It was she who chirpily informed us that NewsBusters and other right-wing sites were blaming CBS News for Santorum's defeat in Pennsylvania (and, no doubt, for global warming and the North Korean nuclear bomb). Moving along briskly to the so-called left of the spectrum, Malkin announced that Ned Lamont's defeat by Lieberman had "really opened up some fissures in the Democrat Party. There's a lot of cannibalism out there among liberals." Is that so, Michelle? I can't say I'm surprised; they are liberals after all. But tell me, who gets to eat Al Sharpton?
Right after that, just before 10 p.m. Eastern, Hume had to announce the defeats of Gov. Bob Ehrlich and Senate candidate Michael Steele, two well-liked Republicans, in Maryland. Whether it was Malkin's outburst or those losses that threw him off, Hume lost all pretense of objectivity, and spent several minutes dolefully dwelling on a lone Republican hold in a close seat, the 13th Congressional District of Florida. He seemed terribly eager for analyst Michael Barone to tell him this was a harbinger of better things ahead, and not just a Proustian remembrance of glorious elections past.
Inclining his forehead toward us at that familiar, if weird, 45-degree angle, Hume said, "Republicans' task now is to maybe hold the Senate and contain their losses in the House. They must realize in their bones now that the House will be Democratic, but, well, maybe not by too much."
Alas, poor Brit, it was too much for him to bear in the end, I'm afraid. You almost had to feel sorry for the guy, shilling for the know-nothing protofascists with his officious, piss-elegant mannerisms and his cute little reading glasses. I said almost.
Normal TV manners reasserted themselves, and before long Sen. John McCain came on the show, supposedly to talk about how the Republicans would land on their feet. Of course this is the new, improved McCain, a pod person hatched in some Karl Rove greenhouse who at some point in 2005 replaced the old tough-as-nails, indie-Republican model. I have long felt that I'd actually prefer McCain to Hillary Clinton in '08, but, jeez Louise, have you seen this guy lately? He sits there in a chair with all the lifelike vividness of Lenin's corpse, smiling in this ghastly, dead way and reading from a script, with no evident conviction or even awareness. I'm not positive his lips move. Sca-a-ry.
Less scary, but even more mealy-mouthed, was Sen. Harry Reid, the wispy nonentity from Searchlight, Nev., who could become the Senate's new majority leader. He doesn't seem to want the job. At any rate, he tried really hard to concede defeat in the Senate campaign, a defeat that (at this writing) looks as if it might just turn into victory. "I never thought we would get to six [additional Senate seats]," he said. "I've been in the minority, I've been the majority whip, I've been in a tied Senate. I've done it all!" Just what we need at the helm of that august body: a guy so experienced he just doesn't give a crap.
At 11:23 EST, Fox put up a graphic showing a cherry-picked selection of the incoming House leadership. Predictably, they'd found a photo of Nancy Pelosi with a bad puffball hairdo and a weird gape-grin. Below the speaker-presumptive were a few likely chairs of major committees: Charles Rangel, Alcee Hastings, John Conyers and Henry Waxman. These people were variously described as highly liberal (Rangel and Conyers), ethically challenged (Hastings) and overly aggressive (Waxman). No one on the show observed that the folks in the picture were a woman, three black guys and a Jew. (At least not out loud.)
Shortly before Hume's signoff at midnight, Kondracke asked him, "How do you keep track of all these blogs? There's a lot of them. It seems like anybody in their pajamas ..." He trailed off.
"It's a real marketplace of ideas, isn't it?" said Hume.
All night long, it had looked like George Allen was going to squeak it out in Virginia, and the Foxies were clinging to that apparent result. Bill Kristol kept wanting to call the race and then talking himself out of it, but he did repeatedly exclaim with boyish wonder over the fact that it might be Allen who saved the Republicans' bacon in the end. Hume got to tell his viewers, right before departing, that Allen's lead had finally evaporated, and that a recount, and possibly agonizing defeat, would come with the dawn.
By the next hour under Shep Smith, Fox had totally dropped the mode of lamentation and moved on to a new message: Let's end this partisan bickering and get stuff done! It's time for new ideas! Change! Competence! Like I said earlier, it's the message of those who just got a can of whup-ass opened all over them. (It looks like condensed cream of mushroom soup, but tastes even worse.)
"This is sort of a standard election," Kondracke said crossly in summing up. "There's always something in the sixth year [of a president's tenure], whether it's Watergate or Vietnam or a recession." Yeah, Mort. There's always something. Here's the something this year: That big plan for a permanent Republican majority? It crawled out into the Iraqi desert, rolled onto its bristly back and died.
About the writer
Andrew O'Hehir is a senior writer for Salon.
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