Politics is hard. It's harder when your anterior is firmly implanted in your posterior.

Surprising as it may seem for such a “hot take” or scoop or whatever you might call it, MSNBC’s Mark Halperin, who is all over your TV as a “senior political analyst,” waited until the Friday night to make the most stunning — and dumb — prediction of the 2016 election season. As the kids say: “Whoa, if true.”…. As intelligent people who follow politics — and even with people who only have a passing knowledge of who their two senators might be — might say: “Shut the hell up, Mark.”

A very wise person (it may have been my mother) once told me that if you have nothing to add to a discussion it’s generally best to maintain your own counsel- keep your mouth shut and wait until you have something to add to the conversation. At least that way you’re increasing the odds that those around you won’t believe you to be a complete moron incapable of a cogent and/or useful thought.

I suspect Mark Halperin might have thought he was breaking news…but even in this almost completely fact-free election cycle, pulling news out of your backside remains frowned upon. The problem is that “instinct and a little bit of reporting” could mean anything from the fever dreams of a weekend-long peyote binge to frequenting sex dungeons with HRC’s campaign manager. Instinct, while often useful on a first date, has precious little to offer in the way of increasing the accuracy of political prognostications. “A little bit of reporting” sounds like what you might do around closing time on a Friday night when you’re at a Georgetown bar trying to convince one of the cute HRC interns to take you home so you can school her in the dark arts of the horizontal mambo.

The problem is that Halperin undoubtedly pulls down a pretty decent salary for being a “senior political analyst” at MSNBC, even as he produces little of tangible value. The network might want to revisit what exactly it is they’re getting in return for their investment…because it certainly sounds as if their “senior political analyst” has just stopped trying.