“You broke my heart, David French!”

Jeff Goldstein contemplates the aftermath of the election debacle by channeling The Godfather.

Just read it.

“The strangest election I’ve even seen.”

Reacting on the Fox News Channel to the GOP’s underperformance in the 2022 midterms on Tuesday, economist Stephen Moore described what happened as perhaps the strangest election he’s ever seen in his long career.

Trace Gallagher introduced the segment by pointing out that polling suggested that the Democrats would be on the receiving end of a red-wave rout over the cost-of-living crisis.

“What’s your assessment?” he asked Moore, the FreedomWorks financial expert and former Trump advisor.

“I very seldom admit that I was wrong, but I was in that camp. I thought the Democrats would take a shellacking for what they’ve done to our country, with the four trillion dollars increase in government spending, and the runaway debt, and the runaway inflation,” Moore admitted. …

“But I’ve been in this game a long time, 35 years or so. This may be the strangest election I’ve ever seen, in this sense: We know the people are angry. They’re angry about inflation. They’re angry about the out-of-control border. They’re angry about crime and other issues. And yet, I don’t think they’re was a single incumbent in either party — I may be wrong about this, there may be one or two exceptions — not one incumbent governor or senator lost, which means the voters said, ‘whatever you’re doing, keep doing it.’”

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Jim Hoft was disgusted:

In a normal time, in a normal country, voters would reject record gas prices, record inflation, record crime rates, war and corruption.

But not today.

Once again, Democrats proved they can survive anything as long as they have their fraud.

Americans reject every single dish the Democrats served. Yet, Democrats shocked Americans on Tuesday to win the US Senate, steal battleground states, and possibly keep the US Congress in Nancy Pelosi’s control, one of the most corrupt and dishonest politicians in US history.

Republicans dominated in states like Florida and Ohio, states Democrats have not yet stolen with their mail-in ballots, bloated voter rolls, ballot trafficking and manufacturing operations.

But Democrat John Fetterman, who never held a job and cannot form sentences, won in Pennsylvania. Colorado stole popular conservative Lauren Boebert’s seat with their mail-in voting. Georgia elected a Trump-hating governor but Marxist radical Raphael Warnock who likes to scream about whitey at his church won the first round of the Senate race. …

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Matt Yglesias gloats.

This was a bit of a monkey’s paw campaign for those of us who two years ago said Joe Biden could have a surprisingly successful presidency by boring the country to death, lowering the temperature on the culture war, and returning focus to brass tacks economic issues. Biden was pretty successful at delivering on that agenda, except the economic basics seemed to turn against him with inflation soaring and the national mood souring. Rather than the kitchen table, Democrats’ best issue was clearly abortion when the Supreme Court hung an albatross around Republicans’ necks.

Democrats ran lots of ads about abortion. Lots and lots and lots of ads.

To the point where a lot of people on both sides thought they were really fucking up by not doing more to be visibly addressing the crime and inflation issues that voters said was more important. I always thought the abortion-centric ad strategy was the right choice among the choices available, but I still didn’t really think it would work.

Yet looking around, I think you have to conclude that it did.

Democrats did better than I thought they would. They didn’t wildly outperform the polls or anything. But they did outperform the vibes. They outperformed the history of in-party midterm performances. They outperformed skepticism that surveyors know how to reach the public. And in several states where it counted, they outperformed Joe Biden.

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Andrew Bloody Sullivan actually came out for Republicans this time. And did it help?

Ha! The democrats nominated a drooling tattooed skinhead with a billy goat beard who campaigned in a hoodie for the Senate in my home state, and he won. I feel like Job.

Jim Geraghty sums up the debacle pretty well.

Well, that was awful. The much-touted red wave felt more like a red splash in a kiddie pool.

Don’t Let Anyone Tell You It Was an Okay Night for Republicans

No excuses, Republicans. Everyone thought you had just about the ideal issue environment for a midterm election, and the exit polls verified it. Seven in ten voters said they were “dissatisfied” or “angry” with the state of the country. Around three-quarters of voters nationally characterized the state of the economy as “poor” or “not good,” and the same amount said that inflation has caused them severe or moderate hardship. About two-thirds said that gas prices have been causing them hardship. You had parents livid about the learning loss in schools because of the long closures for Covid-19 and inappropriate materials in the curriculum. You had an unpopular president, who was such a liability that Democrats couldn’t let him go anywhere near a swing state.

And the nation, deeply dissatisfied with the way the Democrats were running things, looked at what the GOP offered as the alternative and concluded, “Nope, I’ll stick with what the Democrats are giving me” in a lot of key places.

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Matt Taibbi has the answer for how to watch election returns tonight.

No matter where you watch, coverage tonight should be packed with lunatic hyperbole, with warnings either about a blood-soaked New American Reich or a vast election-theft conspiracy, depending on which party succeeds. Of course the most likely end is the Beastie Boys No Sleep Till Brooklyn scenario, i.e. we don’t make it to an answer no matter how late we stay up, with panic continuing for weeks and people on all sides feeling more anxious and hating one another more as time progresses.

To which our answer is, Drink! But have fun doing it, at least tonight, perhaps according to these rules:

Drink EVERY TIME:

Anyone, from a candidate to a TV anchor, mentions that “democracy is on the ballot.” Double-shot for use of the phrase democracy itself, e,g, “democracy itself is on the ballot.”

You’re told this is the most important election of our lifetime, or the most critical moment of our lives, etc. You may drink an additional shot if you’re certain today is not any of those things.

Steve Kornacki draws a frenzied geometric shape around Pennsylvania.

John Fetterman’s shorts are visible in a video report.

Nate Silver reminds you he doesn’t do predictions, but rather publishes percentage-chance forecasts.

Liz Cheney is mentioned (i.e. as if mattering).

Elon Musk is blamed for something. Double-shot if the bad thing is “in the name of” or “under the guise of” free speech.

Anyone mentions “over a hundred election deniers on the ballot.” Also drink for permutations on the theme, e.g. “60% of Americans will have an election-denier on the ballot,” or “Over half of GOP candidates are election-deniers,” “election-denier JD Vance wants to ban books,” etc.

Anyone mentions the “specter of violence” or “conditions ripe for violence,” or reports votes are being counted “amid threats of violence.” Do an exclamation shot at the end of the night if no violence is ultimately observed.

A politician or a pundit warns that everything might come down to the “wild card” in Georgia, and with suspicious gleefulness reminds you we might all be waiting until December 6th to find out who’ll control the Senate. Call it the “No Sleep Till Georgia” rule. Read the rest of this entry »

Paul du Quenoy says his (pierced and tattooed) generation is conservative, because it remembers growing up under Reagan. (!)

What makes X-ers like me (born in 1977) so damn conservative? In the context of 2022, there is no great mystery. We grew up in the 1980s, a blessedly simpler time when life was fun and carefree, when the USA was cruising toward Cold War triumph, and when truth, justice, and the American way were both time-tested certainties and the unstoppable wave of the future. As far as we knew, we were living in the best of all possible worlds, riding our bikes without helmets, going to raves without social media tracking our every move and pill, knowing our moms and dads couldn’t be helicopter parents if they had the whole Army Air Cavalry Brigade at their disposal. Every problem had a solution. Every feeling found a form. Every dream became a reality.

Moronic boomers took our complacency for laziness. We were derided as “slackers,” dismissed as the first generation who would live worse than our parents. We were chided for our cynicism toward the Sixties ideals that our elders still mouthed but had abandoned so hypocritically that for us they were little more than a good laugh when the adults left the room.

For a brief moment, we were the Brat Pack ready to take the reins in a Pax Americana. Then, as the college students and young professionals of the 1990s, we watched the boomers piss it all away. Scandal followed scandal. Power grab followed power grab. One institution after the next was corroded by corruption and greed. By the end of the decade, the first boomer commander-in-chief left us wondering what the definition of “is” was as he testified in the first presidential impeachment trial in 130 years. The boomers knew they had failed. But rather than admit it, they retreated into Bob Dylan’s tedious word salads and hid behind corporatized Beatles lyrics.

Of course their values struck us as hollow and empty. The much promised better world — and the opportunities we were meant to have so long as we jumped through their achievement hoops — never materialized alongside all the wars and recessions. Like the latch-key kids we’d once been, we found our own solutions. We became self-reliant, self-directed, and self-assured. Our medium was sarcasm because nothing left to us was sacred or even authentic. More of us believed we would live to see UFOs than Social Security checks. To the mass irritation of our parents and teachers, we tuned in religiously to the satire of South Park before it got preachy, The Simpsons before it got zany, and Saturday Night Live before it sucked.

We watched with bemusement as the younger generation born after 1980 — the millennials now poised to vote Democratic despite it all — grew up coddled and medicated, enslaved by technology, unable to solve basic problems without turning to parental helicopters. Their entitled ways became even less intelligible as they spouted identity politics and grievance tropes gleaned from our failing schools and universities, using them to whine, shame, and scold their way into the lower echelons of the workplace while taking gruesome bites of avocado toast to help the overprescribed Xanax and Adderall go down. The irony with which they expressed their discontent seemed pointless and sad.

To our immense frustration, the boomers cultivated millennial dependency and helplessness, all while keeping real power, success, and independence out of their emotionally impaired reach. “You will own nothing and you will be happy,” an arch boomer recently told them without discernible objection. Is it any surprise that more American millennials view socialism more favorably than capitalism and vote that way? For both sides of this codependent intergenerational alliance, the ideology of the left offers to provide for their ever greater needs while absolving them of all responsibility. There’s an app for that. It is called the Democratic Party.

Generation X-ers are caught in the precarious middle. Our financial fortunes have been broadly held back by Boomers unwilling to pass the torch, and are coveted by millennials. The freedoms we knew and cherished through our young adulthoods are now ever more forfeit to the nihilistic abstractions of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” which are demanded by our insecure juniors and mandated by our browbeaten seniors. The uplifting unity we felt when the Berlin Wall fell has yielded the crude, hackneyed divisions of identity politics and a digital age atomization so thorough that 65 percent of young Americans do not feel comfortable having a face-to-face conversation. Our natural esteem for success and prosperity is locked in mortal combat with the crippling self-doubt, poisonous envy, and consequent ill will of the generations surrounding us.

For the X-er, the choice is clear. One party, whatever its faults, vibes morally and ethically with the spreading of human happiness and success tempered by traditional values. The other party tries to enforce alien moral and ethical vibes as a precondition of human happiness and success at the expense of traditional values, especially if they get in the way of its peculiar vision of “social justice.” Nearly six out of ten X-ers are drawing on their halcyon childhoods to find the right way forward.

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I certainly hope he’s right about the voting, but personally I’m skeptical of the alleged perspicacity of the generation that thought Punk Rock was any good.

This, this! is running for the Senate from Pennsylvania.

John Fetterman’s last name sounds like the name of a good old Pennsylvania Dutchman, but take one look at him. He’s got a skinhead and a billy goat goatee. His arms are covered with tattoos. And he’s out there giving speeches, running for the highest office in the Commonwealth, wearing workout clothes. The SOB looks like a recently released brig rat running for head of the local outlaw biker chapter, not for Senator.

Unbelievable! Who would vote for that?

On top of everything else, he’s a Gen X-er who is really more like a millennial. He sponged off his parents until he was 49 (he’s now 53), and like fellow leftist Bernie Sanders from Vermont, he went from being a bum to being a town mayor, after winning the primary by one vote and then running as as a democrat unopposed.

Even better, running in Pennsylvania, he’s pro Gun Control, wants to release more felons from jail, and he hates fracking. You can imagine his position on Coal.

Fetterman belongs in California, not PA.