which is I guess transgressive in a setting where we expect full-on uncritical empathy and undiluted affirmation—but you verge on mean-girling the mean girl here. The irony.

It’s the Peter Thiel model, ruinous and ugly. Once, we assumed that a celebrity who sued had probably suffered a real, malicious injury (as in the groundbreaking Carol Burnett lawsuit against Mad Old Donald’s favorite print outlet, the National Enquirer): now, we have to allow for the possibility that the lawsuit…

Even talking about this with email proof in hand is high risk for any woman in the arts. I know a young woman—an incredibly talented performer and writer—who was basically driven out of the community for taking on the incredible, endemic sexism and exploitation rife in her creative community (the arts are the one…

I know it’s getting quite the workout these days, but Paul Krugman’s classic description of Newt Gingrich as a ‘stupid person’s idea of what a smart person sounds like’ would apply to the nth degree in the case of Stephen Miller.

Semper paratus.

Having a bad stomach day (or as it’s now known at our house, “a touch of Scaramucci,” and I so wish you hadn’t mentioned the cottage cheese and ketchup.

Produced by the Coens. It’s all kinda Fargo Does Washington DC.

I know, right? I know I can’t really spend the rest of my life doing facepalms and muttering, Jesus H Christ, but sometimes it feels like that’s how it’s gonna be from here on in.

As with the Boy Scouts, the really chilling and horrifying thing here was the crowd response. The smirking and the cheering from these cops was disgusting. Not surprising, mind you: just disgusting. They dishonor their uniforms. And while they prepare to rack up the body count, they should be aware that this…

Maybe Sasha and Malia and Chelsea could sit these whiny little Republicans-in-chrysallis down and teach them about, you know, soldiering on and dealing with shit. Republicans are such twerps. Even their children are twerpy.

I can’t tell whether this is some kind of “creative destruction” game by Steve Bannon,the frenetic, hyperbolic, anarchic hack who plays an intellectual in the Donald regime—there isn’t much competition—and who is notoriously fond of violating all known rules of logic and decency (he only does it to annoy because he…

Oh, God, why didn’t we let them secede when we had the chance?

He really does want his people to start killing people—immigrants, dissenters, feminists, Muslims, anybody who’s handy. Every ugly little word that comes out of his ugly little sphincter of a mouth is an incitement to riot.

As noted by Mike Godwin, the man who came up with “Godwin’s Law,” an allusion to or invocation of Nazis is not invalid if it is apt. In this case, it is apt.