or suggest that being a virgin doesn’t mean you can’t be an insightful writer

*does negatives math*

Wouldn’t that be “or suggest that being a virgin means you can’t be an insightful writer”?

And here I was assuming that the Times could not sink any lower than their choice to give Bloody Billy KKKristol a platform on their editorial pages.  It would appear that I was woefully and profoundly wrong.  *sigh*

Ross is married.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/fashion/weddings/30tucker.html?ex=1348804800&en=992083366ac70207&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

You gotta be fucking shitting me! I guess this is their replacement for motherfucking Kristol. Shit, the NY Times is a motherfucking fish wrapper. Strike that. No self-respecting dead fish would deign to be wrapped in the motherfucking NY Times.

DrDick:

Idunno. I haven’t (my eyes! my eyes!) read enough Douthat to be solidly convinced of anything other than “he’s another conservative wanker”, but what I have read suggests to me that although he’s unpleasant I wouldn’t be scared to be in the same room with him, which I kinda would with Kristol. Of course by not being a raving lunatic he may ultimately be more dangerous to the truth.

Good article worthy of appreciation, runescape accounts  you give us a heart to enjoy.  runescape accounts  Communicate more wow cd key

Cool, some spam snuck in…

“In other news (of the amusing gossip variety), Bristol Palin dumps Levi for being ‘white trash’.”

Pot, I like to introduce you to Kettle.  Kettle, this is Pot…

[sigh]

MikeEss:

But think, suddenly that tattoo-removal earmark won’t seem like pork to the republicans any more…

note to LaPalin: don’t pimp your kids!

You can be married and still a virgin. Joe Lieberman, for example.

I still want to cheer for Bristol!

Yea!  You weren’t forced to marry a high school drop-out just b/c no one ever taught you about birth control! 

Any time someone escapes a bit of patriarchy it’s a good thing.

I can’t wait to read what Ross has to say about Bristol not marrying the Father of her Child.  I’m sure he’ll find a way to put it all in place.

“I’m sure he’ll find a way to put it all in place.”

...or ignore it…

Paul -
Douchehat is not as batshit crazy (in that shower scene in Psycho kind of way) as Kristol, but he is far more inane and flat out stupid.  If possible he actually demeans our public discourse even further than Kristol (an average 8th grader would be embarrassed by most of what he writes).  Kristol had the decency to lie.  Douchehat actually believes his bullshit.

Oh, awesome. They managed to find someone even worse than David Brooks. Well done, Times! Take five; you’ve earned it.

If a marginally talented writer can get a primo gig at the times simply by spouting conservative nonesense makes me wonder how far a very talented writer could go by spouting conservative non-sense. 

Amanda maybe you could switch sides and make a whole lot more money.

Should we call it the spot reserved for wanker welfare ?

Any time someone escapes a bit of patriarchy it’s a good thing.

I’m pretty sure Bristol’s personal matriarchy isn’t all that fun either…

“Amanda maybe you could switch sides and make a whole lot more money.”

...with Amanda’s writing talent, all she would need is some “epiphany” where she finally realized that women need to be protected from themselves, abortion should be illegal, atheism isn’t just wrong but a force for evil, women should be denied the vote, Ronald Reagan really was the greatest American of all time, etc., and she could make a quite handsome living sucking at the Conservative teat…

She wouldn’t have to actually follow through on any of those things (see Coulter, Ann), just loudly spout them off any time a pad of paper, a computer, a microphone, or a camera is nearby…

I cannot wrap my head around how anybody can think Douthat’s worse than Bill Kristol, who flat out just made up his shit as he went along without bothering to even think about it.

I have facepalmed along to Douthat’s pro-life writing as much as anybody in this comments thread but this was probably one of the better people they could have picked for this slot—when not writing about life shit, I’ve always found him to be a pretty insightful dude.

Ross may be married, but unless he’s a father, he’s a virgin or a hypocrite.

“Ross may be married, but unless he’s a father, he’s a virgin or a hypocrite. “

I’m tired and preoccupied so I may be missing the snark or joke here… but why?

Shit, the NY Times is a motherfucking fish wrapper.

I’m told their book lists are quite authoritative…

Ross may be married, but unless he’s a father, he’s a virgin or a hypocrite.

Seeker, I would assume because he comes out against birth control.

But, in that case, “infertile” should have been included in the list. Not sure.

Douthat on birth control.

On the other hand, Douthat’s as much as said that American Catholics are hypocrites.

So the Times will have nine male op-ed columnists (Blow, Brooks, Cohen, Douthat, Friedman, Herbert, Kristof, Krugman, and Rich) to two female columnists (Collins, Dowd)? What the hell? Can they not count? I mean, I could understand being 82% male if this were, say, Maxim. But it’s not, It’s a major newspaper and not a publication targeted at men.

If confronted, I betcha a dollar the Times powers-that-be would rebut by pointing out all the women who have columns in the style and wedding sections.

I wish I could get upset about this, but the sad fact is that the NYT almost entirely whored its remaining editorial and journalistic credibility years ago.  Like a sad, decayed former A-list / current D-list actor showing up at A-list events and having everybody pretend that he’s still relevant, the Times stumbles on, a death rictus on its ancient, pointless face.

I occasionally read Douhat’s stuff but honestly can’t see why he is so eagerly respected.  The fact that he’s not a congenital liar and a consistently wrong slime like Kristol does not stand as intellect; it stands damnation by faint praise.  Three of his most lauded pieces are the Atlantic piece on porn masturbation and his lengthy article on the paranoid style in American cinema, and his Atlantic article on letting Christianity find its voice.  All are empty and silly:

* The first is a series of digressions with a rather smug little moral underneath, (porn, jacking off and you are all bad), rather like watching partnerless ballroom dancers whirl around while murmuring maxims from Victorian morality books.
* The second is astounding in that, while condescending to all the silly, silly, silly deluded liberals who make such odd movies about government malfeasance it never bothers to address the rafts of known government amorality, immorality, conspiracies and wrongdoing that helped make a formerly idealistic citizenry into near-paranoids in the first place; it was the journalistic equivalent of sneering at people who write about being “mugged” (`as if such a thing actually happens!’ he seems to say)  without finding out a damned thing about street crime.
* The third is perhaps the most bizarre of all.  It stands for the proposition that the Christian faith, which has been the temporal, cultural and spiritual alpha dog for most of modern western history, is somehow unheard and finally needs a chance to have its views considered.  It is difficult to find a phrase beyond “astounding nonsense” for something ludicrous.

He is innovative in no way.  He trots out very tired right wing and religious ideas but since they come from a young face and are said without the vicious rancour so characteristic of modern American conservatism they seem, to some, to be fresh and new.  He’s just the “nice, friendly rookie” in the good cop / bad cop routine of American conservatism.

I’m as keen as the next fellow to see the current bunch of mainstream fossils retired and younger minds have their turn.  (Will somebody please tell Larry King that he died shortly after Dave was made????  Will somebody please tell Maureen Dowd that not only is she no longer in high school but graduated while America was still in Vietnam and Barry Manilow was a brave new musical voice?)  But am I the only one who notices that when “young people” are brought into the mainstream American media they tend to be conservative?  Douhat gets a gig first at the Atlantic and then at the NYT; McEwan has to get published in England, Marcotte gets her TV appearances cancelled, and Klein, Moulitsas and Marshall are “just bloggers” and left firmly in their place.

“when not writing about life shit, I’ve always found him to be a pretty insightful dude.”

Really? Wow.

One final point before I leave what infuriates me and return to what pays me…

Any total fool who tries to convince blacks or women or gays that there isn’t a privilege dynamic at work in America for straight white guys who toe the “company line” need only point to Douthat.  He is obviously no more talented than dozens, perhaps hundreds of competitors of all kinds.  But the straight white guy spouting repackaged conservative nostrums rockets right to the top of his profession’s heap before he’s thirty.

I’m tired and preoccupied so I may be missing the snark or joke here… but why?

Oh, I’m sure he’s got some very slight, half-assed reason that it’s okay for him and his wife to not jump on the procreation train immediately, but I tend to think anyone who has gone on a rampage against contraception for others owes it to the rest of us to model the one-child-after-another model they think the rest of us should be condemned to for fucking.

My problem with Douthat is he, like a lot of conservative men, is awful slippery on the subject of contraception and leave you with no doubt that, should the anti-choice crowd start to really make headway in banning forms of contraception, they’d probably go right along with it. I have more respect for the people who just come out against it, because they aren’t seeking ways to nip access here, tuck legality there.

That link nolo listed is a good one, because it really gets to Douthat’s slipperiness.  He plays footsie with the people who want to ban birth control, at least the pill.  He knows that hurts his mainstream cred, though, so he writes in such a way that you have to read between the lines.  The problem is that people like him or George Bush can maintain the appearance of tolerating birth control while working to restrict access.

The other thing about Douthat in the second link I posted (where he’s responding to the also-annoying Saletan on the issue of contraception and abortion) is it’s a great display of Douthat’s capacity for intellectual mendacity.  I especially like the part where he holds up the relatively low abortion rates in culturally conservative states like Mississippi and West Virginia as some kind of proof that there is no relationship between contraception access and abortion rates—as though there aren’t plenty of other explanations for low abortion rates in states like Mississippi and West Virginia.

“He is obviously no more talented than dozens, perhaps hundreds of competitors of all kinds.  But the straight white guy spouting repackaged conservative nostrums rockets right to the top of his profession’s heap before he’s thirty.”

Spot on, win, amen, bingo, yes. And he writes like he’s a 70-year-old crank, and one of his Harvard Crimson editorial pieces was an straight-faced assertion of the reality of demons. As in spiritual creatures that take possession of souls. (I often speak up for Christian apologetics against militant atheism. But *demons*!?!? Really?? Nothing is too ridiculous to say if you’re a white dude from Harvard, it appears.)

Hey, as a “militant” atheist, I have to point out that if you stop believing in demons, you’re gonna start question the Sky Fairy next.  So I’m with him on this one. 

A favorite Douthat quote:

You could spin this out further and point out that it also makes adaptive sense for women to have a certain amount of difficulty having orgasms, because then they’re more likely to seek out a long-term monogamous partner who knows their body well, which in turn dovetails nicely with the general female interest in having only one partner, the better to keep that partner around when the children come along.

Amanda maybe you could switch sides and make a whole lot more money.

Hey it worked for Michael Savage (ne Dr. Weiner).

I’m not reading anyone whose name I have no idea how to pronounce. (Doubt-hat? Doo-thay?)

Gail Collins is awesome. Is she not a feminist?

I can’t wait to read what Ross has to say about Bristol not marrying the Father of her Child.  I’m sure he’ll find a way to put it all in place.

He will have a very eloquent explanation of why it’s the fault of liberals.

But am I the only one who notices that when “young people” are brought into the mainstream American media they tend to be conservative?  Douhat gets a gig first at the Atlantic and then at the NYT; McEwan has to get published in England, Marcotte gets her TV appearances cancelled, and Klein, Moulitsas and Marshall are “just bloggers” and left firmly in their place.

You’re not.  It’s especially odd considering that Obama got something like 70% of the under 30 vote and more people in that age cohort identify as atheists than as Republicans.  The MSM is deliberately keeping conservatism on life support.  I predict that 14 year old kid from CPAC will have a syndicated column and his own show within the next decade.

“...with Amanda’s writing talent, all she would need is some “epiphany” where she finally realized that women need to be protected from themselves, abortion should be illegal, atheism isn’t just wrong but a force for evil, women should be denied the vote, Ronald Reagan really was the greatest American of all time, etc., and she could make a quite handsome living sucking at the Conservative teat…”

I’m thinking the story should be that an angelic Reagan appears to Amanda while she’s waiting to get her eleventyfifth abortion of convienence and he convinces her that everything she thinks is wrong. I’m thinking she’d get the biggest Regnery contract ever with that one.