money babyI don’t know how many of you have been following the fortunes of Atlantic Monthly’s latest Ivy League Affirmative Action hire, Megan McArdle. She’s the blogger formerly known as Jane Galt, a Randian “Libertarian” whose musings on economic policy and the social safety net are so painfully vacuous and shallow that Paris Hilton would be ashamed to sign her name at the bottom. She makes Ana Marie Cox look like some kind of Girl Chomsky.

Once when we were in our twenties I asked my twin brother what exactly a Libertarian was. “A Republican who owns a bong,” was his highly informative response.

That explains a lot.

Most people go through an Ayn Rand phase. Generally somewhere in those dark years between A Catcher in the Rye and the onset of Still Life With Woodpecker. After Old Yeller, but before On the Road (basically, somewhere around one’s junior year of high school), many an American teen has tackled Atlas Shrugged and spent a couple of weeks spouting geysers of rhetorical dreck about self-determination and Teh Individual before some helpful older person takes them aside and explains that it’s awfully hard to enjoy your speedy new roadster when there’s no roads, which are paid for by taxes, etc, etc.

Unfortunately, that helpful older person never intervened in McArdle’s case. From her writing, it appears that she was dumped straight from her gilt-edged creche into some gold plated veal-pen of a preparatory school, from whence her parents’ money wafted her into the rarefied airs of the Ivy League, which summarily spat her into her current sinecure at the Atlantic. Presumably all without her ever scrubbing a toilet, waiting a table, or doing anything that would spoil her manicure or muss her boarding-school bob.

Somewhere along the way, some essential steps for an aspirant to The Writing Life were missed, however. The Good Roger Ailes pulled this paragraph from a recent McArdle post and reprinted it unretouched.

Behold:

An upper middle class white kid who decides to become a journalist is consigning themselves to a lower standard of living than the one they grew up with; at one time I considered writing a book on downward mobility. But it’s not the same decision that a kid whose parents are a janitor and a waitress makes. Even if their parents don’t give them money, the upper-middle class kid know that if some financial disaster appears, their parents can step into alleviate it. Help with things like housing downpayments in expensive urban areas will be forthcoming. Eventually, a small inheritence will provide capital for needed projects. Meanwhile, an enhanced lifestyle is generally available through parental meals, vacation homes, theater tickets, and so forth.

Uh, remedial sentence structure, anyone? How about subject-verb agreement? Hello? Mind-numbingly stupid content aside, that has to be one of the most appallingly written paragraphs I’ve seen outside of the less-traveled backwaters of RedState.org.

And I am taking it as proof of a beneficent deity that Megan’s book on downward mobility never saw the light of day. Praise His holy name.

I would think it should be incumbent upon McArdle to be able to properly spell the word “inheritance”, don’t you? That would be the one word she ought to get right.

Sadly, no.

Speaking of whom, Gavin?

It looks like it was another fabulous blur of a Saturday night for Megan McArdle, with the watermelon martinis flowing like liquid family annuities. Because today we find the following:

We must force you to be free!
09 Sep 2007 02:56 pm

Scott Lemieux is blogging about Quebec’s refusal to let Muslim women vote with their face uncovered:

Um. Yeah.

Go ahead, Scott, kick the football.

I had no idea that Canada was forcing Muslim women to cover their faces before they vote. How shocking! How, uh, entirely untrue.

Nonetheless, she has been welcomed among blogging’s moneyed white boys as an adorably whimsical new arrival. This in spite of the fact that in post after post, she reveals that not only does she have nothing to say, but she’s incapable of saying it in anything above sixth grade prose.

It is the uncritical acceptance of well-connected mediocrities like McArdle that ensures that our national pundit class will enjoy their current state of befuddlement and irrelevance for generations to come. It’s also why magazines like Atlantic Monthly, TNR, and the National Review continue to decline in relevance and hemorrhage subscribers and readers.

But hey, as someone who writes for The New Media, it kind of makes me want to write Atlantic Monthly editor Andrew Golis a thank-you note for making sure that his magazine will continue to bring Teh Suck while Those of Us On The Outside will only grow in influence and credibility.

Thanks, Andrew. You shouldn’t have. You really, really shouldn’t have.

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