Mike Pence's silent-star performance at yesterday's impromptu "oval office negotiating session" has triggered a wit war, which, so far as my knowledge extends, was won by former Republican strategist Steve Schmidt, who without much prep time said, live on MSNBC, that if an airplane passenger looked like that the flight attendants would draw straws to see who had to check for a pulse. But I'm going to defend Pence. As one who was always attending meetings that I should never have been invited to, at which I sipped coffee and listened to all the other people who shouldn't have been invited say stupid stuff in order to prove that they had to be there, I admire a guy who can sit still in silence. The real pro move would have been to say he couldn't make it, he's doing lunch with someone with whom the vice president might plausibly do lunch, maybe the third undersecretary of labor--but, having erred by showing up, he took the highest road.
Honestly, but not surprisingly, I think Trump's performance was the ridiculous one, and Jon Chait, of New York Magazine, had the apt dart. Here is a link. For those of you who want the short version, Chait deployed refreshingly the overworked trope concerning how someone's playing 3-d chess while the overmatched foe is trying to remember the rules of checkers. In this case, Schumer was in the role of the 3-d chess player, and, as he was palely considering his first move, Trump stuffed all his checker pieces into his own mouth, tried to swallow, choked, and died. Schumer is a genius!
I don't understand why Nancy Pelosi has to fight to be Speaker. Only thing I can come up with is the possibility that what all these whining, uppity women say about not being taken seriously by men's club members is true, and that can't be it. Her counterpart, Paul Ryan, is widely regarded as a boy wonder even though he's 48 and his accomplishments end with the list of elections he's won. Pelosi, tenacious and effective, is merely good at her job.
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