Kurt Schlichter says to stop caring about them:

I didn’t vote for Donald Trump to be a role model or a moral paragon. I voted for him to not be Hillary Clinton, and to incrementally move towards actual conservatism. Like everyone else who voted for him, I knew he wasn’t a doctrinaire conservative. But he believed in some conservative things, and that was better than someone who believed in no conservative things, and who wanted to stamp her sensible shoe into our faces forever.

Was he my first choice? No. Was he my second? No. But was there any other choice when it came down to him or Felonia von Pantsuit?

No. Which is something a lot of the cogs in the machine that is Conservative, Inc., still don’t choose to acknowledge.

That’s pretty much my take, too.

Why he’s a more honest journalist than most of the MSM:

O’Keefe has revealed them to be fools, remarkably unsophisticated in their response to his revelations. (Jeff Zucker, et al., looked like dimwits walking into the most obvious trap by dismissing Bonifield as a mere “medical” producer with the famous Van Jones already queued up for humiliation.) At this point, only the most naive believe what the MSM says. CNN is already a joke, but the NYT, WaPo, etc. are not far behind. We are all reading Pravda now.

We always were, it’s just become so much more obvious.

[Update a while later]

CNN tries to move forward:

…starting now, we’re instituting new policies for handling Russia stories. Stop groaning! This important! From now on, we’re going to need your Russia stories to all have an element of truth.”

The room erupted into chaos.

“What the hell?” screeched Wolf Blitzer. “Preposterous!”

“Wolf, your name is sort of like my puppy Woofy’s!” said Chris Cuomo. “Sort of.”

“Never!” snorted Christiane Amanpour, who had been annoying Jake Tapper because her enormous pink gyno hat was blocking his view.

“Look at it spin!” piped up Chris Cuomo between delighted giggles.

Jim Acosta stood up and adjusted his tie. “I want to register my outrage and disapproval of this hateful attack on the free press in the strongest possible terms!”

“Oh, knock it off, Jimmy. There’s no camera here,” Zucker said. “From now on, your anonymous sources have to actually exist. That’s final. I’m sorry people – calm down! – but you can’t quote sources who don’t exist.”

From the back, Don Lemon finished his drink and howled, “The voices tell me MANY THINGS!”

“Look,” said Jim Sciutto. “Like my friend Don, I deeply believe that invisible voices in our heads can be legitimate news sources. Especially if a different voice in our head confirms what the first voice told us.”

“But don’t you understand,” stuttered an indignant Brian Stelter. “Don’t you know that democracy will die in darkness if you impose arbitrary rules on us that limit our ability to report things that never happened?”

Kurt is a cruel man, but fair.

What if he doesn’t sink the party?

Now, I realize that neither Ossoff nor Handel mentioned the president much during the race — which, in itself, bolsters the theory that Trump might not be as consequential in these races as Dems hope. But the race was nationalized. Its implications were national. The coverage was national. The parties treated the race as one that would have national implications. Certainly, the money that poured into the race was national. One imagines that every Georgian Republican who went to the polls understood what this race meant for the future of the parties. When you nationalize races, Republicans will take more than the president into account.

We already know that an electorate can be happy with a president and dislike his party. Why can’t the reverse be true? Barack Obama, for example, carried healthy approval ratings for the majority of his presidency, yet voters decimated his party over six years. What if there’s a faction of Republican voters who don’t like Trump but still don’t like Obama’s policies?

What a concept. I find Trump detestable in many ways, and I’m not a big fan of Republicans, but know what’s worse than either? Democrats.

Oh, and you know about this brilliant electoral strategy of telling voters that they aren’t voting for you because they’re cruel and bigoted?

Herein lies the Democrats’ problem, just as it was a problem when Hillary Clinton bellowed about a basket full of deplorables during the 2016 campaign. The Democrats and their base (Hollywood) think the key to winning elections is to insult voters. “They don’t vote for us because they are bigots” is not a strategy I would employ as a campaign manager but they are welcome to keep trying this, and they are welcome to keep losing.

Another problem with Filipovic’s theory: Trump won educated white women over the first major party female nominee in history. ”

The otherization and dehumanization of large swaths of the voting public is a primary reason operatives like Filipovic have been reduced to tweeting from the havens of their Upper West and East Coast cities. These urban islands are where the party is forced to mine for talent to send into strange flyover districts. As Heat Street reported, Ossoff had nine times as many donors in California, as his home state of Georgia.

The key to winning, according to Filipovic, is to act contemptibly toward voters and put up candidates in districts where they don’t live, while simultaneously marching through their streets and blocking highways. Bold strategy.

Please keep that up.

Oh, and then there’s this:

The problem with Pfieffer’s direction are two-fold. While there are Republican voters disenchanted with Trump, they may not be disenchanted enough to close their eyes and pull the lever for Democrats. That’s an awfully big gamble for a party that just threw $30 million down the toilet.

This is a reinforcement of Harsanyi’s thesis above. The dynamic of the election, in which people like me hated that Trump was the nominee, but are sure as hell not going to vote for a Democrat in general, let alone Hillary Clinton, continues to play out.

[Update a while later]

Heh. “The only thing Democrats won recently was the congressional baseball game, while the only way Democrat voters can seem to get Republicans out of Congress is by shooting them. And they can’t even do that right.”

[Thursday-morning update]

Some people hate Trump; more people hate liberalsleftists [correction mine].