Matt Purple

What news network did you watch on election night? Thankfully we all had plenty of options. There was CNN, where John King's magic wall grows ever more granular: "we're moving the Kelleher household into the leans-Republican column, Wolf, though their dog remains undecided. Now next door to the Smiths..." There was Fox News, where loud people shout at each other until Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum finally pull over the car and tell everyone to knock it off. And then there was MSNBC. Oh, Lord, was there MSNBC. There did we find Nicolle Wallace, one of the network's fastidiously objective anchors, declaring that Virginia governor-elect Glenn Youngkin "worshipped at the altar of Donald Trump.

Of all the clowns to come prancing out of the Terry McAuliffe campaign car in recent weeks, it was the Muppets that finally got me. McAuliffe recently ran a get-out-the-vote commercial that featured several Sesame Street-style puppets singing about how much they love the people in their neighborhood. "Except for Larry who doesn't vote," they finish, upon which some poor schlub comes bumbling in and they all stare at him judgmentally. Next up: Snuffleupagus on why he's passionately in favor of rolling back voter ID laws. Or something. The ad technically wasn't cooked up by Team McAuliffe; it appears to have been created in 2018 by the left-leaning PAC Priorities USA. But the fact that they decided to dust it off despite it being so creepy and coercive speaks volumes.

Everyone is bullish on natural gas, but I think America’s most inexhaustible resource might be 1990s nostalgia. Every time it seems our BuzzFeed badlands have run dry, another Friends reunion or reassessment of Francis Fukuyama comes gushing through the soil. So it is that the most hyped series on TV right now is American Crime Story, dedicated this season to Ryan Murphy’s telling of the Clinton impeachment. Legends of the Hidden Temple, perhaps the most beloved children’s show from the Nineties (and that’s saying something), is being remade for adults. Even the recent death of comedian Norm Macdonald elicited callbacks to the days of cynical wiseasses and O.J. Simpson cracks. What is it about the Nineties that remains stuck in America’s craw?

We begin today with the reigning alpha of the self-celebrated political super-staffers. Enter Ron Klain, President Joe Biden's chief of staff, who is a polymath in the D.C. sense that he has both a job and a Twitter account. Klain last week made news when he endorsed a tweet that dismissed our current bout of inflation as a mere problem for the "high class." Cut to Jeff Bezos weeping at the grocery store: "I can't possibly afford any of this!!!" Klain, according to a New York Times profile, is neighbors with Chief Justice John Roberts and lists Twitter as a "hobby," so you can tell he's the well-adjusted sort.

One of my favorite pastimes is reading those alternate-lifestyle essays that the left-wing media loves to publish unironically. You know the sort: Why I quit my job at a high-powered social media firm to become a minimum-wage pansexual. Or: How my open relationship with three maple trees and a rhinoceros helped me find inner peace. The august New York Times rarely indulges such deviancy, if only because the cardinal rule of that paper's op-ed page is to never let down one's guard lest one accidentally say something interesting. Yet recently the Times did make a modest exception. Last week it ran an essay by Lara Bazelon titled 'Divorce Can Be an Act of Radical Self-Love’.

It seems strange, but just two decades ago the United States government had a balanced budget. Bill Clinton had run for president as a new type of Democrat, calling for an end to the deficits that had so bedeviled George H.W. Bush. Thanks in large part to pressure from Newt Gingrich and the Republican Congress, he pulled it off. Clinton trimmed military spending and signed into law a package of tax increases. This cued haunted house noises in the parlors of center-right think tanks, but Biden also approved more conservative-friendly measures like domestic spending cuts and welfare reform. This bipartisan approach, in conjunction with a galloping economy, led to the unthinkable: budget surpluses for four fiscal years in a row.

Breaking news from off the wires this morning. Apparently the guy who almost punched out a Detroit factory worker on the campaign trail may not be our most adept of presidents. That Joe Biden's administration is flailing has suddenly dawned on our establishment as though a miraculous epiphany. Think a kind of political Fatima, only instead of the sun moving across the sky it's just that TikTok influencer with the long nails prancing about the clear blue. How bad has it gotten for the White House? Even Chuck Todd thinks Biden has a 'pretty big credibility crisis on his hands.' And Chuck Todd once let Dr Fauci interview him. The abruptness of this realization does seem weird.

There is a spot of Washington DC, a few blocks of downtown not far from the White House, where a cigarette is your only hope. The buildings are garish blocks of glass — 'like someone overturned a giant ice cube tray,' as one wag put it — while the color palette runs from charcoal gray to navy gray. The place can feel like ennui embodied, and all the worse when rain darkens the air and the streets fill with the soulless din of tires swishing through puddles. It can wear on you, this drab slice of middle-managerial noir. But at least for me, there is one thing that can brighten it up: cigarette smoke. I might catch it off a passerby or light up a Marlboro myself. But either way I feel paradoxically improved. I think, at least someone here is having a good time.

THIS...iiiiiis Jeopardy! And it’s time now for today’s final answer. This pack of gibbering monsters is witlessly tearing down everything that’s good and decent about our society. What is us? All of us. The vicious and grievance-obsessed people we’ve become. Jeopardy! is that rarest of American traditions, one that really hasn’t changed. The quiz show has remained a granite bulwark against the pop-cultural tides: same sober presentation and aesthetic, same challenging questions and unforgiving pace. There are no blazing graphics, no CGI car chases through downtown Montpelier during the ‘State Capitals’ category. There hasn’t even been a crossover with the Real Housewives — ‘Bitch, the largest fossil-fuels producer in Central Asia isn’t Uzbekistan!

Last week, President Joe Biden announced a blizzard of new executive orders. He effectively mandated COVID vaccines for the entire federal workforce as well as all federal contractors and anyone who works at a company that has more than 100 employees. He didn't consult Congress on any of this even though — and this is what truly separates the boys from the caudillos — both Houses are controlled by his own party. So while we still technically live in a free country, it looks a bit different than it did before. The executive branch is Joe Biden, the legislative branch is the multiple Joe Bidens Joe Biden sees in the mirror just after taking his prescription Zestril, and the judicial branch is when Joe Biden lurches awake at 3 a.m. barking 'I am the law!

The thing about childhood is that eventually you're supposed to grow up. It's with this in mind that we turn to Sen. Lindsey Graham, who when he ran for president in 2016 polled so low that he was relegated to the so-called 'kiddie table' GOP primary debate. It had to chafe. Graham back then was a loud Trump critic, yet there was Trump eating off the fine china while Graham moodily stirred his wagon wheel mac and cheese around his Toy Story bowl. At one point, the ultra-hawkish Graham did try to get the grown-ups' attention. If you're tired of fighting wars, he declared on Fox News, 'don't vote for me!' Republicans stopped eating for a moment, then took him at his word. I thought of that today, perhaps because it's almost the 20th anniversary of 9/11 and I needed some levity.

If you read one book this fall, make it The Handmaid’s Tale TV show. And then don’t read another book, ever again, if you want to remain au courant on Twitter. Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel, and the more recent Hulu series, which depict a futuristic America called Gilead where women are treated as breeding chattel, have become a political obsession. They're used as a kind of shorthand by the trendy left for the medieval theocracy my fellow pro-lifers and I are supposedly hammering together in our spare time. This totalitarian state is evidently being built over the scaffolding of the lawless Randian anarcho-syndicate we were accused of building just a few years ago. But then those kindly old ladies praying rosaries outside abortion clinics are nothing if not adaptive.

The terrorist attack at Kabul airport on Thursday was so horrific as to summon the word ‘unprecedented’. But it was nothing of the sort. In fact, it was hard not to be struck by a numbing sense of déjà vu. There was the nature of the attack: a suicide bombing, pioneered as a terrorist technique by the Tamil Tiger rebels in Sri Lanka but introduced to Americans by our Islamist foes. I remember reading for the first time about a suicide bomb back in 2001 and trying to comprehend the sheer fanaticism that could lead anyone to push that button. Fast-forward 20 years to the supposedly more enlightened Afghanistan we created, and that same evil is still ripping apart the innocent. There was the ghoulish disregard for human life, a trademark of Islamic extremists.