It's "All the Rage," says Tom Tomorrow. Meanwhile, the poor NYT, still looking for a new Safire, instead finds a Douthbag

by Ken

I know it's supposed to be my job to assemble these posts so you can read them. But just as I'm discovering in more of my local emporia that somehow it has become my job, as the customer, to check my purchases out, which in my mind is the merchant's job, I'm going to allow for some confusion as to whose job is what here.

Here's the deal. Monday for the first time I took note of the NYT's weekly right-wing op-ed tool, Ross Douthat. Imagine my surprise to discover that he's been doing this since last April -- my goodness, a whole a year! "Evaluations," he calls his observations on politics and culture. You or I might go for something less pretentious, like maybe "Observations," but maybe that wasn't available. Maybe that would have been too close to the great Russell Baker's retired "Observer"?

Not a good start, though. "Evaluations," it seems to me, ought to be left to people like Consumer Reports, or America's Test Kitchen. I really didn't know who or what a Ross Douthat was, though the name rang a distant bell. I guess it was the title of Monday's column, "Can CNN Be Saved?." Well, can it?

The column didn't start too badly, evoking -- approvingly -- Jon Stewart's famous Crossfire appearance with the immortal plea, "You're doing theater when you should be doing debate." And if CNN's response, beyond just killing Crossfire, which was surely nothing more than putting the dying beast out of its misery, was to banish all debate from the network, then I certainly agree with Mr. Douthat that CNN, um, missed the point. After all, when Jon S said, "You're doing theater when you should be doing debate," wouldn't you think he was implying in a deeply subtle way that they should be doing debate?

Now, Mr. Douthat wants to tell us that The Daily Show With Jon Stewart actually does "substantive" interviews with right-wing guests. I don't have a problem with that either. Personally, they make me cringe. And it's terribly difficult for Jon to find that fine line between being so polite as to allow people who in real life are low-grade morons to appear intellectually respectable and being so in-their-face as to appear to be bullying. Still, Mr. Douthat enjoys them, and I'm happy for him.

Unfortunately, all the rest is bullshit. I'm not going to go through it point by point (this is where you have to do the heavy lifting yourself) but will confine myself to some observations I jotted down earlier today between splutterings.

But the rest is -- how shall I say this politely? -- bullshit.

* The Crossfire of 2004 was a fiasco, he acknowledges, was a bust:

[I]ts liberal hosts at the time, Begala and James Carville, really were Democratic Party hacks. (The conservatives, Carlson and Robert Novak, were much more independent-minded, but the constant need to rebut partisan talking points took its toll on them as well.)

And already Mr. Douthat is on intellectual-honesty probation. No problem with the dismissal of Carville and Begala as Democratic Party hacks, but then what the heck would you call Tucker Carlson and Robert Novak? "Independent-minded"? Only in the sense that they weren't Republican Party hacks, but extreme-right-wing hacks, back when there actually was a difference, unlike now.

* Jon Stewart himself is sort of doing what Mr. Douthat would like to see. His "series of debates on torture and interrogation policy, in particular — featuring John Yoo and Marc Thiessen, among others — have been more substantive than anything on Fox or MSNBC." Which means, of course, that either he's never watched MSNBC, or he's too stupid or dishonest to report honestly on what he saw.

Mr. Douthat got into trouble with Glenn Greenwald ("Ross Douthat invents a false claim for 'balance'") for inventing a fiction: that Rachel Maddow never invites conservatives on her show. I was less bothered by the lie than by the clear indication that he's never watched the show, but only occasional clips edited by right-media. Anyone who's ever watched the show knows that Rachel points out constantly how hard they've tried to get Republicans and right-wingers on to defend their positions.

But Mr. Douthat is locked in his passion for debate. The fact that Rachel's show attempts to methodically piece together the facts of an issue is irrelevant. That's not "substance," it's "ideology." In an astonishingly imbecilic blog reply to Glenn's blast, he actually stands by his equation of Rachel's show and the propaganda screeching of the Fox Noisemakers. (Glenn's reply to his reply is included in an update to his original post.)

I'm going to have to ask you to read it all for yourself, and decide for yourself whether Mr. Douthat is too stupid or too dishonest to be able to "evaluate" the difference.

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