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DBOTW

posted by Armadillo Joe

I may be overstepping my bounds here, but I nominate Ross Douthat at Ye Olde NYTimes for the coveted Douchebag of the Week title.

Why? you may ask...

Well, because -- as a person who escaped the third-world cesspool and laboratory for unfettered implementation of conservative economic-theories called "Texas" for a place more, um, evolved -- I find the fact that Douthat thinks California's recent economic and social woes and Texas' apparent lack of them vindicates his pinched, ill-informed world view supremely unpalatable:

In the Bush years, liberal polemicists turned the president’s home state — pious, lightly regulated, stingy with public services and mad for sprawl — into a symbol of everything that was barbaric about Republican America. Meanwhile, California, always liberalism’s favorite laboratory, was passing global-warming legislation, pouring billions into stem-cell research, and seemed to be negotiating its way toward universal health care.

But flash forward to the current recession, and suddenly Texas looks like a model citizen. The Lone Star kept growing well after the country had dipped into recession. Its unemployment rate and foreclosure rate are both well below the national average. It’s one of only six states that didn’t run budget deficits in 2009.

Blue Texan at FireDogLake has this to say about that with her retort:

...Texas is exactly what Douthat's "liberal polemicists" charge.

Stingy? Check out these state rankings. Child poverty: 44th, senior poverty: 40th, per capital child welfare expenditures: 42nd, child vulnerability index: 46th, education expenditures per pupil: 40th.

Lightly regulated? Texas is the nation's 4th biggest polluter, and the biggest contributor to greenhouse gases. Pious? Does having creationists running the school board count?

Finally, the only reason Texas isn't facing a budget deficit is because Obama's stimulus bill bailed us out.

I'd like to point out that four of the seven presidential elections since 1968 to have gone to the Republican candidate have gone to a guy from southern California -- Nixon twice and Reagan twice.

I would like to further point out that Douthat doesn't actually live in Texas or anywhere else in "red" America. He lives in Washington D.C., just like Limbaugh, O'Reilly and Hannity all live in New York City. Funny how none of these rightwing assholes actually choose to live in Omaha or Tulsa or Boisie or any other of these places where they think all the "real" Americans live.

I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions as to why that might be, but in the meantime I think the rest of us should encourage all these toilet smears to move to the places they claim to think are so wonderful -- you know, put up or shut up -- so that, rather than us fending off every attempt by these dipshits to have their delusional mythologies about how the world works imposed on the rest of us, we can instead get about the business of actually running a prosperous, healthy country that benefits everyone and not just the top .01% (who also happen to all be 99.999% white, when corrected for Tiger Woods and Oprah).

Douthat should really be a DBOTW-emeritus, but for now I'll just nominate him for one of the weekly titles. Who's with me?