Shorter Charles Gaba: For now, it still looks like Obamacare enrollment this year will end up at around 14.7 million. That’s not bad, especially considering that fewer people are dropping out of employer plans than expected.

For everyone except die-hard conservatives who are driven mad by the thought of poor people getting decent health care, this is a pretty good Christmas present. Enjoy it.

Our long national nightmare is nearly over:

Happy holidays from the Beatles: As of 12:01 a.m. on Dec. 24, the band’s music will finally be available on streaming services worldwide.

…The surviving members of the group, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, along with Universal Music Group, which controls the band’s recorded music, made no statements other than the fact that the Beatles’ catalog — 13 original albums and four compilations — will now be playable on nine subscription streaming music services.

Maybe I need to try one of these newfangled streaming thingies someday. I’ve heard rumors that music has continued to be produced over the past 30 years, and I suppose I should investigate that.

So: Beatles or Stones? Which are you?

I assume everyone knows this about Donald Trump, right?

A self-confessed germaphobe, Trump doesn’t even like to push a ground floor elevator button because it’s been tapped by so many people….This does not sit well with the masses, let alone the PTA crowd. Trump especially avoids shaking hands with teachers, since they are likely to be have been “in touch” with too many germy kids.

It’s no wonder that he finds it disgusting to even contemplate someone’s use of the bathroom. I can only imagine what Trump thinks of having to use public facilities himself—assuming he ever does. Maybe he always holds it in until he can make it back to the gold-plated lav on his plane.

I’ve wanted to use this headline¹ for a long time, and now I have. I guess I could just end this post right there, or maybe ramble on about how Hunter S. Thompson’s 1972 collection of campaign reporting was one of the books that got me interested in politics in the first place. Me and a million others, I suppose.

But no. I actually have a point to make, and I will get around to making it, I promise. First, though, I’m turning over the mic² to my great-grandblogger³ Martin Longman. He was bemused by blogger Tom Maguire’s casual acceptance that fear is a perfectly reasonable emotion to exploit in a political campaign:

At first, I was offended. Then I realized that we’re both probably correct in our own way, but with limitations.

I’m sure if I challenged him, Maguire would recite countless examples of Democratic politicians exploiting the fears of the electorate. These would be fears about the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, or fears about NSA surveillance, or fears about grandma losing her Medicare or Social Security….I think this is different in kind, though, than using fear itself as a political tool….What’s really bad, in my opinion, is to deliberately increase people’s sense of insecurity not primarily so that they will demand policies to keep them safe but to make them more inclined to vote for you and your political party. Making people afraid for political gain is cynical and almost cruel.

As Longman suggests, this is a mighty thin line to draw, and I’m not sure it’s the right line anyway. Here’s the thing that liberals tend not to want to accept: different people evaluate threats in far different ways. This is not right or wrong. It’s just human nature.

I tend to be almost absurdly non-fearful, for example. This is not because I’m brave in the usual sense: I run from fights at the first opportunity and I have no idea if I’d rescue a drowning child from a watery maelstrom. I’m talking about more abstract fears. Should you be afraid of being mugged? Afraid of terror attacks? Afraid of earthquakes?⁶ In my case, I never even bother getting out of bed if I feel an earthquake. I just roll over and wait for it to stop.

This is, by almost any measure, stupid. Sure, most earthquakes around here are fairly small. But not all of them. Wouldn’t it make sense to at least hop out of bed and get ready in case my house starts to collapse? Yes it would. I’m putting my life in danger by underplaying the threat.

So who has the more correct view of national security threats, liberals or conservatives? As it happens, liberals tend to feel less threatened than conservatives by danger from others, something that we paid a big political price for when we ignored the huge rise in violent crime in the 60s and 70s. Conservatives tend to respond more strongly to threats from others, something that they paid a political price for in the aftermath of the Iraq War. In the first case, conservatives understood the reality better. In the second case, liberals did.

This is not because conservatives were smarter the first time and we were smarter the second time. It’s because, at a very deep level, we react to threats differently. There’s no purely objective way to decide who’s right and who’s wrong in any particular case, but I think you can reasonably say that sometimes conservatives are closer to right and sometimes liberals are closer to right.

So what’s the right response to terrorist attacks? I can’t even imagine being personally afraid of one. The odds of being targeted by some insane jihadist are astronomical. But a vast number of people feel very, very differently.⁷ At a gut level, they’re afraid that what happened in Paris and San Bernardino could happen to them—and they want something done about it. Are they right? Or am I right? Who can say?

But that’s why conservatives are exploiting this fear. Conservatives consider terror attacks a serious and alarming threat. Liberals tend not to, which is why our politicians mostly adopt a pretty even tone about them. In both cases, this response is politically useful. Mainly, though, it’s genuinely how they feel. Conservatives really do feel threatened. Liberals really don’t.

Keep this in mind. It’s not a sham. It’s not just cynicism. I happen to think conservatives are wrong about this, and I think their campaign-trail exploitation of terrorist fear has gone far beyond anything even remotely reasonable. But at its core, this is a real disagreement. How safe are we and what should we do to increase our safety? When you cut through the bombast, there’s a very hard, very bright, very deep, and very human core of division here. And there’s no guarantee that you or your tribe has the right take on it.

¹Yes, I know I’ve punctuated it differently than the book.

²Even though I’m officially an old person, I am adopting the Washington Post dictum that mike is no longer acceptable shorthand for microphone in modern America. It lives on in the NATO alphabet, though.

³Longman⁴ is my third successor as blogger at the Washington Monthly.

⁴Or “Phil’s brother,” as his closest friends call him.⁵

⁵That’s just a joke. Martin is Phil Longman’s brother.

⁶Needless to say, this depends a lot on circumstances. Women in dangerous neighborhoods are quite legitimately more afraid of being mugged than men in the suburbs. People living in Beirut are more afraid of terror attacks than people in Atlanta. People in Tokyo are more afraid of earthquakes than people in London. Still, we can reasonably talk about averages here.

⁷This is clear both anecdotally and via polling. I know personally plenty of people who are afraid of a terrorist attack. And recent polls are quite clear that a large majority of Americans are concerned about further attacks.

Iraqi forces are fighting to retake control of Ramadi, a city of half a million about an hour west of Baghdad:

“I think the fall of Ramadi is inevitable,” said Col. Steven H. Warren, the United States military spokesman here. “The end is coming.” But he added: “That said, it’s going to be a tough fight.”

….If Iraqi forces manage to reassert control over Ramadi — the capital and largest city in Iraq’s western Anbar Province — it will be the latest in a series of military setbacks for the Islamic State. President Obama said recently that the militant group had lost 40 percent of the Iraqi territory it had seized in the middle of last year, as the United States and its allies have intensified their aerial bombardment against the group. In October, Iraqi forces and Shiite militias retook control of the northern city of Baiji and its oil refinery, and last month, Kurdish and Yazidi forces expelled the Islamic State out of the northern city of Sinjar.

Progress is slow but steady. The map below, from IHS, shows the territory lost by ISIS over the past year. There’s still a long way to go.

From a recent study on swearing:

Both formats produced positive correlations between COWAT fluency, animal fluency, and taboo word fluency, supporting the fluency-is-fluency hypothesis. In each study, a set of 10 taboo words accounted for 55–60% of all taboo word data.

What this means is that people who cuss a lot are smarter than the rest of you. So there. Wonkblog’s Ana Swanson, who apparently has access to the full paper, explains further:

In order to use bad words appropriately, people still have to understand nuanced distinctions about language, the paper says. As such, cursing isn’t a sign of a limited vocabulary at all. Past research has shown that when people are really at a loss for words, they tend to say things like “er” or “um,” rather than cursing. Other studies have shown that college students are more likely to use curse words, and that this group tends to have a larger vocabulary than the population in general.

“A voluminous taboo lexicon may better be considered an indicator of healthy verbal abilities rather than a cover for their deficiencies,” the researchers write.

Quite so. And on that score, the study’s findings should give us all pause. Take a look at the chart on the right, which shows the number of words people could dredge up in three different categories. Apparently the average American can come up with only 11 curse words. Eleven! That’s pathetic. I have dreams where I use more curse words than that. Of course, there’s much I don’t know about the methodology of this study. How much time did people have to come up with words? How unique did words have to be? Are fuck and fuckwit separate words, or merely different members of the vast fuck family? It would cost me $35.95 to find out, and you can guess how likely I am to spend my Christmas money on that.

UPDATE: Participants got two minutes to write down all the curse words they could think of. So…that’s an average of about five curse words per minute.

Catherine Rampell worries that Lake Wobegon-ness is wrecking America:

To an almost comical degree, Americans consistently evaluated their own personal lives and relationships as higher-quality than those of Americans writ large.

When married respondents were asked whether they believed their own marriage had gotten better or worse over the previous two years, 43 percent said stronger, 49 percent said about the same and only 6 percent said weaker.

But when those same people were asked about U.S. marriages generally, the responses flipped: Just 5 percent said they generally were getting stronger, 40 percent said about the same and 43 percent said weaker.

We see this all over the place, of course. Schools are terrible, but my local school is pretty good. Congress is hopelessly corrupt, but my representative is great. Rampell, however, thinks this is a widespread phenomenon, and it’s responsible for the dysfunction of our political system:

In a country that has become not just polarized, but also atomized; in which we root unwaveringly for our own political “teams” composed of those who look, think, vote and raise children exactly as we do; and in which we treat opposing viewpoints as motivated by malice or stupidity rather than honest disagreement, perhaps it is not so surprising that so many Americans have come down with a serious case of dictator envy, a longing for a political strongman (such as, say, Donald Trump) who will put our neighbors in their place and skirt the pluralistic niceties and nonsense of democracy.

I guess it was inevitable that this piece would somehow end with Donald Trump, since he’s the ultimate mystery to my tribe of hypereducated lefties. Still, Rampell’s point stands without him: if America’s two major tribes think the other tribe is not merely wrong, but dangerous and morally degenerate, democracy gets a lot harder. After all, the underlying prerequisite of democracy isn’t elections, it’s the peaceful transfer of power. But that only happens if both sides consider the other fundamentally legitimate and neither side fears destruction when the other side governs. If you think that Republicans are trying to enslave women’s bodies or that Democrats are secretly in league with Islamic jihadists, that peaceful transfer of power gets harder and harder.

We’re nowhere near to losing it, and the political polarization we feel today isn’t unique in American history. Unfortunately, modern media, both traditional and social, amplifies this polarization. If you watch Fox and MSNBC, you’d barely recognize that they were reporting about the same country. I come across this frequently myself when I hear about some new conservative complaint and find myself completely befuddled. What is that all about? A bit of googling usually provides an answer, and by the time it hits the blog it sounds like I’ve known about it all along. But often I haven’t. It’s been reported widely in B-list conservative outlets, but I’m pretty oblivious to those. Conservatives, however, have been getting increasingly riled up about it for months or years.

I’m perhaps not as worried about this as Rampell. Still, it’s disconcerting to know that there are so many people in both tribes who socialize solely within their own tribe and basically think of those outside it as either laughable or dangerous. It may not be the downfall of the nation, but it’s pretty unhealthy.

Marco Rubio has been the subject of attention lately for his apparent lack of effort in the presidential race. He doesn’t campaign much. He hasn’t opened many field offices. He doesn’t spend any time in the Senate. What’s the deal?

Republican activists — including many who appreciate Rubio’s formidable political gifts and view him as the party’s best hope for beating Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton — say they are alarmed at his seeming disdain for the day-to-day grind of retail politics….That may be, as some of his allies fret privately, a sign of overconfidence in his own abilities. Or it may be a smart strategic decision that the personal touch is overrated in an era in which celebrity billionaire Donald Trump is leading the field with a campaign that consists largely of mega-rallies, barrages of tweets and television interviews that are literally phoned in.

This is something I’ve wondered about for a long time. It’s an article of faith that running for president is an almost inhuman grind. Up every day at 5 am, pressing the flesh and delivering your standard stump speech in five cities by nightfall, then off to a Holiday Inn and bed at 1 am. Four hours later, rinse and repeat. It’s grueling beyond belief. It’s as if you don’t deserve to be president unless you first go through this hazing ritual.

But why? This is the United States, not Phi Gamma Delta. Especially in the modern era, I doubt that personal appearances really account for that many votes. And even if they do, why nominate a candidate who’s good at this kind of retail politics? Even if it works in Iowa, it sure isn’t how you win a general election. What you really want is a candidate who can debate well, who can hire a great staff, who can raise trainloads of money, who does well on television and social media, and who cuts great TV ads. Spending a long series of exhausting days to win a few dozen votes per event doesn’t make any sense.

I actually think this has been true for a long time—at least 20 years, maybe longer. Small-scale retail politics may still have a place, but it’s a small place. And running yourself ragged is far too great a price to pay for the minimal return it buys you. Whatever else Rubio is or isn’t doing right, I think his “disdain for the day-to-day grind of retail politics” makes perfect sense. The rest of the world just hasn’t caught up to him yet.

Michael Knights writes today about why it’s so damn hard to destroy ISIS, even though they’re not really all that formidable a force. Basically, it’s because everyone except the United States has bigger fish to fry:

All of our allies and rivals have far more complex goals than degrading and defeating the Islamic State. For them, the current battle is really a game of positioning for the truly decisive action that will begin as soon as the Islamic State is defeated.

The first priority of most actors is consolidating their control on the ground. The Kurds in Syria and Iraq are staking out their long-term territorial claims. Iranian-backed groups like Badr are carving out principalities in Iraqi areas like Diyala and Tuz Khurmatu. Abu Mahdi al-Muhadis, the most senior Iranian proxy in Iraq and a U.S.-designated terrorist involved in the deaths of U.S. and British troops, is seeking to quickly build the Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) into a new permanent institution akin to a ministry.

….The Assad regime in Syria is integrating with the Russian military machine….Syrian Sunni groups are tightening military ties to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey. Iranian-backed groups in Iraq continue to deepen their ties with Russia and Iran….The Baghdad Operations Command continues to hold around half of the offensive-capable Iraqi military units in reserve in the capital despite the declining risk of an Islamic State attack on Baghdad. Why? To offset the risk posed by the Shia militias.

The whole thing is worth a read, even if, in the end, it boils down to our old friends Team Sunni vs. Team Shia. Basically, everyone is willing to give lip service to fighting ISIS, but for most of the actors in the Middle East it’s not really a high priority. They’d rather keep their powder dry for the main event. In that respect, ISIS is sort of like Donald Trump. All the other Republicans want to get rid of him, but they don’t want to spend a lot of their own energy doing it. They want someone else to do it, so that it will be someone else who’s too worn out to win the actual nomination fight.

More generally, Knights is concerned that the US has no good post-ISIS strategy. We simply have too many allies who hate each others’ guts, and we’re not willing to just take a side in the Sunni-Shia civil war and let the chips fall. “Though Washington may seek to play the role of the balancer between these camps, the U.S. government is faced with impossible choices between traditional Sunni allies and the up-and-coming Shia actors who are critical players in the war against the Islamic State.”

Personally, I’m not convinced there’s a workable answer, which means we need to maintain a pretty light touch in the region and not get sucked into its endless sectarian feuds. But who knows? Maybe President Trump will be able to thread this delicate needle after his landslide victory next November.

I hate to pick on TV critic Todd VanDerWerff, but today he really encapsulates a pet peeve of mine:

There’s so much out there! This year, there were more than 400 scripted dramas and comedies just in primetime….So when you see that the list below starts at 35, and then see that I’ve thrown in an additional 25 runners-up, know that I’m choosing only a small fraction of a fraction of the shows I wanted to include. (My initial list of programs to either consider or catch up on ran nearly 175 titles in total)….While the number 10 is largely an arbitrary one, there is some value to conciseness, so I’ve also ranked everything. If you just want to know my top 10, you can scroll down to that point. And if your favorite show isn’t on this list, I probably just didn’t watch it.

I am absolutely drowned in stories these days about the best show on TV. Or the best show nobody watches. Or the best show on cable. Or the best show not on cable. Or the most criminally underrated show. Or the best show ever about prison. Or the best show ever about the military. Or the best show ever about the transgendered. Or the funniest show. Or the most heartbreaking show. Or the funniest show you’ve ever watched about a trangendered Marine Corps officer who ends up in prison.

We don’t live in the golden age of television. We don’t even live in the platinum age of television. Apparently we live in the unobtanium age of television.

Enough. This has become a joke. Theodore Sturgeon said 90 percent of everything is crap. He was being generous. Even so, this means that maybe 2 or 3 percent of everything is truly outstanding. If you think 60 TV shows out of 400 are must watch—and it was hard to narrow it down to that number from 175—you’re just not being critical enough.

I get that TV spent a long time as the bastard stepchild of the critical world, routinely mocked for its boob-tube idiocy. And when genuinely great shows like The Wire and The Sopranos came along, it was something of a revelation. But this doesn’t mean that a decade later upwards of half of all TV shows are brilliant. Critics do their readers no favors when they gush about so much stuff that their recommendations no longer even seem meaningful.

I don’t begrudge anyone their favorites. As much as I’m tired of the endless parade of shows being described as brilliant, I’m equally tired of TV (and music and art and fashion) being used as cultural bludgeons against the less sophisticated. If you like NCIS, that’s fine. It’s a perfectly decent procedural. If you didn’t like Mad Men, that’s fine too. A show that spends seven years focusing on a faux mysterious protagonist and a relentlessly predictable affair of the week just isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. You shouldn’t think you have a penetrating intellect because you hate the former and love the latter.

But now I’m just ranting. Feel free to rant back, since I started this. But I will stick to my guns on one thing: There are not dozens or hundreds of great shows on TV, and being a critic is not the same as being a fanboy. If you like virtually everything you watch—and an awful lot of TV critics seem to—you really need to be more critical.