Wednesday, December 28, 2016

Why She Lost: Conventional Wisdom Edition


By A.J. Liebling
Meta-content Generator
 
It's the 21st Century equivalent of why the Red Sox lost: was it pitching Lonborg on two days' rest?  was it relieving Jim Willoughby?  was it keeping Buckner in the game with Stapleton on the bench?  These last-century questions are endlessly interesting.   

This century, by contrast, we are going to have to abide an endless torrent of Conventional Wisdom from the usual gasbags and bloviators telling us ignoramuses why Hillary Clinton lost the election – cough, Comey – to a dangerous crooked bigot who now seems to be evidencing signs of Alzheimer's.

Now wisdom dispensers don't get any more conventional than The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza, whose evocatively named column, The Fix, has been shoveling it out for years.  Sure enough, Chris knows Why She Lost:
In The Washington Post's terrific oral history of the 2016 presidential campaign, there's a quote from Hillary Clinton media consultant Mandy Grunwald that is remarkably prescient. Responding to a question about how Clinton could lose despite being ahead in every traditional measure of the campaign, Grunwald said:
How it will happen would be that the desire for change was greater than the fear of [Donald Trump], the fear of the risk. . . . That’s something we talked about very early on — how do we make sure that people aren’t comfortable making that leap because they’d like to go for change. . . . The question is what’s the more salient question when they go vote.
That's it. That's the election in a nutshell: change vs. risk.
That's it, says the Bernini of Conventional Wisdom.  Nothing else to see here people; move along. 

Gee, we asked ourselves, could there be any other explanation?  We searched and searched and searched (for about 0.22 seconds on Yahoo!) and came up with one possibility that we'd like to offer up to Chris Cillizza:

Yes, Chris, we got it.

Tuesday, December 27, 2016

Do not forget the clueless! The Spy's brazen Christmas appeal


Editors' Note:  Among the most beloved recurring features of the Spy is its moving holiday appeal.  Like such campaigns in other media, it works like this:  we guilt trip you into giving money and then take credit for your generosity.  It's so easy!  Unlike those other appeals in fading media outlets like newspapers, ours as in years past focuses on a group so pitiable that none could resist sending their checks to The Massachusetts Spy, The Spy Building, Worcester, Mass.  Remember, with your help, some of these poor bastards might someday get a clue!


Appalachia


How long has it been since night came to the Cumberlands?  We'll say more than 60 years ago, as the effort to rebuild that ravaged region began in earnest with the War on Poverty, which was ended with Honor by the most corrupt President in the history of the United States, pre-2017.  Since then, it's been an endless series of environmental disasters, public health collapses, and job losses, due to the replacement of coal by cheaper and less toxic fuels, like natural gas.

Over the last eight years, the Democrats under the leadership of President Obama worked tirelessly to bring hope to the meth-blackened hollows of Appalachia.  They refloated the American economy.  They brought health care to those who had gone without since the collapse of the United Mine Workers and their hospital network.  They tried to pass a massive infrastructure program to bring good-paying jobs to less-skilled workers, like, for example, unemployed coal miners.

And how did the good white folks of Appalachia respond to these valuable policy initiatives?  By voting en masse for a Tangerine-Faced Grifter who will do nothing but make them sicker and poorer while enriching himself, his mouth-breathing children, and his gang of finaglers and thieves to whom he will entrust the United States Government.  After all, he had the qualities that the folks in Butcher Holler could identify with: he wasn't black, he wasn't female, and he talked like he was on meth.

No health care, no jobs, no hope – it looks like a rough four years for the clueless voters of Appalachia.  Unless you help.  Or at least buy some of their meth.

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Republican Columnists


Almost all of American journalism betrayed its fundamental cluelessness in 2016, with a few honorable exceptions, like David Farenthold of The Washington Post.  Indeed, we first thought that we'd add the entire profession to this appeal, but then decided we might squeeze a few more bucks out of you if we focused in on the most pathetic among them.

Surely in that group were a number of supposedly thoughtful conservative Republican columnists who added much-unneeded bullsh*t [Surely, balance? – Ed.] to op-ed pages from New York to Washington.  Take the case of poor David Brooks, whose sure-fire combination of windy theorizing, straw-man arguments, and classy references to real writers have delighted his editors [Surely, readers? – Ed.] for years.  In measured tones, he seemed to conclude that the Tangerine-Faced Grifter was on balance a slightly greater menace than a superbly-qualified and brilliant woman whose faults included: (1) she wanted to take a few bucks from the rich and spend it on benefiting the poor and (2) she kept her emails on her own server.  His effect on the Republican electorate was so profound that they . . . well, you know.

Almost as sad was former Likud cheerleader Jennifer Rubin, who found herself unable to stand still for a grope from the T.-F. G.  It turned out to her surprise that the Republican intelligentsia, such as it was, didn't place support for Benjamin Netanyahu at the top of their priority list.  In fact, they regarded the neocon itch for perpetual war in the Middle East as a distraction from the main task of f**king over people of color regardless of nationality or religion, or as the Republican Party would call it, its platform.

To make matters worse, their rice bowl – the claim that their columns were needed to “balance” wild pinkos like Hot Air Force Generalissimos Tom Friedman and Freddie Hiatt '76 – showed signs of cracking as desperate editorial page editors put out a call for pro-Trump but not neo-Nazi columnists to peddle their wares.  It's one thing to be ignored and dismissed; it's another thing entirely to find a cushy gig in an economy ruined by President Obama's 70-month record of job growth.  Not to worry, Jen and Dave: we hear that Sheldon Adelson's Vegas Hayom is hiring!

PS to Freddie: She's available.  And she has plenty to say!






















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The tramp stamp reads: "Bernie 4-ever"

Millennials


We used to think that Millennials had it tough: their parents had run up a giganto debt paying themselves Social Security and pumped so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that the younger generation might have to swipe left underwater.   Even worse, they had to endure endless clichĂ©-ridden style pieces in the New York Times about their penchant for kompuchea tea cleanses on hoverboards or some such crap.

Then came this election: a last opportunity for Millennials to salvage their future.  Of course, they fucked it up:
Of the estimated 24 million people under 30 who voted in the 2016 presidential election, a large majority supported Hillary Clinton. But Clinton received notably less support from young voters (18-29) than Barack Obama did in 2008 and 2012, particularly in the crucial battleground states she lost to Donald Trump.
Not only did the slackers not turn out (according to the same study), an astonishing 8% voted for Ethan's crazy mom or Aleppo Gary Johnson.

Why?  Apparently some of these delicate flowers were still upset that their favored candidate, Grandpa Bernie, wasn't the nominee.  Then they were shocked to learn (thanks to Vladimir Putin) that some establishment Democrats wanted the candidate with the best chance of beating the Tangerine-Faced Grifter to get the nomination.  And then some heard something about “emails,” which they despise because it's how their parents check up on them when they're out of town.

Frankly, we don't give a toss why this clueless generation couldn't be bothered to put down their cat videos and save themselves from losing their Social Security, not to mention their planet.  We only know that staying home on election day because Hillary Clinton was a “politician” who used “emails” has got to be the very definition of cluelessness.  Their prize?  A lifetime on Mom's basement sofa, temping to pay off their student loans (assuming that rising sea levels don't flood the basement).

Friday, December 23, 2016

Report from Washington: What Is He Thinking?



Editors' Note: With the change of Administration from Barack Obama to the Gang That Couldn't Go Straight only a month away, the Spy thought it prudent to expand its Washington coverage to provide the kind of coverage you won't be getting from the mainstream gasbags.  So we've hired new correspondents and rented out some fabulous office space at Buzzard's Point to build out the team, which will be reporting to you until the demise of the First Amendment or the world, whichever comes first.

By Isaiah Thomas
White House Bureau Chief
 
With the President-elect of the United States threatening a vast new nuclear arms race via Tweet, Washington is once again asking itself: what is he thinking?

The usual bloviators are devoting hundreds of words and hours of airtime parsing over each syllable emanating from the Grifter-Elect’s stubby fingers, extracting a myriad of possible meanings from his vague yet menacing words.

The inquiry is sadly misplaced  because it relies on two vital but counter-factual assumptions: (1) the Grifter-Elect’s words have meaning, and (2) he’s thinking of something.

As even the dullest campaign-watcher should have concluded by now, the Grifter-Elect does not think, and he has no interest in what words mean.  When he says that Mexico is sending us rapists, he does not intend to communicate the idea that the Mexican Government is poring over lists of convicted rapists and then choosing which among them to send into the United States.  In fact he does not intend to communicate any idea at all.

What he’s trying to do?  Some or all of the following : (1) make himself the center of attention, (2) stir up anger and hatred to demonstrate how powerful he is, (3) retaliate against someone who has slighted him and (4) cast himself as the only one who can save the masses from the threats he conjures up.  He does not think.  He does not mean what he says.  How could he?  As the example of the Mexican rapists demonstrates, inferring a meaning from his words leads to a ludicrous result.
 
We admit that while these four motives usually suffice to explain any remark he makes, one must also keep open the possibility that any given outburst has no more meaning than a two-year old’s shrieked “No.”  There’s no rational motive at all, it’s just that the toddler is in the grip of powerful emotions he can’t control.  So too with, in Quinn Cummings’s classic sobriquet, the Giant Toddler.  He can no more control his emotions or be responsible for their consequences than can the Sta-Puf Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters.  Indeed, there is a familial resemblance which would be ever plainer if the Marshmallow Man slathered on some bronzer before rampaging through the streets.

In this context, everything the Grifter-Elect says or does makes sense.  When he says “Lock her up,” he doesn’t mean that he believes that there are particular federal crimes that Hillary Clinton committed.  He simply means that a girl has been mean to him.  When he says that Barack Obama was not born in the United States, he has no interest in the truth value of that  claim.  It’s only  a way to get attention, stir up racist yahoos, and cast himself as their savior.  PS it worked bigly!

Consider his most incredible statement, which was that he should be elected President of the United States.  It didn’t mean that he had any plans that he wanted to carry out as President, whether for good or for evil.  All it meant was that he could make himself the center of attention, stir up anger and hatred to demonstrate how powerful he is, retaliate against those who mocked his ambitions, like Barack Obama, and cast himself as the savior of the masses he stirred up.

Even after the election, it is clear that he has no program, no goals, indeed, no idea at all of what to do.  He has outsourced all domestic policy to a loathsome gaggle of reactionary Republican hacks, like beloved baseball fan Mike Pence, and billionaire plutocrats who see the United States Government the same way the Grifter-Elect does: as a giant pinata to be beaten until riches rain down on anyone holding a bat.

For foreign policy, he has chosen generals and CEO’s who look the part, regardless of whether they are loony (like his National Security Adviser Jack D. Ripper), without experience (like His Oiliness Rex Tillerson), or perhaps fortuitously competent and rational, despite nicknames like “Mad Dog.” It’s surprising that based on his selection criterion for senior  positions (“looking good on television”) he couldn’t find a place for Ron Burgundy.  It must have been the mustache.

In the meantime, the Grifter-Elect is content to fire off Tweets about nuclear war or magazines that pan his shitty tourist traps, whichever gets his attention at the moment, and then ride around a golf course with celebrities.  We suspect that the next four years will play out just like this transition,  until he finds out what happens when you do your level best to provoke nuclear war.  Let’s just say the results will be yuge.  At least the rest of us won’t be around to see them.

Tuesday, December 13, 2016

Texas T for the Tillerson

By Henry Cabot Lodge
Diplomatic Correspondent

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The common clay of Ambridge, PA and all the other old mill towns that voted for the Tangerine-Faced Grifter must be on Cloud Nine after seeing whom he has chosen for  his  “populist” Administration.  Let's see, he's got a former senior finagler from Goldman Sachs, an avowed enemy of public housing at HHS, a billionairess who's vowed to destroy public schools at Education, General Jack D. Ripper as National Security Adviser, and the latest gift to America's depressed and not at all racist working class: the plutocratic CEO of the world's largest and most rapacious oil company, who has spent his career devoting himself to drowning the East Coast of the United States when not poisoning the air, the water, and the wildlife of Alaska.

The nominee for Secretary of State is a well-known oil magnate
Of course, the angry white men and women of Ambridge might not put down their crack pipe long enough to register a protest, since it's only Secretary of State and their Facebook feeds aren't crammed with photos of gorillas bearing Rex Tillerson's name.  The sentient among us are supposed to buy Assistant Principal Mike Pence's line that he's qualified to serve as Secretary of State for the Trans-Atlantic Oblast of the Russian Federation, nominally known as the United States, because he ran a big oil company that did a lot of deals abroad, like with his BFF Vladimir Putin.

Now we've known a few CEO's in our day.  They shared a number of qualities:

  1. An insane oversupply of unearned self-regard
  2. A laser-like focus on next year's bonus
  3. A proven record of relentless kissing up that brought them to their current pinnacle of success
  4. A childlike love of barking orders and insults to subordinates
  5. A paranoid belief that everyone is out to get them

Of those qualities, the only one that might be helpful to a Secretary of State is the last: a Secretary of State, especially in an Administration as dysfunctional and directionless as that presided over by the Grifter-Elect, needs to keep in mind what his enemies are doing to f**k him and how he can f**k them first.  And not just enemies: it's good practice for dealing with foreign states, whether they are our allies, like Russia, or our enemies, like France.

The other attributes, not so much.  Tillerson will trouser $200 million even if he sits on the Seventh Floor and plays pinochle.  The kissing ass will of course be required, but he'll have to take a ticket just to get anywhere near that sagging bronze butt. Of course, Tillerson will shit all over anyone and everyone in his Department, but that will only ensure that he is not informed about things he'd be better off knowing, like who else in the U.S. Government is trying to do him dirty.

The bigger problem is that the skill set so helpful to climbing the oily pole doesn't do you much good in Foggy Bottom.  You can throw your briefing book at foreign service officers or even foreign ambassadors, but that won't help you decipher the ever-more ominous pronouncements from China before the guns go off across the Straits of Taiwan, much less the Delphic emanations from the Pentagon that they will favor you with while muscling poor bespectacled State out of the way.  See Iraq, Victory in.

And if you're thinking that the former CEO of Exxon-Mobil doesn't have to take a call from, and do the bidding of, Santino, Fredo, or Michaela Trump, well, brother, you're going to be shot out of the saddle, because you're about as indispensable to the Grifter-in-Chief as Rudy Giuliani.

Beloved theatergoer and baseball fan Mike Pence says that Tillerson is qualified because he's a great negotiator.  Whether all those oil deals prove to be good, bad, or indifferent remains largely unknown.  The answer depends on a combination of luck, hunches, and the future prices of various types of energy.  In any case, those deals all came down to dough.  Guess what: that's not how it works when the sign in front of you reads UNITED STATES and not EXXON-MOBIL.

How on earth is Tillerson supposed to balance support for Taiwan against enlisting Chinese help to stop North Korea?  Dumping the Iran nuclear deal versus protecting tens of thousands of Boeing jobs?  Balancing concerns about energy supply and human rights in places like Angola?  Actually, we're just pumping your derrick: you know where Tex-Rex is going to come out with that one.

Memo to Foreign Service Officers: be careful what you tell Tillerson
The only solace we can wring from this calamitous nomination is the prospect of Tillerson facing off against Deputy Secretary of State Dr.  John Bolton Strangelove.  Bolton is an old bureaucratic player comfortable with fucking anyone he doesn't like in the back channel.  Will Tillerson figure it out?

The next-to-most-recent time the Presidency was entrusted to a Republican manifestly not up the job, the State Department was torn to shreds between the devious, paranoid Al Haig and the reactionary boob sent to babysit him, a former state judge from Reagan's California kakistocracy.  We remember how Judge Clark and his fellow red-hots thought that they could stop a Russian oil pipeline by yelling, screaming, and threatening European allies as if they were subordinates who could be booted out at whim.  It didn't go so well.  It took George Schultz years to clean up the mess, by which time St. Ronald Reagan and his BFF Mikhael Gorbachev had agreed to destroy their nuclear arsenals.

If our Senate had regard for anything except passing tax cuts for the rich and destroying health care for the poor (hi, Ambridge!), it would send this toxic nomination up the pipe and flare it off.  Instead, we suspect that Tillerson will be narrowly confirmed to take his place as another piece of unqualified and crazy that will make the next four years a burning clown car if we are lucky.  And if we are not, no one will be left to tell the tale.

Saturday, December 10, 2016

1,000 years ago in The New York Times

The federal investigation, involving the F.B.I. and the intelligence agencies, has been going on since the Democratic National Committee first called in a private cybersecurity firm, Crowdstrike, in April.

Preliminary conclusions were discussed on Thursday at a weekly cyberintelligence meeting for senior officials. The Crowdstrike report, supported by several other firms that have examined the same bits of code and telltale “metadata” left on documents that were released before WikiLeaks’ publication of the larger trove, concludes that the Federal Security Service, known as the F.S.B., entered the committee’s networks last summer.

The G.R.U., a competing, military intelligence unit, was a later arrival. Investigators believe it is the G.R.U. that has played a bigger role in releasing the emails.

In an essay published on Lawfare, a blog that often deals with cyberissues, Susan Hennessey, previously a lawyer for the National Security Agency, called the published evidence about Russian involvement “about as close to a smoking gun as can be expected when a sophisticated nation-state is involved.”

Mr. Assange’s threat to release documents, she wrote, “means, put simply, that actors outside the U.S. are using criminal means to influence the outcome of a US election. That’s a problem.”

But American intelligence agencies have their doubts that the Russian intention, at least initially, was to sway the American election. The intrusion began just shortly after Mr. Trump announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination. At the time, his chances looked minuscule. One senior official noted that while the cyberattack might have been intended to embarrass Mrs. Clinton, who was the presumptive nominee, it could not have been aimed at bolstering Mr. Trump.
The New York Times, July 26, 2016

Wednesday, December 7, 2016

You read it first in the Spy('s Twitter feed)!



The Massachusetts Spy, November 19, 2016

Let’s be even blunter. Flynn doesn’t bring to mind serious, sober figures who have served other Republican presidents, people like Colin Powell or Brent Scowcroft or Condoleezza Rice. He seems more in the mold of General Jack D. Ripper from “Dr. Strangelove,” obsessing over a supposed international conspiracy “to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.”

Scott Lehigh in The Boston Globe, December 7, 2016

Monday, December 5, 2016

Annals of Diplomacy: a Spy Exclusive

By Henry C. Lodge
Diplomatic Editor

You may have heard something about a conversation the Grifter-Elect had with the President of Taiwan, during which he flushed 37 years of successful China-Taiwan policy down the gold-plated hopper.  You may have also heard that the Chinese, while somewhat nonplussed, sent a note of protest to the State Department, as would be expected in such circumstances.  But only in the Spy can you read the text of the State Department's response, leaked to us by a highly placed source who wished to remain anonymous but whose name rhymes with Don Berry:



His Excellency Cui Tiankai
   Ambassador of the People's Republic of China
       Embassy of the People's Republic of China
          3505 International Place, N.W.
              Washington D.C. 20008


The United States Department of State presents its compliments to His Excellency Cui Tiankai and has the honor to refer to the His Excellency's Note of December 1 last concerning certain conversations held by the President-Elect with certain persons located on the island of Taiwan.

Please be advised that the Government of the United States fully shares His Excellency's concerns regarding such conversation and takes this opportunity to reassure His Excellency that between now and January 20, 2017, the "one-China" policy of the United States Government remains in full force and effect.

Please be further advised that the Government of the United States is unable to provide further assurances with respect to any aspect of United States domestic or foreign policy after such date, which will thereafter be under the full control of an ill-informed narcissistic bigot with the intelligence and attention span of a fly caught in a bong.

His Excellency should be aware that the people of the United States have, in their wisdom, entrusted the fortunes of the entire world to a man whose view on any issue can be reduced to 140 characters of insult comedy and is any event formed by the last person he spoke to, who is invariably ignorant of the issue at hand.

His Excellency should also be aware that the President-Elect's foreign policy team are expected to comprise a National Security Advisor fired from his last intelligence posting for being, in the argot of the intelligence community, "batshit crazy," and the three untutored children of his first marriage when they are not otherwise engaged in decimating the animal kingdom or flogging hideous shoes to those with more money than taste.

Please be advised while the Department of State expects to continue in operation for at least a period of time following the Inauguration, we humbly suggest to His Excellency that all diplomatic communications with the incoming administration be conducted through Twitter or an appearance on a morning cable news show to reach the new President.

May we suggest to His Excellency that perhaps the best way to influence the next President is to enrich him.  The Department of State believes that the grant of a casino license in Macau to the Trump Organization or the purchase by a Government-affiliated trading company of a few thousand pair of Ivanka-brand pumps would likely resolve all outstanding issues between the United States and the People's Republic of China in a manner likely to satisfy the latter.

Upon the opening of Trump Macau, we would expect the next President to look with favor upon efforts by your Government to resolve the Taiwan issue once and for all, up to and including invasion.

The United States Department of States avails itself of this perhaps final opportunity to renew to the Embassy of the People's Republic of China the assurances of its highest consideration and best wishes for the future. You'll need it. 

/s/ John F. Kerry
Secretary of State



That should smooth things over.

Friday, December 2, 2016

Only the Loathsome, Part III


By A.J. Liebling
Content Deconstructor

We have now marshaled our forces sufficiently to dig our way through the final portion of “Kevin” Dowd's column in last Sunday's New York Times.  We can't go on much longer, so, breaking our promise to readers of line-by-line analysis (of course, if we were as narcissistic as “Kevin”'s choice for President, we'd just deny we ever said it), let's skip ahead a paragraph or so.  (For those of you who came in late, we have Kevin in quotes because we don't know if he's real or just a chance for sister Maureen to tell us what she really thinks while retaining plausible deniability.)

After berating college students who skipped class because they were upset at the imminent transformation of the United States of America into a kleptocracy (apparently, college students, unlike he-men firemen, policemen, and newspaper columnists aren't entitled to personal days off), “Kevin” decides to take a shot at what the kiddos are studying at college these days:
Not one of the top 50 colleges mandate one semester of Western Civilization. Maybe they should rethink that.
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! Maureen, you've heard of Columbia College up there on 116th Street?  Here's its description of its required freshman course, Contemporary Civilization:
The Core Curriculum is the set of common courses required of all undergraduates and considered the necessary general education for students, irrespective of their choice in major. . . .

Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West

Founded in 1919 as a course on War and Peace Issues, the central purpose of Contemporary Civilization is to introduce students to a range of issues concerning the kinds of communities – political, social, moral, and religious – that human beings construct for themselves and the values that inform and define such communities;. . .
We're not going to go through 50 fucking websites just to prove that “Kevin” doesn't know jack shit about higher education, but here's two more:

At the University of Chicago, thought by many others besides “Kevin” to be a pretty fair school, undergrads must take two courses from the following list:


Readings in World Literature I-II-III

Philosophical Perspectives I-II-III

Greece and Rome: Texts, Traditions, Transformations I-II-III

Human Being and Citizen I-II-III

Introduction to the Humanities I-II-III

Reading Cultures: Collection, Travel, Exchange I-II-III

Media Aesthetics: Image, Text, Sound I-II-III

Language and the Human I-II-III

Closer to home perhaps, here are the core requirements of one fine school within rock-throwing distance of Annandale, Georgetown:
Kevin Dowd remembers when college taught you how to think white
They also have to take science courses so they can understand that women do not have to remain silent whilst menstruating, a tidbit lost on “Kevin”'s preferred candidate.  Maybe “Kevin” should rethink getting his information on the state of American academe from Rush Limbaugh.

Let's move on to “Kevin's” next nugget:
Mr. Trump received over 62 million votes,
A mere 2,500,000 fewer than Hillary Clinton, which doesn't seem to slow down “Kevin”'s entirely unearned triumphalism.
not all of them cast by homophobes, Islamaphobes, racists, sexists, misogynists or any other “ists.”
That's true.  Some were cast by poor whites in Appalachia because they thought the Tangerine-Faced Grifter would help them.  Perhaps “Kevin”'s definition of “help” includes cancelling their Obamacare-provided health insurance thus allowing them to depart their grim lives years earlier.
I would caution Trump deniers that all of the crying and whining is not good preparation for the coming storm. 
Another fact!  That makes two in a row.  He is absolutely correct that crying and whining is not good preparation.  Organization and resistance work much better.  We did like the neologism “Trump denier.”  That's different from “climate denier” – an individual who like the Tangerine-Faced Grifter denies the irrefutable scientific proof of human-caused global warming, an issue of no interest to “Kevin,” unlike say freshman college course requirements.
The liberal media, both print and electronic, has lost all credibility.
I come here not to defend the liberal media, whatever that is, but only to note that “Kevin” has provided us with the moron's version of a Buddhist koan.   If a column in in the “liberal media” says the liberal media has lost all credibility, then is “Kevin” Socrates?  We'll go with no.
I am reasonably sure that none of the mainstream print media had stories prepared for a Trump victory. 
I am reasonably sure that “Kevin” pulled this out of his blowhole. If he really wanted to know what preparations the media had made for election night, perhaps his sister could have picked up the telephone and called Dean Baquet, her executive editor and boss.   Sadly that would require an act of “journalism,” a craft last practiced by Maureen Dowd during her salad days on the late lamented Washington Star (died 1981).
Here is a final word to my Democratic friends.
To quote Tracy Lord, “Of whom he has many I'm sure.”
The election is over. There will not be a do-over. So let me bid farewell to Al Sharpton, Ben Rhodes and the Clintons. Note to Cher, Barbra, Amy Schumer and Lena Dunham: Your plane is waiting. And to Jon Stewart, who talked about moving to another planet: Your spaceship is waiting. To Bruce Springsteen, Jay Z, Beyoncé and Katy Perry, thanks for the free concerts.
This gets to the heart of  “Kevin”'s artichoke.  For him and his fellow white louts, the campaign was not about the economy (as Annandale has been living large at the Federal teat for generations), managing complicated and dangerous crises in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, keeping the world from drowning our children, or making life better for the downtrodden.  It was about white male triumphalism: the supposed right to gloat over a list of mostly female, minority, and Jewish celebrities that “Kevin” now feels entitled to patronize, because of how 100,000 votes fell in three Midwestern states.  (By the way, you can try to make fun of Jon Stewart if you dare, but his joke was making the obvious point that if you fear that the Tangerine-Faced Grifter will blow up the world, as you should, moving to Canada is hardly a solution.)

Ridiculing celebrities on the left is considered quite a sport among the white supremacist set, so it's hardly surprising to see “Kevin” piling on.  Liberals don't get to have equal amounts of this fun, because what's the point in roughing up Scott Baio and Ted Nugent?

“Kevin” saved his KO punch for the end:
And finally, to all the foreign countries that contributed to the Clinton Foundation, there will not be a payoff or a rebate.
That riff hasn't aged too well, has it? In the last week alone, we've seen the Grifter-Elect profit from foreign countries booking events at his DC hotel, and from countries like Argentina and the Philippines hiring the Grifter-Elect's real estate partners to influence the G-E. And since the G-E refuses to divest his holdings, instead entrusting them to Santino, Fredo, and Michaela Trump, he'll be in position to profit from not only foreign deals but also, just to name a few, going easy on penalties for a German bank to which he owes $650,000,000 and nobbling the National Labor Relations Board so that he can violate with impunity the collective bargaining rights of ill-paid maids at his Las Vegas sh*thole.

But “Kevin”'s not worried, because he knows that a Cabinet and White House staff composed of former Goldman Sachs partners, white supremacist mouthpieces, reactionary hacks, and billionaire finaglers will no doubt stand up for average hard-working Amurricans like him.  While that crowd of swindlers is robbing him and our poor country blind, stealing Medicare from “Kevin” and his contemporaries, and leaving 20 million Obamacare recipients to expire in the street, they'll provide “Kevin” what what's really important to him: a steady diet of insult comedy, unearned gloating, and the chance to put the non-white, the non-hetero, and the non-testicled in their place.

He must be so proud of himself.