NP: King's X, Manic Moonlight

Josh Marshall talks about the fallout for health care reform if Scott Brown wins in Massachusetts, but what I like most about it is the description of all of this as "meta-politics." Because ultimately, it seems like actual politics have been completely overwhelmed by meta-politics, and that's a really succinct way to describe everything that's gone wrong in politics.

In case you're not as big a nerd as I am, or as infatuated by this particular prefix,"meta-" is described by Wikipedia as being "used in English (and other Greek-owing languages) to indicate a concept which is an abstraction from another concept, used to complete or add to the latter." And, to be thorough, "politics" is defined by Merriam-Webster as "the art or science of government." So "meta-politics" is basically a level of abstraction about actual politics, which is as good a description of the political punditry as I've ever seen.

In practice, then, whenever some talking head goes on about what something means politically -- in terms of re-election, optics, whatever -- and not what something actually means, it makes you think that MSNBC needs to reconsider it's tagline.