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Writes David Remnick in “The Floodgates Open on Trump” (The New Yorker). The “collective nerve endings” that matter are the nerve endings of Trump haters, and they are “frayed and numbed” and insufficiently “alive” because they’ve received so many “ugly” messages that they can’t feel the ugliness anymore. And yet supposedly, the ugliness has been dammed up. I guess the “dammed-up” image is useful (metaphorically) because it suggests a vast quantity of ugliness that hasn’t got out yet and so there’s potential, if the “floodgates” open, to batter the near-dead nerve endings and finally, at long last, get the reaction against Trump that Remnick is so sure he deserves. The particular ugly message to which the collective nerve endings were insufficiently alive, was Trump’s reaction to Congressman Schiff’s satirical restatement of Trump’s Ukraine phone call: “Rep. Adam Schiff illegally made up a FAKE & terrible statement, pretended it to be mine as the most important part of my call to

I’m quoting “Washington at war: Dems aim for speedy impeachment push as Trump threatens whistleblower” (CNN). I see everything needs to be fast, fast, fast for this to work. If another week passes without the whole country getting the cue to go “frenetic,” maybe the Ukraine phone call will fade away like 100 other impeachable offenses attributed to Trump. I’m put off by the pressure for speed. All the time we devote to electing a President and all the work lavished thus far into the next election, and we’re supposed to suddenly stop everything and throw this bum out? Quick! Don’t think! That makes me want to slow down and think quite a bit. And I’m amused by the war metaphor, “Washington at war,” because I was just reading a diatribe in The Washington Post against Trump for quoting some preacher who used the words “civil war” to describe the impending discord over the impeachment. Real war is truly horrible, so what an outrage to use war as a metaphor! And then CNN tosses off the wa

Writes Alexandria Petri , who seems to have ventured out of the elite cocoon to talk to some deplorables before condemning them for failing to match her opinion. This account of a perilous journey to the hinterlands appears in The Washington Post. She doesn't state where this truck stop is, so I'm not certain it isn't a satirical fantasy. I'm just reading the headline and glancing at the text, trying to find out exactly where this is, and I'm suspecting "cursed" is a clue that the place is her invention, the truck stop from hell. Now, I'm reading the text. I’ve been interviewing for what I figure is at least an hour — the clock on the wall is broken — and everyone I speak to still supports the president just as much as they did the day he was elected.... Who relies on a wall   clock to know what time it is? That's your first clue. The old man at the end of the counter shakes his head when I tell him the president is beleaguered by scandal. He’s no