This is getting to be quite entertaining.

Watch CNN or MSNBC’s coverage of what appears increasingly likely to be a GOP takeover of the Senate either tonight or in the coming weeks, and it won’t take too long to see emotions strain, voices rise, brows furrow, and wishing take the place of genuine political analysis.

In the name of science, National Review’s Jonah Goldberg subjected himself to an hour of MSNBC’s Morning Joe and recorded the effects on his body. His observations over the course of this selfless experiment are worth reviewing:

Out of morbid curiosity, I watched Morning Joe for a while this morning. It was pretty hilarious. The general consensus ranged from a GOP victory tonight would be a poisoned chalice for the Republicans because they will learn the wrong lessons from it, to mockery of the GOP for failing to do even better.

Alas, it was hard to hear everything above all of the goalpost moving but I did catch one odd note through the din. Chuck Todd made the point that the pivotal moment in this election cycle was Chris McDaniel’s failure to wrest the GOP nomination from Mississippi Senator Thad Cochran. According to Todd, that saved the entire Republican field from being forced to answer for everything McDaniel said and all of the skeletons in his closet (this only happened a few minutes ago, so I don’t have exact quotes). In short, McDaniel would have been this cycle’s Todd Akin, dragging down the whole party.
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But let’s unpack this for a moment. How would McDaniel become an albatross for the GOP? By what mechanism? Sure, the Democrats would do their part. But I feel like there’s this other group that would have an outsized role in the process. What could it be? No, not the Shriners. Not the Quakers. Oh, I’ve got it: The mainstream media!

Goldberg goes on to dissect Todd’s analysis in more detail, but it is also worth wondering why the most important topic of conversation this Election Day is gaming out how the media might have derailed the GOP’s electoral prospects if only the party had obliged by nominating a toxic candidate or two. Rather than covering the races before us, we are reduced to dreaming about what might have been.

Later on, MSNBC Republican and former John McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt made the perfectly defensible observation that, if Republicans fail to take control of the Senate tonight, it would be a disaster for the party. He went on to expound on this righteous rejection of Republicans by the people:

“It would also be a repudiation of the strategy that we’re not going to try to legislate, we’re not going to try to put forward a positive agenda at any level, we’ll just run against Barack Obama,” he said.

Okay, let’s stipulate that is the case. Is the opposite also true? If Republicans do take control of the upper chamber before 2015, does the strategy of opposing Barack Obama deserve some credit for its efficacy? Have the Republicans tapped into the American zeitgeist? Does the public want to see Obama’s will frustrated by any means necessary? Schmidt declined to go any further down this rabbit hole, much to his glum audience’s relief.

Perhaps the most enjoyable tantrum was delivered on CNN by a Princeton University “presidential historian” who was asked by anchor Carol Costello about whether a GOP victory would be “better for the country.” Their verdict won’t surprise you.

“My guess is that a Republican Congress would be more obstructionist and more difficult for the Democratic president to deal with,” said author Julian Zelizer. One suspects the founders would be confused by this scholar’s framing of the representative body of government, now dominated by the party in opposition to the executive, as the obstructionists in this case. In the 115th Congress, it will be Obama who stands athwart history.

Zelizer appeared deeply disturbed by the prospect that the voters’ judgment may force the president to contemplate going back to the negotiating table over a “grand bargain” on entitlements. This “historian” contradicted himself, however, when he insisted that Obama was and remains The Great Compromiser.

“The record for him and his opinion has been he offers things to the Republicans, he has offered to compromise, and like Lucy and Charlie Brown, they take the ball away right when he’s about to kick it,” Zelizer said. He later suggested that The Great Compromiser’s instinct would be to govern by executive fiat in an era in which the GOP is ascendant. It makes sense if you don’t think about it.

This is not intellectualism, it’s merely emotion; raw, hurt emotion. The press is clearly having a hard time coming to terms with a likely GOP Senate, and all of this occurred before 10 a.m. It’s going to be a long night.