This election campaign has been going on for far too long, and few -- apart from the candidates themselves, of course -- have had to endure more long, wearying months than America's punditocracy, that elite cadre of men and women paid to speculate upon, analyse and debate the nation's future. For 18 months now, next week's vote has dominated their waking hours, and it's saddening to have to report that finally, inevitably, the pressure seems finally to have broken them. For me, the decisive moment came yesterday, when New Republic senior editor Jonathan Chait -- a perfectly sane, learned and perspicacious individual, prior to his sudden psychological decline -- posted a video of himself performing a hand-puppet show about the relationship between John McCain and Sarah Palin:
Of course, for pundits of a more conservative disposition, the burden is doubled: they're at their wits' end with the eternal campaign, but they're also now dealing with rising levels of fury, resentment and infighting as they confront their side's likely imminent defeat. Take, for example, the National Review blogger Ed Whelan, who this week launched a tirade against the Washington Post for failing to report Joe Biden's controversial remarks about how the election of Obama might be followed by an "international crisis" to "test" the new president. It soon emerged that the Post had indeed reported the remarks, several times, prompting Whelan to accuse those pointing out his error of being "unhinged". (They weren't unhinged -- they'd just used the search engine at WashingtonPost.com properly.) His colleague Andy McCarthy had a similar response when readers dared upbraid him for excitedly and credulously leaping upon the fake attack story promulgated by the McCain staffer Ashley Todd: he told them he was deleting their emails and launched into a crazy rant about how the attack was believable because Obama once wrote a book chapter in support of "direct action".
Matt Drudge, meanwhile, just seemed to have pitched forward onto his keyboard in a state of exhaustion, hitting a random combination of keys with his head:
(Note that that headline, which appeared yesterday, didn't link to a story in the normal Drudge style; it was just, inexplicably, there.)
The combination of long campaign plus likely Obama victory also seems to be taking its toll on the other side of the Atlantic, where it has had the astonishing, but vastly entertaining, effect of making Melanie Phillips even more incoherently rage-consumed than usual, as in this "explanation" of why anyone who supports Obama is guilty of "wickedness, ideology, stupidity or derangement" and support for "the agenda of the Islamists". (Some of whom endorsed McCain the other day, one notes in passing -- but frankly that's barely the start of the logical problems with her piece, which is more awe-inspiring when approached as a work of art rather than an argument).
But I'm sorry to say the stress is having an effect closer to home, too. Even the Guardian's own Mike Tomasky has taken to spending long hours in his garage with various cans of spray paint:
(I kid, I kid. Although that picture was snapped in West Virginia, his home state, so you've got to wonder.)
And who's the only pundit who's managing to sail through all these high-strung emotions with his mind calm, his views as pungent as ever, and his serenity intact? Well, he's not a pundit so much as a philosopher. Or should I say un philosophe: that's right, it's the original Croque Monsieur, Bernard-Henri Levy, who delivered this marvellously content-free stream of consciousness on the financial crisis to the New Republic (content-free, possibly, because he was mesmerised by Jonathan Chait's puppet show?):
The scent of execution and of collective suicide has been circulating in the middle of the pack. It is as though we have been watching a deadly dance around a fire, where those same people who, through their irresponsibility, devastating egoism and, it must be said, intelligence, turned mad and led the financial world toward implosion, thinking that they could pull themselves out of the furnace by pushing the others in first... They are all afflicted with an ignorance of the dark, unknown world bristling with new threats that they enter with us.
But BHL is the only one immune from the fervid atmosphere, I'm afraid. It will claim everyone else over the next few days. If you hear a fizzing sound followed by an enormous bang, and then, a few moments later, a splattering sound, don't be worried. It's just Wolf Blitzer exploding. It was always going to happen eventually.
