If I had a nit to pick with Obama’s deficit reduction plan, it’s that he’s framing increasing taxes on the wealthy in the service of reducing the deficit — traditionally a Republican goal — rather around the idea that progressive taxation builds a healthier democracy. But he’s on the right track.

How do I know? Because David Brooks hates it.

Paul Krugman’s blog today laments another example of false equivalence, when he catches Clive Crook claiming that if the shoe were on the other foot, Democrats would behave like the Tea-GOP. They’d take the US credit to the brink, holding the economy hostage to impose the Democrats’ policy objectives, so they’re just as bad as the Tea-GOP crazies who have created the debt limit crisis.

Here’s Ross spinning fantasies about how attempted rape is such great dramatic fodder.

Today, Ross Douthat hilariously laments Obama’s “stark depature” from Bush/Cheney’s method of war-making.

Poor little Ross Douthat, this analysis gig of his is so hard, especially while the fantasy world of conservatism continues crashing all around him when his primary job is to keep that fantasy alive, at great cost to the real world. Today we find little Ross taking on the crash of the Irish economy. In flailing about for an explanation of what has happened to this former poster-child of Chicago economics run wild, Douthat briefly flirts with an accurate explanation of what went wrong, but then pays proper homage to his overlords by discarding the painfully obvious truth in favor of yet another conservative talking point that is easily demonstrated to be false.

Here’s Douthat in today’s New York Times, explaining how a country that elected a Democratic Congress in 2006, then extended the margins in both houses while installing a Democratic President in the White House in 2008, is suddenly more right-wing.

One of my cob-loggers unearthed this astonishing passage from the Bright Young Allegedly Sensible Rightish-Libertarian Will Wilkinson, someone vaguely rumored to not be a twit, presumably because there is a niche market for right-leaning Thinkers who don’t want to share cellar space with Chuck Norris over at Townhall.  He is sort of I suppose your [...]

Douthat is correct that the substance-free Beckstallnacht was all about identity politics – white, Christian conservatives throwing a temper tantrum demanding that we “turn back to God” because they feel like they’re “losing our country.” This explains George W. Bush’s and The Quitter’s appeal to the same group of fundies. They’re “one of them.” But…Howard Dean?

Ross Douthat doesn’t care for the “Bush lied, people died reductionism” of the new Matt Damon movie, “The Green Zone,” and instead, would prefer something more along the lines of The Comedy of Errors.