One of the most “important” functions of the White House Press Corpse is to serve as body watchers — if anything happens to the President, by God, they’ll be there to tell us every little detail that isn’t really that important. So, in a way, Saturday night’s attack by an obviously fucked up individual was right down the middle of the fairway of their raison d'être.

These people are, in general, very soft, and even people with a lot more grit than this crew is going to be traumatized by witnessing a shooting. If Trump is good at anything, it’s a understanding what his audience of the moment wants, and he delivered:

Trump also talked about his ballroom at that press conference, so there’s that. He’s lucky, as usual, that he was evacuated before he gave his speech, which was apparently a list of grievances.

Before we taped our podcast with Dylan Ris, we were talking about kid’s books, and good recommendations, since some of us (not me) have young kids. One of the books that I read with my kid years ago was Hunger Games, and we also went to the movies. A lot of the reviews were fairly unkind, saying it was a bit derivative. Maybe so. But one thing that it got right, total bullseye, was the difference between people in the outlying territories and dwellers in the Capitol. The Capitol dwellers were vain, tedious, superficial and “fashionable”. It was sort of a LA-meets-DC place.

Well, readers, screw your courage to the sticking place, because the Capitol dwellers are going to have a moment, and we lesser folks (in their mind) are just going to have to tolerate it.