Thanksgiving Cheap Shots: And Farewell to Mark Halperin

Reconstruction Thanksgiving, Thomas Nast in Harper's Weekly, 1869. Uncle Sam carving the turkey, self-government and universal suffrage on the menu, and everybody, a Native with a feather in his hair, Germans, French, Spanish, African Americans, Chinese (the Chinese woman looks more Japanese, but the child she's admonishing is wearing a Qing-dynasty queue), even a disreputable but hopeful-faced Irishman at far right, among the guests. Identity politics used to be a thing Republicans approved of! Image via Millard Fillmore's Bathtub.

Happy Thanksgiving! I'm grateful Trump's too busy watching TV to do all the harm he might otherwise be doing, glad to have a voice and wonderful readers, happy to have a big extended family to go have dinner with, and schadenfreudig that the exodus of famous but bad men from social respectability includes Charlie Rose, Leon Wieseltier, and Mark Halperin.

Following Dylan Byers awful tweet (since deleted) about the catastrophic loss of talent in the media industry because all these sexual assault victims keep telling their stories, Jeet Heer:

Imagine thinking that Mark Halperin, Charlie Rose, Brett Ratner & the like represent some peak of human excellence that can't be easily matched. https://t.co/tQqgCFVNeN

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) November 22, 2017

and me:

Imagine there's no Halperin
It's quite an easy trick
No one who says Trump's gropings aren't illegalhttps://t.co/zW6XOjAMwI …
Or that Obama is a dick.
Imagine all the journos
Trying to distinguish right from wrong. Youhoo
You may say I'm a dreamer...

(Repeat from last night) https://t.co/hA6yhEpwUP

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) November 22, 2017

More on Halperin from Lemieux, with a link to one of the loveliest parodies of postmodern times, by Alex Pareene, vintage 2013:

A day earlier, President Barack Obama had won reelection (Good, Obama thought), beating gaffe-prone former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney (That's a real shame, thought Romney), and now the "Game Change" boys would have to write a book about it. But the campaign had been predictable. Both candidates were already known quantities and each had insisted on keeping the game the way it was. Even the voters had decided to stick with the existing game.

"Well," Heilemann asked Halperin, "what will we call the book?" Halperin was dumbfounded and blindsided. I thought we were going to call it "Game Change 2," he said. You mean we have to come up with another phrase? The fate of the book, and the fates of both men's careers, depended on this decision. The wrong title could sink the whole project. Bookstores might all go out of business. Literacy rates could plummet to zero. The two might literally die. Everything depended on getting the title of the book right, Halperin knew.

Etc. Read the whole thing. I'll try to get some more stuff out later.

Cross-posted at The Rectification of Names.