Thanksgiving

In 2010, a US air force drone crew watching infrared video of a night-time convoy of Afghan vehicles, as revealed in the transcript of their conversation, thought that warm dots in the trucks they saw on their screens were weapons. In fact, they were turkeys, presents carried by the peasant passengers for their relatives in Kabul. (The trucks were attacked, killing 23 people.)

Triumph

Jesus, Saddam Hussein went out with more dignity than this.

Oh look, here's Thomas Frank, perennial winner of the Ian Malcolm Award for Political Commentary* back in the Guardian again, shouting the blindingly obvious into the howling void.

I have been narrating our country’s toboggan ride to hell for much of my adult life, and I can attest that Biden’s triumph by itself is not enough to bring it to a stop. It will never stop until a Democratic president faces up to his party’s mistakes and brings to a halt the ignoble experiment of the last four decades.

Yeah, well, good luck with that. These are after all the idiots who thought Biden would be good for down ticket candidates, when his whole strategy was to persuade disaffected GOPers to vote against Trump, while cheerfully ignoring the obvious question - why on Earth would they vote Democrat in any other race? And the idiots now arguing the failed campaigns of "centrists" are the fault of the progressives who won. But of course it makes perfect sense to construct a national election strategy around the question of whether it might spook some paranoid ex-Cubans in America's wang.

* It's a statuette of a young Jeff Goldblum in a leather jacket, with the inscription around the plinth: "Boy do I hate being right all the time."

Pitch

Sixties used car pitchman's joke out-take (warning: quite a lot of sailor-talk).