Katha Pollitt: "Love Me, I'm a Conservative" -- On Douthat & Kristol

[laststeamtrain]

Love Me, I'm a Conservative
By Katha Pollitt

Liberal blogger men are thrilled with the New York Times's appointment of 29-year-old Atlantic blogger Ross Douthat to replace William Kristol on the op-ed page. Douthat is best known for his conservative Catholicism (abortion is murder, frozen embryos are children, contraception kills romance) and for Grand New Party, written with Reihan Salam, which argues that the Republican Party should appeal to lower-middle-class "Sam's Club voters" by supporting policies intended to shore up marriage, parenthood and work. Because what the party of big business wants most of all is to help working people live secure and prosperous lives. That's why it's spent the past three decades telling them their only problems were Hollywood, Harvard, Planned Parenthood and black people.

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So who would I like to see in the Kristol slot? Actually, Kristol. I was livid when they gave him the job, but he was perfect: a dull, complacent apparatchik who set forth the Bush line in all its fact-free glory. His columns were like press releases--you could hardly remember them two minutes after reading them. But his presence on the page reminded readers that David Brooks is not really what Republicanism is all about. Frankly, though, I don't see why there must be two conservatives on the page. Does the Wall Street Journal, the Times's national competition, have two liberals? That the Times, the closest thing we have to a liberal paper, cedes so much turf to the opposition, as progressive bloggers applaud, shows the truth of Robert Frost's quip that a liberal is someone so open-minded he won't take his own side in an argument.

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http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090406/pollitt?rel=hp_columns

[Richard Steele]

1. K&R

[valerief]

2. I don't want to see any conservative columnists. I've had enough of them. nt

[SpiralHawk]

5. That's because they aren't really conservative at all

The word 'conservative' is just a propaganda smokescreen meme for the radical borrow-and-spend, drive-up-the-debt while smirking-your-ass-off policies of the Republicon Homelanders.

[valerief]

6. I thought that's what conservative meant. They want to conserve all the money for themselves. nt

[hfojvt]

3. the Times is not that close to a liberal paper

and Maureen Dowd is not a liberal either, so the Times has more than two conservatives. And Tom Friedman. Is he a raving liberal? Isn't he a big cheerleader for free trade and the Iraq war for the first two years?

Then there's the reporting. Wasn't there a Judith Miller catapulting Bush propaganda about Iraq? Weren't there other reporters and even Bob Herbert, of all people, assisting in the 'war on Gore'?

Kristol/Douthat is the least of their problems.

[Hello_Kitty]

4. Douthat is an insufferable twit.

And like Pollitt, I'm getting quite annoyed by all-male discussions about abortion and contraception.