Run Like Hell

So what to do you if you're Ross Douthat, the New York Time's backup auxiliary, Conservative hack?

What to do if you write bad columns that intelligent people laugh at, line cat boxes with and then forget about?  What to do if you spend your hollow hours between writing bad columns waiting for David Brooks to fall to his death from a pile of his press clippings so you can ascend the throne?

What to do you if you're Ross Douthat and then, one fine day, right out of the blue, that flimsy duck blind behind which your movement has been hiding its bigotry and depravity for decades is suddenly incinerated before your eyes? What to do if you are Ross Douthat and all at once Willard Romney's Hot Mic Death Ray leaves you nothing to camouflage your bullshit but aglets and zippers and a couple of Goldwater campaign buttons?

You run.

  

You run, run, run as fast as your little legs will carry you for the sheltering harbor that has long protected millions of Conservatives from the humiliation of being wrong all the time about everything.

You run for that last, stout refuge of the craven "independent" and the wingnut scoundrel.

You.

Run. 

Like. 

Hell.



for the impregnable bunker of the Big Lie of Centrism.

Our Revolting Elites

By ROSS DOUTHAT

... 

What these comments definitely tell us, though, is what Mitt Romney, master consultant, feels his “clients” in the Republican donor base want to be told about this election and what will inspire them to dig deep and give freely to his cause. Assuming those instincts are correct, his comments help illuminate the way many well-off Americans feel about their less-fortunate fellow countrymen – and it isn’t a pretty thing to see.

As many people have pointed out, Romney’s comments are a right-wing echo to what was previously the most famous leak from a fundraising event: Barack Obama’s remarks...

In both cases, a presidential candidate ...

For rich Republicans, the stereotype is all about the money...

For rich Democrats, the stereotype is all about the culture wars...

For Republicans, the dystopia is (inevitably) “Atlas Shrugged.” For liberals, it’s one part “Turner Diaries,” one part “Handmaid’s Tale.”...

What does it say about our culture that the people funding presidential campaigns on both sides of the aisle seem to regard their downscale fellow countrymen as a kind of alien race, to be feared and condescended to in equal measure?

What does it say that rich Republicans are unable to entertain the possibility...

What does it say that rich Democrats can’t fathom why working class Americans might look askance at an elite...

The current American story is one of polarization, with the two major parties sealed into their respective ideological bunkers, and stratification...

Both the right and left have provocative intellectual takes on how this new world came to be...

To be perfectly fair, Young Master Douthat does mention in passing that "The way Obama and Romney employed these stereotypes are not actually equivalent"...

...just before he jettisons that fact completely and moves right along with his Fake Centrist thesis.

Fake Centrism is the biggest single lie in the American media today. And once you start to look for it, you find it everywhere. 

(Also, Jesus, Mary, Strunk and White, it's "The Handmaid's Tale" and "The Turner Diaries" you dim little man.)