If David Brooks was a dumb move, what do you call the NYT's scooping up the worst conservative columnist this side of Jonah G? Inspired? Or suicidal?
Douthat, in that patented, barely acknowledged aside that smirks, "Everybody knows that", announced in his column today that the problem with Bush was that he was a - hold onto your braces - "crypto-liberal" president.
Last week, the Census Bureau released a statistical report on the last year of George W. Bush’s presidency. The numbers were brutal. On every indicator, Americans lost ground during the Bush era. The median income slumped. The poverty rate increased. The percentage of Americans without health insurance rose.
- has by virtue of the utter failure of conaservative "ideas" been morphed into a "crypto"-liberal, whatever that might be. And it was as easy as this:
Adding insult to injury, the umpteenth insider look at Bush administration’s dysfunction was unveiled last week as well, courtesy of an obscure second-term speechwriter named Matt Latimer. (Next up: Bush’s White House chef tells all!) Latimer’s memoir, excerpted in GQ, offers grist for Bush-whackers of both parties. For liberals, there’s Dubya the incurious frat boy, flubbing policy details and cracking wise about Hillary Clinton’s posterior. For conservatives eager to prove that the most unpopular president in 50 years was never really one of them, there’s Bush the crypto-liberal, who dismisses the conservative movement and boasts that he personally “redefined the Republican Party.”
Douchebag goes on to compare Bush to Lyndon Johnson but only if Johnson had left his successor "a new strategy that enabled U.S. troops to withdraw from Vietnam with their honor largely intact." Douchehat thereby imagines a fictional scenario in which Bush had an exit "with honor" from Iraq all figured out and passed it to Obama before he left office, a scenario Ross declares to be fact though there is no evidence of its existence anywhere except inside his own fevered brain.
The Nixonian repatriation of Bush has therefore begun right in the middle of his exile from GOoPerLand, part and parcel of it, you might say. Even as they dump him, they're rebuilding his positive image out of whole cloth. Striking, I think. The conservatives' love/hate relationship with liberalism has never been more open or more confused. They are threading their way through a minefield, desperately trying to make it across before their heads explode from the toxic level of cognitive dissonance. After all, Bush did redefine the Republican party in the image of AEI and Li'l Dick Cheney, in the process making it the ultimate persona-non-grata of American politics. Nobody likes them. (Chart via Digby.)
Douchehat has found - or rather, invented - some ground he can stand on, at least temporarily, by blaming whatever he doesn't like on Bush's supposed "crypto-liberalism" and credit everything he does like to conservative cleverness. It may bear no rational connection to the world as it actually is (or was) but it's his story and he's sticking to it. But there is no possible rational explanation for the NYT paying this Douchebag actual money for treating his fantasies as facts. Didn't they fire Jayson Blair for doing the very same thing? Why is it OK for Ross Douchehat to make shit up but not Jayson Blair? What's the difference?
Let me get this straight: he isn't and never was "big name", not even at David Brooks' level; he doesn't speak for conservatives or liberals, both of whom think he's a rank poseur and dumb as a brick; he makes shit up; he can't write; he hasn't had an original thought since 1978; and he looks like a dork. What about any of this did the NYT find attractive? The fact that he could fit into the Brooks/Friedman triangle of right-wing Douchedom?
Enlighten me.
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