Thar She Blows! Loud and Real Clear.

Saw the headline on somebody’s Facebook link. I stopped checking in on RealClearPolitik a couple years ago. Their rolling mish-mash approach to polls offends me, insisting as it does on the moderateness of averaging apples and oranges with bat guano and calling the result Information. Their editorial policy is similarly offputting. Steering a wobbly course down the middle, being very careful not to veer too far to the right in particular, is not a good strategy for surviving on a two-lane highway, and in political discussions it leads to sitting alone in the corner by the punchbowl, with too many empty shrimp tails on your paper plate. Goldberg territory these days. Speaking of whales.

After a very long day of reading, I didn’t feel like wading through the article myself, so I asked my wife to do it for me. She chafed through long paragraphs of nothing about an orange cetacean, noting that there was a “a lot of something for this side, something for that side,” until seven graphs down she found the only mention that justified the headline. It’s all I’ll share, since the rest of the essay is RealClearDishwater at best:

“Not good enough, say powerful Democrats and their faithful media allies. After all, the Great Orange Whale is still out there, swimming and spouting. His adversaries, still fighting the last election and ready for the next one, have their harpoons sharpened and ready.”

The lefty orange meme regarding Trump has always seemed as typically weird and ineffective as other Dem attempts at political wit. Spelling Republican with three K’s. I’m With Her/Hillary. The Wonderful O (no, sorry, that’s a weird book by James Thurber). But you know what I mean. Why is associating the president with the color orange supposed to make Trump supporters feel hurt, angry, and defeated? Because somebody nobody remembers now once quipped that his first impression of Reagan was that he was “prematurely orange,” referring to his dyed hair, a gaffe Bill Clinton turned into a sartorial art form, often switching from blonde to gray and back again within mere days. Orange is just, like so much of LeftySpeak, a dumb nonsequitur.

But I really liked the Moby Dick application. Why this whole post is here. Proving once again that one picture is worth a long ton of blubbery political prose.