Today In Both Sides Do It: Ross Douthat, Bret Stephens and the Worst Deuce Fan Fiction Ever

Mr. David Brooks may have taken a paid "book leave" from The New York Times for a quarter of the year off to pick up an extra paycheck on side, tooling around the country lecturing Americans on humility and Both Siderism --

New York Times columnist, author and public broadcasting commentator David Brooks is in Missoula to kick off the University of Montana's President's Lecture series. The conservative pundit spoke about Donald Trump and humility with Sally Mauk before the lecture.

"To me, humility is not thinking lowly of yourself," Brooks says. "My favorite definition is, 'it's radical self-awareness from a position of other-centeredness."

-- but he still cares deeply about the care and feeding of his elite Beltway audience.  Specifically, he cafes very much that they no be left going cold turkey for lack of regular doses of his brand of  "gliding above it all, casting blame equally in all directions except, of course, at his elite Beltway audience" journalism.

And so he left the keys to his Shitty Shitty Bang Bang vehicle with Bret Stephens --

I’m on book leave for a couple more weeks. I’m glad Bret isn’t. https://t.co/gKOouCERR8

— David Brooks (@nytdavidbrooks) September 27, 2018

-- who wrung out an entire column --

This Revolution, Too, Will Eat Its ChildrenWhat this frenzied national inquest means for our civic culture.

-- on the horrors of living in the post-Kavanaugh world --

In the post-Kavanaugh world, however, we have new editorial standards. The Gawker standards.

-- without once mentioning that, long before Republicans decided to ram the Kavanaugh nomination through come hell or high dudgeon, they had already turned up the music, clapped their hands over our mouths and dragged the county against its will into the post-Merrick Garland world.

Mr. Stephens also somehow forget that, just a couple of months ago, this was hiw very own sweeping Delphic pronouncements about how Democrats should behave.  

Just Confirm Kavanaugh

...

I refer to the decision of Senate Democrats to wage a tooth-and-nail battle to oppose Kavanaugh, an effort that is likely doomed to fail and equally likely to hurt Democratic chances in the fall. Who knew Chuck Schumer was so content with his job as as Senate minority leader?

Let’s count the ways in which the Democrats aren’t helping themselves...

For now, however, the first question Democrats ought to ask themselves is whether they really have political capital to waste on a losing battle...

Fierce opposition to Kavanaugh hurts Democrats...

Liberals always cry wolf...

But we haven't forgotten, Mr. Stephens.  We will never forget.

And then, before we can catch our breath, here comes this week's homily from Mr. Stephens' fellow New York Times employee -- Ross Cardinal Douthat -- who hilariously leads off with what may be the -- 

-- Worst. Deuce. Fan. Fiction. Ever.

An Age Divided by Sex

The Kavanaugh nightmare shows how the competing moralisms of conservatism and feminism are tearing us apart.

The Year of Our Lord 1982...

The ’70s were officially over, but their spirit still lived on...

The shadow of AIDS hadn’t yet fallen on the sexual revolution, the era’s teen movies offered unapologetic raunch...

Most contemporary discourse about the social revolutions of the 1960s and ’70s imagines a consistent “left” that created those revolutions and a consistent “right” that opposed them.

it was a world where a social revolution had ripped through American culture and radically de-moralized society, tearing down the old structures of suburban bourgeois Christian morality, replacing them with libertinism. With "if it feels good, do it" and the Playboy philosophy. With “Fear of Flying” for women and “Risky Business” and “Porky’s” for the boys...

Then comes the obligatory Bill Clinton name-check as required by the NYT Conservative Style Book

..in the age of Bill Clinton...

Then, because he is the product of a privileged suburban life of Hamden Hall Country Day School and Harvard University (after which he was decanted directly into an editorship at The Atlantic and a column at The New York Times) and does not have the slightest fucking idea what the 70s or the 80s or urban life in American were actually like, Mr. Douthat shifts from the stilted language of the Wikipedia book-report (The Sexual Revolution: A Land of Contrasts) to a vocabulary with which he is much more comfortable:

To put this disagreement in terms familiar from 1980s movies...

yeah.  That happened.

And then, as you must have guessed by now, Mr. Douthat ties the whole, pompous, banjaxed mess up with a big Both Siderist bow --

Thus the puritanism of conservatism would be more admirable...

The puritanism of feminism, meanwhile, would be more realistic...

Instead of such a tempering of both worldviews, though, we seem to be headed in the opposite direction — toward a world where the parties are polarized by gender and the two moralistic programs, feminist and conservative...

-- and calls it a good day's work.

Funny old world.

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