The NY Times read my post, and said "Hold my Beer"

Yesterday, it was Lady G and Carville, today, they leverage their internal dirtbags

NOTE: I use the term “goatse.cx” below. That is an old school internet trolling reference, and if you are not aware of what it means, DO NOT SEARCH for it. You have been warned.

Ross Douthat and David Brooks from the NY Times steal a kiss

This is getting old. I opened my iPad this morning when I woke up, opened the the NY Times app, and I saw this brace of headlines:

Since I still had sleep in my eyes, I had to blink a few times, to ensure that I was seeing things accurately.

It appears that the NY Times has followed up on their craptastically shitty take yesterday with this brace of morons…

Go Home NY Times, you're drunk

At that moment, I vowed to let it slide. I have been bagging on the Times a lot lately, and last week, I feel I grew a bit as a human when I chose to not pick on the WaPo’s Kathleen Parker again.

But this, I cannot abide…

Alas, I fear I must don the full body Zentai suit, and wide into the cesspool that is the NY Times Opinion section. First up, I will take the David Brooks piece.

In case you didn't know, David Brooks used to be the token Conservative on staff to provide balance. Now he’s the decrepit broken-down twat who is their middle of the road voice.

In the way-back time I would regularly dive into his columns and maybe one out of five I would note that he have a point, grudgingly. Since Trump waddled down the golden escalator in 2015, he’s been unmoored and hapless, trying to find a center.

He hasn’t been successful.

The column is “How Trump Wins (and Harris and the Democrats Blow It)”, and it is a doozy.

The opening is nauseating (but largely factual):

The people in the Trump campaign should be counting their lucky stars for Donald Trump’s close victory, given the political incompetence they showed in July and August. In the six weeks between July 21, when Joe Biden dropped out, and Labor Day they had one job: to define Kamala Harris as an elite San Francisco liberal before she could define herself as a middle-class moderate. The Trump campaign did next to nothing. All they needed was to play the 2019 clips of Harris sounding like a wokester cliché, but they couldn’t even come up with an argument, let alone act upon it. Harris brilliantly defined herself in that vacuum.

This mistake could have been fatal for the Republicans, because Trump is the 46 percent man. That’s roughly the share of the popular vote he won in 2016 and 2020. He was never going to ride a majority wave to victory in 2024, so it would have been helpful to take his opponent down a few points.

But then he traipses into the poppies, with a victory led by Trump doing better than expected in the election. Alas, he then backs that up with a fuckton of bullshit.

People like the red model more than the blue model. The fastest-growing states by population are mostly governed by Republicans, including Florida, Texas, Idaho and Montana. The fastest-shrinking or -stagnating states are mostly governed by Democrats, including New York, Illinois, California, Pennsylvania and Hawaii. The red model gives you low housing costs, lower taxes and business vitality. The blue model gives you high housing costs, high taxes and high inequality.

Democrats want to expand the welfare state so that our social insurance system would look more like Europe’s. But Europe is economically stagnant and falling behind. In 2021, households in the European Union enjoyed, on average, only 61 percent of the disposable income Americans enjoyed. By this measure, rich European countries like Norway are behind poor American states like Mississippi. According to the McKinsey Global Institute, large European corporations invested 60 percent less than American corporations in 2022 and grew at two-thirds the pace. For a decade, Europe has been falling behind on capital development, research and development, and productivity growth. Even the vaunted German economy has basically flatlined since 2018.

Here he’s stretching it, a lot. Making the argument that people prefer to fuck themselves, and whilst they might envy the Europeans their long vacations, and their benefits, but they prefer to get the high hard one from their bosses.

Then he shares this beaut…

Social and moral cohesion. Republicans can be rugged individualists when it comes to economics, but Democrats can be rugged individualists when it comes to morality. They are more likely to hew to a code of moral freedom that holds that individuals should be free to live by their own values. Individuals get to choose their own definition of when human life begins. Any form of family and social life is OK so long as the individuals within it give their consent. This is the privatization of morality.

You know, reading that it almost seems like he has been taking lessons from his buddy Ross. I could have sworn that this was the position of the Republicans until, like yesterday. At least they used to pretend they were interested in freedom.

I read more, but damn I am too old to read more of this twaddle. It is David Brooks trying to play a liberal reading why Trump wins, and he clearly is a fabulist.

Now, let’s check in on what the Rad Trad Catholic spitball has to say…

---

Ross’s column takes the position that Harris wins … “How Harris Wins (and Trump and the Republicans Blow It)”. This is going to be specially odious.

To understand Kamala Harris’s narrow victory over Donald Trump, you have to think about Marie Kondo, the Japanese style guru famous for her ruthless minimalism, whose prescription for a cluttered home is to remove any object that doesn’t immediately “spark joy.”

Narrow? I can buy that, for some reason Trump will probably get 46% of the vote.

The progressivism that infuses the contemporary Democratic Party can be a cluttered, claustrophobic worldview. In its Trump- and Biden-era form, it doesn’t just include a large array of interest groups, each making their own policy demands. It argues that all of these demands must be accepted and acted on together, that there’s an underlying philosophical or even creedal unity (“in this house, we believe …”), a seamless garment that can’t be divided up. Everything is intersectional, and you can’t just pick and choose: Climate justice is reproductive justice is antiracism; trans rights are women’s rights are Indigenous rights; if you stand with migrants you also have to stand with teachers’ unions and vice versa.

Here he spews the standard pap that the MAGA Republicans all ascribe to Liberals, with that sneer.

I am dropping this in, because me thinks Ross has a crush on Marie Kondo¹.

Harris did stake out some moderate positions, promising border enforcement and touting her prosecutorial credentials. But mostly she followed a Marie Kondo strategy, applying the life-changing magic of tidying up to the Democratic platform. She didn’t offer a comprehensive moderate agenda or seek out a Sister Souljah confrontation with some left-wing interest group. Instead she offered a form of progressive minimalism, reducing a cluttered agenda to a few popular promises and just leaving everything else out.

Then again, a third mention of Kondo:

Her convention speech was especially Kondo-ist: Short, sparse and nonspecific about virtually everything except restoring Roe v. Wade, protecting middle-class entitlements and keeping Trump out of the Oval Office.

Uh, Ross, that sounds like a perfectly acceptable plan for Madam President. If she did nothing more than that, I would be ecstatic!

Of course then he has to toe the NY Times line that Harris and Walz are being poopie-heads by shunning the Paper of Record’s demands for deep policy papers, and long form sit-down interviews where barely cognizant journos can crucifer them for an inconsistency on pages 75 and 263…

They argued, correctly, that Harris was often just avoiding issues, not offering some clear new policy approach. They complained, accurately, that she was dropping her past positions without any adequate explanation. (Indeed, her minimalism often didn’t even rise to the level of a flip-flop, because there wasn’t any new landing place.)

And then he follows that up with his disappointment that the lack of even a brief goat-rodeo primary prevented the proper vetting:

They also pointed out that her minimalism would have never survived contested Democratic presidential primaries with a gantlet of interest-group demands — that only the last-minute coronation and the urgency and brevity of a general election campaign enabled Harris to sell herself this way. And they noted that all the interest groups would be ready to reassert themselves on Day 1 of a Harris administration, that their ideological demands had been muted but not repudiated, that a vote for her was still a vote to hand them power once again.

Wah wah wah, call the Whambulance.

You know what these two fuckers miss? The gaping goatse.cx rectum that is the Trump campaign is neither serious, nor even trying at this point to grow their pathetic base. Yes, it is a durable base, but it seems every time that the cheeto tinged shitgibbon opens his face anus, he spews things that horrify women, sensible men, the youngs, and the suburban women that he shouldn’t be able to win without.

And today, I read that the Trump campaign has given up on trying to focus the Mango Mussolini on policy, instead of his “weave” of bullshit.

The question I have is, clearly someone in the leadership in the editorial side to the Times pitched this pair of dinguses (dingi?) to write this ridiculous fiction. Fiction so bad that I doubt even the knuckle draggers at Newsman would read. But hey, you must be trying to lose the last of your subscribers. Clearly you don’t give a fuck, or you are so upset at Harris and Walz’s campaign trajectory that you are fearing might prevent you becoming the propaganda arm of the Trump Reich Restoration.

Because, I can’t think of any other reason they would do this stupid stunt.

I will leave you with one rather insightful comment:

Yeah, that tracks.

Friends don’t let friends read the New York Times.

1. I think she should get checked for cooties, because Ross crushing on you is just fucking gross

---