david brooks vs. thomas friedman vs. ross douthat

Jesus Christ

"chunkier Reese Witherspoon drunkenly masticating"
About 1,970 results (0.22 seconds)

Gay relationships may be unitive in some sense, but they are not unitive in the male-female, difference-reunited sense that the Biblical narrative strongly suggests that God intended sex to be. Gay people can bear and rear children, but they cannot bear and rear them in accordance with what the Biblical narrative suggests is God’s original intention for the reproduction of the human race. Homosexuality may be innate, but recall that one of the core doctrines of Christianity is that sin itself is innate—that our innermost being is in some sense broken and fallen and turned from God’s desires for us. What a traditional Christian morality asks of gay people seems impossibly difficult, but the Jesus of the New Testament asks the near impossible of people quite frequently.

guess who

so "sux2bu" is harvard for "god hates fags", got it

they are not unitive in the male-female, difference-reunited sense that the Biblical narrative strongly suggests that God intended sex to be

It is wholly OT-based stuff like this that makes baby Jesus cry.

Wow this Douthat guy, I was not really even that aware of his views until recently. I mean at least Brooks and Friedman are faux-intellectuals of this century.

haha 'the biblical narrative strongly suggests'

what kind of punk-ass bullshitty appeal to scripture is THAT.

What a traditional Christian morality asks of gay people seems impossibly difficult, but the Jesus of the New Testament asks the near impossible of people quite frequently.

will you be getting around to any of it at any point or are you concentrating for now on not being gay

yep. this poll was easy.

I was supposed to be excited, but I was bored and somewhat disgusted with myself, with her, with the whole business

maybe you should try having sex with another dude

I could see the whole xtian thing as this gag column he tried out for the harvard newspaper and then when it worked he just stuck w/ it and years later he is trapped doing this and feeling really guilty cause irl he's just a boring atheist w/ nothing to say

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

(Aimless innocently opens ILE New Answers, sees the names David Brooks, Thomas Friedman and Ross Douthat, starts sobbing like a frightened child)

Make it stop!

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

backwards!

strong campaign by douthat down the stretch but he couldn't close the gap.

http://www.tnr.com/book/review/bad-religion-ross-douthat

we could've been less sexist and thrown Maureen Dowd in the mix.

yeah she's awful too

hah that book review authoritatively calls bullshit on douthat

"ROSS DOUTHAT’S ANALYSIS of religion in America is more sophisticated than the analysis of, say, Rick Santorum—but not by much. "

^^excellent lead sentence

"My problem with Douthat’s book is not that his opinions differ from my own. My problem is that he does not seem to have any idea what he is talking about."

he also got sonned in the nyt

Charles Pierce:

I refuse to accept the term "curmudgeonly annoyance" from a teenage sex-panic victim with D'Artagnan starter-kit facial hair."

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/ross-douthat-post-election-14752276

i'm not a big charles pierce fan

it's okay to be a mild Charles Pierce fan

i'm from minnesota...

oh so that's a football reference right

It's a nice response to an NYT idiot

ha no i mean "not a big fan" = "i want to play around in your blood"

I'm a huge Charles Pierce fan because he writes pieces like that.

I'm a huge Charles Pierce fan because he writes pieces like that.

++

cf. Krugman’s response.

what's supposed to be wrong with charles pierce

I like Krugman's response a lot.

yep

http://observer.com/2014/02/the-tyranny-and-lethargy-of-the-times-editorial-page/#ixzz2sSv69gIu

One current Times staffer told The Observer, “Tom Friedman is an embarrassment. I mean there are multiple blogs and Tumblrs and Twitter feeds that exist solely to make fun of his sort of blowhardy bullshit.” (Gawker has been particularly hard on Mr. Friedman, with Hamilton Nolan memorably skewering him in a column entitled “Tom Friedman Travels the World to Find Incredibly Uninteresting Platitudes,” as a “mustachioed soothsaying simpleton”; another column was titled “Tom Friedman Does Not Know What’s Happening Here,” and the @firetomfriedman Twitter account has more than 1,800 followers.)

Another Times reporter brought up Mr. Friedman, unsolicited, toward the end of a conversation that was generally positive about the editorial page: “I never got a note from Andy or anything like that. But I will say, regarding Friedman, there’s the sense that he’s on cruise control now that he’s his own brand. And no one is saying, ‘Hey, did you see the latest Friedman column?’ in the way they’ll talk about ‘Hey, Gail [Collins] was really funny today.’”

times reporting staff otm. editorial is so so bad.

whatever you may think of the NYT editorial page -- I read this article a few days ago -- the WaPo page deserves reporting to the fucking Hague.

Editorial page has been a piece of shit for my entire lifetime.

Ever since the internet I've kind of scratched my head at why these particular individuals, of all people, get paid so much money to opine about stuff every week

you don't get why someone might prefer to read paul krugman vs some random dude w/ a tumblr?

that's not fair. ppl do like krugman. obv much more embarrassing is friedman + brooks + dowd etc

Paul Krugman is the one exception. I don't get what's special about most of the rest of their regular columnists though, like special enough to warrant once a week for years on end.

I love being able to avoid Krugman, too.

Friedman is embarrassing, but Brooks and that insufferable prig Douthat still worse

friedman and brooks regularly churn out bestsellers, ppl do like them. dowd won a pulitzer and is still (and once was very) taken seriously by a demographic that's very attractive to advertisers. it's not a mystery how these ppl have jobs. it might be a disgrace but it's no mystery.

and yet so easy to avoid them entirely. Makes me happy.

George H.W. Bush used to love reading Mo!

xp but i wonder if they'd be bestseller writers without the vestigial name recognition of being times columnists

douthat (esp at the time they hired him) is a 'reasonable conservative', the type the times has always thought good for their brand the way fox news used to have alan colmes. brooks is the quintessential 'reasonable conservative', to get any more reasonable you'd need aaron sorkin. he's useless as a window into current conservative thought or current conservative politics but he allows the times liberal readers to tell themselves they're exposing themselves to opposing viewpoints, to a range of opinions, that they're not like some fox news watcher. plus he indulges in the kind of dumb social pseudoscience and ted talk worthy ideas that malcolm gladwell and a good half dozen ilxors truck in. kristol was a bigger hack than either (truly a feat), but more useful. you could read him and get some idea of 'here's what these morons think', there's an element of this w/ douthat and evangelicals but he's not nearly as unmitigated a hack and hence not as useful, w/ brooks the only thing to be gleaned is 'here's what this moron thinks'.

brooks and friedman were both bestselling authors before they landed on the times editorial page