The creatures outside looked from pig to man ...

Your occasional reminder that American exceptionalism is a powerful campaign-season drug. This Tuesday morning treat from CNN -- two versions, because tweaking the headline doesn't always mean improving the headline -- pushes a couple of buttons that are routine over at Fox News: Scary Brown Candidate Hates You and Hidden Past Emerges. (For comparison, here's a midafternoon tale from Fox in the same vein; "resurfaced Twitter post" is a cousin of "now-deleted video.")

Nothing unusual about that on Planet Fox. What makes it odd in the professionalized media is that El-Sayed is. um, a former public health official. If you too would rather keep the cats (and yuorself) calm, avoid worrying about flaming debris landing on your roof because someone in the neighborhood doesn't think the British are scared yet, and just watch stuff explode on TV under adult supervision, imagine if you had been head of Health, Human and Veterans Sercies for Wayne County. "Fireworks suck" -- even in a NOW-DELETED VIDEO!!1!1!!1!1!!! -- should have a different meaning in that context, and CNN should be able to figure that out on its own, particularly if it's going to pass this off as subscriber-only exclusive content.

Once CNN has lifted itself from the Fox-tinged fainting couch, it might also ask about "replacing 2nd Amendment." If that's something as simple as adding a footnote to the Militia Clause -- "there's one right up the road, you know," for example -- that seems like something that could make for an interesting campaign discussion. But once the exceptionalism is flowing, it's hard to stop.