Paul McMorrow – Snappy Title TK TK

It’s the morning. Which means Dunkin’s. Which means standing in a line and watching the gerbil wheels whir inside the hosts of Fox and Friends and summoning the restraint to keep from hurling cans of Red Bull at the TV.

The topic of the day was, “Response to the debate: What is the liberal elite saying?” (Spoiler: Maverick, change, maverick. Platitudes for everybody! Folksy and carefully scripted! Ankle-high expectations met! Successfully shifty and sufficiently vapid! Fresh and obviously superficial! Not the colossal failure that would inspire a Saigon-like retreat!)

The blond perky Friend had apparently taken stock of such commentary (wonder, if pressed, whether she could properly identify the sources of the liberal elite perfidy), and she was none too pleased. “What does it take?” she gasped. “What does she have to do?”

So this is what it’s come down to. We have to sit back and clap when Sarah Palin utters generalities and happy-sounding buzzwords, and then escapes without having to explain, or defend, what her dizzying torrents of empty words actually mean. Newspapers, we are told, are failing America by failing to properly congratulate Palin on her remarkable achievement: Getting through the debate without swallowing her tongue or trying to eat her shoe or something. She’s utterly unexceptional. Which equals, ready to lead!

The great coup of the last eight years – more than shredding scraps of paper or whatever – has been the fracturing of the national political conversation. People don’t just disagree on points; they’re working from two entirely different sets of facts, two wholly different political realities. That’s how the GOP wins – by turning the press, the arbiters of discourse, into active, malicious players. Facts don’t matter. Not like emotions do. It’s the same mentality that lets Rupert Murdoch tell Esquire, without blinking, that “On many days The New York Times favors any story that might embarrass a Republican administration.”

(I recently watched a screener for Boogie Man, a new documentary about Lee Atwater. In one scene, Robert Novak talks about how Atwater would play the press – leak to them when it suited him, and then savage them the next day. He recalls one particularly egregious lie that Atwater tried to feed him, and succeeded in foisting onto some other scribe. Then he rears back in his chair and lets out a great, full laugh.)

In other Dunkin’ Donuts news, the lady in line in front of me tried to pay for her large regular and half-dozen donuts with a credit card. It was declined.

“That one’s not working?” she coughed, before explaining, “That’s my child support card.” She then handed over a fistful of cash. Come on, deadbeat babydaddy, pay up. Mama needs her liquid crack!