Winners & Losers: Kristi Noem Is Confuzzled

Welcome back to Winners & Losers, your weekly guide to the lunatics running the asylum, and the adults keeping the lights on (just barely).

Every day, I’m presented with an incredible wealth of losers from which to choose. What luck! The real trick, though, is sifting through the mainstream, normie loser stuff (grifters, fascists, Little Marco — that kinda thing) to find losers whose actions have bigger implications for our culture, our Democracy, and our world than they might at first appear to have.

Sometimes a loser is just a loser. But sometimes, they represent a much deeper problem.

That’s particularly the case this week. I was gripped by an exchange between Kristi Noem, our Secretary of Homeland Security, and Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.). It was one of those exchanges that caught everyone’s attention for a couple of hours. You know the one — it’s where Noem made it clear she thinks habeas corpus is the opposite of what it actually is (more on this after the jump).

It’s genuinely sad and funny in the way that a Cabinet full of non-experts is sad and funny. Use whatever adjectives you want: clown car, circus, a never-ending episode of Veep. Noem and the rest are easy to dunk on, to say the least. But the exchange very honestly gutted me, but maybe not for the reason you might imagine. And, at the same time, I found a sliver of hope.

Here’s why.

Week Three: Kristi Noem (The Loser / A Loser)

The exchange started simply — I’m sure you’ve seen it. Sen. Maggie Hassan asked Kristi Noem a very simple question: What is habeas corpus?

Noem said something to the effect that habeas corpus is the President’s ability to deport people. Habeas corpus is the opposite of that. But this is beside the point.

I have daughters. I worry about a lot of things, but maybe nothing more than the almost inescapable poison of social media. Like generations of girls before them, they are faced with wildly unrealistic expectations of who they are meant to be. Of course, now those expectations follow them everywhere they go, and alert them when they haven’t checked in often enough.

That buzz in their pockets is a reminder: You aren’t enough...