I was nosing around today and I encountered a recent Sadly, No! column on Ross Douthat, one of the truely untalented hacks in today's media landscape. His artlessness is breathtaking, his words are molten drops of lead, his phrasing is comedically slapstick clumsy, his metaphors mixed with all the deftness of a hockey player engaged in brain surgery, and his ideas all permanently and incontrovertibly dead-ass wrong.
In other words, Douthat is a lame-brained conservative apologist whose social network got him a job at the New York Times because he was of damn little use anywhere else in the working world. I guess the rule is those who can, do, those who can't do, teach, those who can't teach, shovel shit, and those who aren't even good for manual labor but are from a good family go work in the media as a conservative pundit. Anyway, I think I made his column disappear today. Follow over the fold for why.
Update: It appears that Douthat's column is now a blog post. Why I can't imagine but I assure you all, when I found it I did so by searching for "Douthat" in the NYT search box, and that was the first result, and it was posted as a column not a blog post.
Douthat's last screed was some pureed drivel about the new James Cameron movie. Sadly No! shortered it to the phrase "Every time you hug a tree, the Baby Jesus cries." I had noticed that, #1, Douthat was predictably a moron in his columns, and #2, that I was outraged that he was making who the fuck knows how much money wiping his ass on his computer keyboard for a paycheck from the New York Times. So I decided I'd start commenting on his articles with some well-informed and blistering criticism.
I thought, maybe, I could get the NYT to realize what a horrifying embarassment it is to have a moron with your newspaper's name over his byline, and maybe they'd fucking quit just giving column space away to fucktards who don't know how to write or think. I was going to start with Douthat and work my way up to Brooks.
So Douthat's column today was about the healthcare reform bill. He droned on in his artless and boring way about how the GOP should have come to the table with something and instead have been handed a huge defeat and walked away with nothing. It's what one would expect, of course, when you are a bad-faith negotiator who lies all the time everywhere about everything, as every GOP politician is. All the time. But Douthat refused to connect the dots. He couldn't see the GOP's failure to bring anything to offer to the table as bad-faith negotiating, or dishonest. To him it was just unfortunate.
I was the 4th commenter on the column so I laid it down thick for him. I said this is EXACTLY what you can expect from a party who is negotiating in bad faith and lies all the time about everything. I said that someone who was doing their homework might have found mention of Chuck Grassley running home to his constituents while the Fox News staged teabagger protests raged, and telling his base that he was negotiating in bad faith. I mentioned that multiple GOP personalities were on the air lying about the as-yet-to-be-drafted healthcare bill that it would "Kill" people.
I mentioned that GOP leadership were multiply on the record as being against the bill ONLY because it would damage Obama and the Democrats politically, and that nowhere could anyone find any mention of what the GOP actually planned to DO for the American people. I mentioned that in reality the system that Douthat and his Douchebag conservatives were so in love with was ALREADY murdering 44,000 people a year by denying them healthcare. I said that health insurance was a pyramid scheme on the scale Bernard Madoff could have only dreamed of, and that if any other industry were taking $20,000 in a family's money and giving them NOTHING in return it would be noted as fraud, or theft.
I then re-iterated that if the GOP had come to this discussion with any honest intentions they would have been included in the solution, and that people were going to remember that they were liars, bad-faith negotiators, and interested only in their own advancement and not at all in what regular folks needed from their government. I also at one point mentioned that anyone in the government or on the GOP side of the conversation might have spent some effort and time researching what solutions to healthcare did work and maybe trying to learn from that, but that instead lazy ideologues simply said NO and tried to continue gaming the current system.
It was a gorgeous reaming. I wish I had saved it because it had a lot of fire. I did at one point copy it into my clipboard buffer, and here is what the first paragraph was:
People are awakening to the fact that the product the health insurance industry sells us is junk -- exorbitant premiums are paid but when actual "insurance" is required the company either denies the claims or backs out of the deal entirely. I mean, it's inexcusably junk, Ross. In any other industry, collecting twenty thousand dollars (an average family premium for those without employee benefits) from someone and then giving them nothing in return would be considered fraud or theft. And the GOP was pretty much standing behind and supporting the continuance of a system that, in any other interpretation of events, is basically a gigantic pyramid racket that would make Bernard Madoff jealous.
There was more and it was good. But go to the NYT website and look for Ross Douthat's latest column, and you'll find the one about Avatar. The one about healthcare reform is GONE. So is my comment.
I don't know if the NYT is just fubared, or if they are genuinely alarmed by people coming into their comments section and defying the Villager wisdom, and the fact that almost nobody sticks around to defend a douchebag like Douthat. In any wise, Douthat's latest column is AWOL.
I'd like to see that condition continue, frankly.