A "This Fucking Guy" Two-fer: Ross Douthat & James Kirchick

My what the fuck gauge got broken with this twofer of insufferable assholes scrolled across my screen.

I know, I know, I read and pay for the NY Times, and many of my readers tell me they cut that cord long ago. Alas, I keep my subs to the Times, the Post and The Atlantic active because they are the only national outlets that still field a national and international reporting infrastructure.

But I also keep them alive as they provide ample grist for these posts. This morning, whilst scrolling after finishing my connections puzzle and the Wordle, I stumbled across two gems.

First up, the least manly columnist that you could find, Ross Douthat gets petty about how this race is beginning to hinge on “masculinity”. Not to be outdone, there is a guest columnist by James Kirchick — author of “Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington” — who whinges that Kamala made a yuuuuge mistake in not selecting Josh Shapiro as her running mate.

Douthat trips on his dick - again

As a dribble of Trump’s semen leaked from his lips, Douthat turned to his laptop to craft a post titled: “Masculinity Is on the Ballot” (gifted link), Ross tries to thread the needed between the “manly man” vibes that Senator JD Vance exudes, and the wishy-washy, liberal cuck vibes that he sees as the behavior of Governor Tim Walz.

He begins with this gem of a setup:

The choice is clear. On one side, there’s the enlightened maleness embodied by Harris’s vice-presidential pick and her husband, Doug Emhoff. These are the good progressive dads, Rebecca Traister of New York magazine writes, the “nice men of the left” who do guy things like coach football but also manifest liberal and feminist virtues — like being “happily deferential” and “unapologetically supportive of women’s rights” and “committed to partnership” in marriage and politics alike.

You can almost hear his balding pate sneering in this passage, barely containing what he really thinks, that Walz is just a pussy.

He then quotes The Bulwark’s Mona Charen:

Walz especially is being held up all over as a paragon of liberal dadhood: “A regular guy,” Mona Charen of The Bulwark writes, “at a time when the country needs reminding that being a regular guy is actually pretty great.”

For the record, in a column that Charen shat out last year, she mentioned that we as a society would be in big trouble if we were to excise toxic masculinity, as we depend on toxic men to be big strong protectors and to serve in our military. Fuck that bitch all the way off.

Back to the task at hand, Douthat does acknowledge that Trump and his mini-me, JD Vance, are not a good face to present:

Then there is the other model, the dark side of the Y chromosome: the toxic masculinity of Donald Trump, the anti-cat-lady conservatism of JD Vance, all of them wrapped together in a package that Zack Beauchamp of Vox describes as “neo-patriarchy.” This is a worldview, he writes, that may claim to allow for more female agency than the older patriarchy but really just wants a “reversal of the feminist revolution,” in which men finally get to be he-men again while their wives stay home and rear four to seven kids.

Most caricatures fasten on some aspect of reality, and the American right in the Trump era does indeed encompass frankly sexist ideas and influences — from Andrew Tate epigones¹ looking for permission to be playboys to would-be patriarchs resentful that the women of America won’t cooperate.

Gee, you think? Really fuck-o? I mean this sounds like a reasonable take, but then he has to engage the bullshit “bothsides” circuits in his ossified cranium, and to find glaring faults with the Liberal ideals for men:

First, I would have thought that by now liberals would be hesitant about proclaiming the special personal virtues of the male feminist, the enlightened pro-choice dude. After Bill Clinton, Eliot Spitzer and Harvey Weinstein, after MeToo case studies too numerous to count, surely we can say that sleaze percolates on the left and right alike, that predators can exploit liberated mores as easily as traditional ones, that the “deferential” and “committed to partnership” guy can be subject to the same temptations as the conservative male breadwinner.

Yo, fuckwad Ross, yeah, we on the left sure have some scumbags. You know what the difference is? We fucking hold them to account², prosecute and persecute them, and make their lives living hell. The conservatives? Not so much. Your esteemed Mona Charen is far more likely to say “boys will be boys” to excuse some really bad behavior.

But then, true to form, Ross brings about his pet theories about how awesome the patriarchy is, and he weaves this jizz-towel from his “religious” persepective:

Second, the thing that Beauchamp calls “neo-patriarchy” and that I would call “neo-traditionalism” — a strong, religiously motivated commitment to marriage and family — does not necessarily have the anti-feminist, back-to-the-kitchen effects that are supposedly inherent to the vision.

Beauchamp cites Vance and Josh Hawley as apostles of neo-patriarchy — but both men have extremely successful lawyer wives. He links to work by the sociologist Brad Wilcox and the demographer Lyman Stone — but both of them have emphasized that neo-traditional households actually show relatively egalitarian patterns of burden-sharing between spouses and strong paternal involvement in child rearing.

The really rich part of this is his invocation of Vance and Hawley having professional wives, so clearly the Liberals don’t have a monopoly on family appearances.

But have you seen Usha Vance trying to square the circle with the stupid shit that comes out of Vance’s mouth?

His fix? Some mythical neo-traditionalism³ (not gonna touch that with Donald Trump’s dick and Vance pushing) mumbo-jumbo:

In the sociological data and my own personal experience of neo-trad culture, what Beauchamp calls an attempted “reversal”of the feminist revolution often looks much more like an adaptation to feminism: an attempt to mix its insights with older ones, creating a culture of marriage and, yes, large families that also allows for various models of female work — from homemaking to the part-time juggle to the full Amy Coney Barrett.

Look NY Times, I know you want to exhibit some balance, but for fuck’s sake, Ross Douthat is embarrassing. You should fire him and David Brooks outright. (and for my money, you can toss Ezra Klein and David French into that same bonfire).

James Kirchick says “hold my beer”

Look, the big sadz that the bulk of the Never Trump ecosystem expressed over Kamala handing the rose to Governor Tim Walz was real, very vocal, and misguided. These pundits were shocked I tell you that Harris didn’t do that thing they expected of her, to choose Josh Shapiro, governor of Pennsylvania, a state crucial to beating the stuffing out of Donald Trump in the general election.

There have been plenty of arguments about this being an own goal:

Or an unforced error, that would surely lead to the tangerine hued turd to win in the fall, another case of the Democrats snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

James argues in his post titled: “Democrats Have a Josh Shapiro Problem” (gifted link) that because Harris is on the ticked because of her identity, and that Josh Shapiro is not on the ticket because of his identity.

He goes into a long tirade about how Biden’s commitment in 2020 to select a woman running mate, implying that the pressure to do this “diversity⁴” selection, because many in the party were advocating a woman of color.

In fact, much of the center right and further right world were rather vocal at the time, about how she was terrible for the ticket, a bad choice, and kryptonite for the electorate.

Turns out that he won, handily, over the mango-Mussolini. But the shit takes, and expectations placed on VP Harris by the pundit intelligencia was really over the top. Name one VP that made a difference (the only one that comes to mind is Dick Cheney pulling W’s strings around the neocon fantasy football).

The matter of identity arose again in this year’s Democratic veep stakes, but in a subtler, more insidious way. In this case, the candidate in question doesn’t possess an identity trait preferred by the left, but one the left increasingly views with suspicion.

Gee, I wonder what he’s referring to? Could it be that he believes Shapiro was passed over because of his Jewish faith?

You betcha:

Among the possible reasons Ms. Harris chose Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota over Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, according to a report in The Times, was that Mr. Shapiro’s selection could “inflame the left.” And chief among the reasons given for this potential inferno was Mr. Shapiro’s allegedly extreme pro-Israel views. An article in The New Republic called Mr. Shapiro “the one vice-presidential pick who could ruin Democratic unity” and claimed that he “stands out among the current field of potential running mates as being egregiously bad on Palestine.” A writer for Jacobin, a socialist magazine, labeled him a “genocide apologist.” A group of far-left congressional staffers and the Democratic Socialists of America teamed up to produce an open letter demanding that Ms. Harris “say no to Genocide Josh Shapiro for vice president.”

Nice list of far left publications there dude. Why don’t you list some of the others you probably troll?

This reminds me of the spring when the Never Trump acolytes were freaking out that the far left protests of the Israel/Palestinian war was going to damage Biden, because he was full throatedly supporting Israel (that these NT pundits likes), but that might peel off enough of the Democratic coalition to cost him the election, handing it to Trump who would then create a pipeline of advanced weaponry for Israel to sterilize Gaza, and open the door for Javanka to build a seaside resort on the rubble of what was Palestinian Gaza.

I am not going to post more of this, go ahead and read the article if you want your blood pressure to spike.

For this, James Kirchick joins Ross Douthat as “This Fucking Guy” award recipients.

1. NGL - this is a pretty good word for a “mini-me”

2. Yeah, yeah, I know Bill Clinton got away with being skeevy as fuck, and he should be persona non-grata.

3. In short, this is the desire to rely heavily on cultural memory for setting policy. Like wasn’t it great when black people knew their place, women didn’t talk back, and children were seen but not heard. And a lot of other fucked up shit. AKA conservative fantasy football

4. See what I did there?

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