Oct. 17 Open Thread: Horseface Pushes McTurtle Out of Headlines

Yesterday’s news cycle was dominated by Trump inaccurately calling Stormy Daniels “horseface,” an insult that simply doesn’t fit her. This was seen as an attempt to distract from Trump’s murderous Saudi buddies, but both stories actually worked to hide the outrage of the day, Mitch McConnell’s declaration that the soaring federal deficit means we must cut Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Considering that this actually impacts Americans, whereas Stormy Daniels’ sex life and the murderous impulses of a bunch of camel-fuckers do not, it’s safe to say that our media has proven yet again that the free market does not come up with the best products or solutions.

Ezra Klein points out why America has a Constitutional crisis: minority government. His article points out that the Constitution was drawn up to balance power between small states and large states, not competing political parties, and that long-term minority rule calls the legitimacy of the political system into question. As much as I agree with him, it’s a little disturbing that the punditocracy is only now beginning to notice a problem that has plagued the country for 20 years now.

Nate Silver ran an article the other day pointing out that political journalists don’t understand probabilities. For example, right now his models show the Democrats with an 80% chance of taking the House, which still leaves the GOP with a 1-in-5 chance of keeping control, but pundits keep acting as if the House is a foregone conclusion. And so it goes: Democrats have many advantages, but some disadvantages three weeks before the midterms.

Is it a coincidence that as Halloween approaches Hillary Clinton is back in the headlines? She’s taking tons of shit today for another tone-deaf interview about her husband’s peccadillos in light of the #Metoo movement that has even feminists lamenting her inability to come to grips with her complicity.

The details of the Saudi assassination of a dissident journalist keep getting more gruesome. Apparently they dismembered Jamal Kashoggi while he was still alive. Just a little reminder that there is no such thing as a “religion of peace” unless that religion has no secular power.

Which brings us to the nub of the problem: Humans are shit. Don’t believe me? Check out this photo, posted by the now-former Idaho game commissioner from his killing spree in Africa: He boasted about killing an entire family of baboons, juvenile included. He resigned his post not because a human who kills for sport deserves to die but because he committed the sin of letting outsiders see what kind of human shit sport hunters really are. Sadly, they never come up with the right solution for their murderous impulses, which would be for the hunters to hunt each other until there’s only one left.