Moleman II

The Rise of the Douthat.

I've always thought of the New York Times' Ross Douthat as just one more wingnut welfare case: another in a long, long line of Conservative fops with the right contacts who -- through God alone knows what strange confluence of gin, fate, blackmail and Conservative Affirmative Action -- one day rolled out of his day-bed at "The Weekly Standard" or "The Atlantic" and into a prime position at one of America's leading journals or newspapers.

One thing about Ross: he can type almost error-free.

Another thing: after the New York Time's Bill Kristol fiasco,

the Sulzberger ATM needed a reserve wingnut. Someone to pump another fact-asphyxiating 800-word dose of rehabbed Thatcherite homilies into the body politic on those days when David Brooks was not available to get 'er done.

Another thing: David Brooks can't last forever.

Eventually even his mighty piping-bag of shameless revisionism, particle-board cliches and Centrist claptrap will run dry; he will poop out his last paean to the the Golden Age of Bowling and the glorious fake America of Applebee McReagan, and toddle off to write very bad children's books, or a tenured position teaching injection molding to hamsters at one of the nation's great universities.

And so, Ross Douthat was created: a strange little rascal, constantly besotted from nipping at the same old jug of Randite hard-cider, who chirps his little second-string wingnut operettas with all the potency of His Irrelevancy Prince Charles trying very hard to command attention from within the deep shadow cast by the real monarch.

However, with his genuinely execrable column today, it appears that Mr. Douthat might be grabbing for the First Chair and the David Brooks Florescent Tie of Glory.

A Return to Normalcy

...
The Republican midterm sweep delivered the coup de grâce to the liberal fantasy by dramatically foreshortening what many pundits expected to be an enduring Democratic majority. But it also dropped a lid, at least temporarily, on the conservative freakout. (It’s hard to fret that much about the supposed Kenyan-Marxist radical in the White House when anything he accomplishes has to be co-signed by John Boehner
...

This return to normalcy is good news for fans of bipartisan comity and centrism for centrism’s sake. And it might be good news for the country. In the end, some sort of bipartisanship will be required to pull America back from the fiscal precipice, and the productivity of this lame-duck December shows that cooperation between the two parties isn’t as impossible as it seemed just a few months ago.

But when it comes to the hard challenges ahead, comity won’t be enough. Real courage is required as well. And this month’s outbreak of bipartisanship was conspicuously yellow-bellied. Republicans and Democrats came together to cut taxes, raise spending, and give free health care to the first responders on 9/11. They indulged, in other words, in the kind of easy, profligate “moderation” that’s done as much damage to the country over the years as the ideologies of either left or right.
...

As I have detailed before ("How to Write a David Brooks Column"), while it ridiculously, paint-by-numbers easy to crank columns like this out --

4) Although such is not the case with today's subject, as often as possible, try to impute these fictional distinctions to the different hemispheres of the political Universe. So no matter how bigoted, reckless or just bugfuck crazy the Right behaves, you just go right ahead and blandly assert with no supporting evidence whatsoever that the Left is equally and oppositely bad in exactly the same qualities and quantities. Here at the Times we call that "seriousness"!

5) Discover in your final paragraph or two that -- amazingly! -- the precise midpoint between those two completely artificial positions on an imaginary spectrum just happens to be exactly the Right and Reasonable answer!

Oh boy!

6) Rinse and repeat. No matter what the subject, no matter how false or bizarre the equivalence, just rinse and repeat. Twice a week.

-- to my recipe book I should have added the following: In addition to assembling the proper ingredients, you must be the sort of person who can look back on the real, ugly history of the last 30 years --

Now, 30 years later, what’s left of these same Conservatives have finally started to notice that their political genitalia is all lit up like a pustular Christmas Tree with oozing Newt-shaped sores, and their Shining City on a Hill has been overrun with hyper-aggressive, ethically-stunted inbred dimwit freaks who all point at the mile-high sculpture of Saint Ronald Reagan in the Shining City Mall Atrium and squeal “Daddy!”

-- and still be willing to make your daily bread slinging third-rate, poison-laced Conservative corn pone to a public you know will grow weaker and less civilized with every bite they swallow.

You have to be the sort of person who is OK with that.

And congratulations, Ross Douthat: you have arrived.