Late Night: Ross Douthat and Dana Milbank Star in “The Mewling Game”

Oh, bother and woe. An unfortunate series of events has severely discomfited comrades in arms, Ross Douthat and Dana Milbank.

Douthat, who never crafted a thesis statement he could actually substantiate, penned yet another of his typically invertebrate columns for the New York Times. This time, his subject isn’t some half-assed, puerile argument about the democratization of abortion, but another anti-feminist take on how conservatives can teach liberals a thing or two about knockin’ boots in the 21st Century.  Or not.

That’s okay, I’ll wait for you to finish puking up dinner.

Hardly the brightest bulb in the logic chandelier (despite that Harvard degree), Douthat garrotes his own argument when he unwittingly contends that well-educated, risotto-eating liberals have more consistent and "traditional" family values than the alleged Republican ones he fetishizes with such pomp and circumstance. Seriously, his advice to the lefty, overly educated rabble is: Go hike the Appalachian Trail!  (But the poor people better stay home and finish cleaning his parents’ house, because what we don’t need is more little poor people running hither and yon):

Better, perhaps, if this dynamic were reversed. Our meritocrats could stand to leaven their careerism with a little more romantic excess. (Though such excess is more appropriate in the young, it should be emphasized, than in middle-aged essayists and parents.) But most Americans, particularly those of modest means, would benefit from greater caution and stability in their romantic entanglements.

 I would imagine that at that extreme altitude, it must be very difficult for Douthat to breathe.

And then there’s Dana Milbank. Yale graduate and "Skull and Bones" member Dana Milbank is the ultimate D.C. insider, who was appointed rather conveniently by Karl Rove to cover the "Skull and Bones" White House. He is the wafer thin-skinned aristocrat of journalism who is very put out that he has to write four . . FOUR . . . columns a week and who called Nico Pitney a "dick" for challenging his precious and patrician worldview.  Indeed, Milbank may very well be the only reporter so utterly vexed about the "set up"– that Obama employed Pitney to address the civil unrest in Iran — that it became his unraveling yesterday on national television.  It matters not to Milbank that Pitney asked a really difficult question that Obama wound up dodging.  What matters is that this unwashed, common heathen was hand-selected by the President to ask a question! Just like Jeff Gannon!  Or not. 

What cleaves these men together is their staggering and unwarranted sense of entitlement. Despite (or because of) their breeding, they both come off as arrogant, ignorant, provincial, and wrongly rewarded: Douthat with his Times op-ed column in which he is well-compensated to spout high-minded yet mindless equivocations and polysyllabic word salads, churlish Milbank with his air of professional piety, WaPo paycheck and "folder of evidence" that he waved in Pitney’s face on Sunday morning like a scolding schoolmarm . . . or Joe McCarthy.  I’m not sure which. 

Douthat and Milbank are trapped in their own little time/class warps.  Reality, however, is quickly catching up with both of them, and it looks vaguely like a chunky Reese Witherspoon. 

Related posts:

1. Dana Milbank’s Time Management Problems
2. Dana Milbank’s Very Small Folder
3. Nico Pitney Slaps Dana Milbank Around
4. Ross Douthat Wants the Whole Country to Look Like Texas
5. Dana Perino: No Terror Attack on USA in Bush Era