Missed It By That Much

Shorter Ross Douthat: Female fetuses are being killed by their parents because women have no value in our patriarchal world. I blame feminists.

A Series Of Unfortunate Events

Shorter Ross Douthat: Since I have the moral development of a little bitty child, I need someone to punish me or else I will be bad.

Longer Ross Douthat:

A Case for Hell

By ROSS "Hellboy" DOUTHAT

Here’s a revealing snapshot of religion in America. On Easter Sunday, two of the top three books on Amazon.com’s Religion and Spirituality best-seller list mapped the geography of the afterlife. One was “Heaven Is for Real: A Little Boy’s Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back,” an account of a 4-year-old’s near-death experience as dictated to his pastor father. The other was “Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived,” in which the evangelical preacher Rob Bell argues that hell might not exist.

The publishing industry knows its audience. Even in our supposedly disenchanted age, large majorities of Americans believe in God and heaven, miracles and prayer.

And if everybody's doing it it has to be right. Either way, it's not surprising that people choose to believe in eternal life and happiness, a Fatherly, omnipotent creator who will always care for them, and that they have a hot-line to this Heavenly Father. Why not? Most people would rather live in a state of hope than a state of fear. If there really is a god, they'll be rewarded for their (supposed) belief and if there isn't a heaven they'll be dead and never know.

But belief in hell lags well behind, and the fear of damnation seems to have evaporated. Near-death stories are reliable sellers: There’s another book about a child’s return from paradise, “The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven,” just a little further down the Amazon rankings. But you’ll search the best-seller list in vain for “The Investment Banker Who Came Back From Hell.”

Ross has a sad. People no longer live in an imaginary, unnecessary state of guilt and fear, and just roll their eyes every time he tells them they're going to hell in a handbasket.

In part, hell’s weakening grip on the religious imagination is a consequence of growing pluralism. Bell’s book begins with a provocative question: Are Christians required to believe that Gandhi is in hell for being Hindu? The mahatma is a distinctive case, but swap in “my Hindu/Jewish/Buddhist neighbor” for Gandhi, and you can see why many religious Americans find the idea of eternal punishment for wrong belief increasingly unpalatable.

I think he's looking for the word "unbelievable," not "unpalatable."

But the more important factor in hell’s eclipse, perhaps, is a peculiar paradox of modernity. As our lives have grown longer and more comfortable, our sense of outrage at human suffering — its scope, and its apparent randomness — has grown sharper as well. The argument that a good deity couldn’t have made a world so rife with cruelty is a staple of atheist polemic, and every natural disaster inspires a round of soul-searching over how to reconcile God’s omnipotence with human anguish.

Oh, for the good old days, when everyone was as callous about death as the god of the Old Testament.

Atheist polemic states that there are no deities, so we really don't wonder how a good deity could be cruel. We just like to remind fundamentalists that their loving god is really mean.

These debates ensure that earthly infernos get all the press. Hell means the Holocaust, the suffering in Haiti, and all the ordinary “hellmouths” (in the novelist Norman Rush’s resonant phrase) that can open up beneath our feet. And if it’s hard for the modern mind to understand why a good God would allow such misery on a temporal scale, imagining one who allows eternal suffering seems not only offensive but absurd.

I think of "hellmouth" as Joss Whedon's resonant phrase.

Yes, Ross Douthat is complaining that the media doesn't discuss his personal and unpopular religious beliefs enough. That kind of self-centeredness is also the attribute of a little bitty child. Douthat doesn't want to let the absurdity and offensiveness of a kind, loving god who sees the sparrow fall but missed out on the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown to stop anyone from believing. That would be bad because then people wouldn't be afraid of eternal damnation and might have gay sex.

Doing away with hell, then, is a natural way for pastors and theologians to make their God seem more humane.

And less homicidal.

The problem is that this move also threatens to make human life less fully human.

Atheists have license to scoff at damnation, but to believe in God and not in hell is ultimately to disbelieve in the reality of human choices. If there’s no possibility of saying no to paradise then none of our no’s have any real meaning either. They’re like home runs or strikeouts in a children’s game where nobody’s keeping score.

That's right. You do the right thing because you choose to be good. You choose to be good because doing good makes you feel good about yourself and eases the pain almost all of us carry inside; self-doubt, loneliness, frustration, guilt, hunger for love and acceptance. Because we let ourselves feel this pain, we need to ease that pain in ourselves and others. What could be more human than that?

In this sense, a doctrine of universal salvation turns out to be as deterministic as the more strident forms of scientific materialism. Instead of making us prisoners of our glands and genes, it makes us prisoners of God himself. We can check out any time we want, but we can never really leave.

Unlike Douthat's belief system, which sees God as judge, jury, executioner, and jailer.

The doctrine of hell, by contrast, assumes that our choices are real, and, indeed, that we are the choices that we make. The miser can become his greed, the murderer can lose himself inside his violence, and their freedom to turn and be forgiven is inseparable from their freedom not to do so.

As Anthony Esolen writes, in the introduction to his translation of Dante’s “Inferno,” the idea of hell is crucial to Western humanism. It’s a way of asserting that “things have meaning” — that earthly life is more than just a series of unimportant events, and that “the use of one man’s free will, at one moment, can mean life or death ... salvation or damnation.”

We realize that every action is a choice and that we are the sum total of our choices and actions. If we are only good because we fear hell, we will make the choices that we think will make our gods and goddesses happy, instead of making choices that will make ourselves and other people happy. Notice what is missing here? The effect of people's actions on other people. Douthat has neatly cut out everyone else on the entire planet, and reduced all of creation to one thing--whether or not he gets the Official Hebrew God Stamp Of Godly Approval. Once you take other human beings out of the moral equation they become roadkill on your quest for eternal life. That is why it is so easy for good religious people to do bad things.

We could say the same thing about heaven as hell. It gives our life meaning (that is, a goal); our salvation is determined by our belief in heaven (and God) and by our actions on earth. That's not good enough for Douthat. He has to know that others will be punished in the fiery pits of hell, forever. Somebody has to suffer, or else Douthat's life has no meaning. And since Douthat won't be around to see them suffer in hell (or so he presumes), he needs to see people suffer for their sins right here and right now. That will prove that God exists and that He is exactly what Douthat believes him to be. If we could only see more people suffer, everyone will believe and everyone will be afraid of God and everyone will obey God and we will have proof for once and for all that God exists and loves us--as long as they believe in Hell.

And that is why Ross Douthat is proselytizing from the pages of The New York Times, although we are not sure why the Times is eager to pay him for his little sermons.

If there’s a modern-day analogue to the “Inferno,” a work of art that illustrates the humanist case for hell, it’s David Chase’s “The Sopranos.” The HBO hit is a portrait of damnation freely chosen: Chase made audiences love Tony Soprano, and then made us watch as the mob boss traveled so deep into iniquity — refusing every opportunity to turn back — that it was hard to imagine him ever coming out. “The Sopranos” never suggested that Tony was beyond forgiveness. But, by the end, it suggested that he was beyond ever genuinely asking for it.

Is Gandhi in hell? It’s a question that should puncture religious chauvinism and unsettle fundamentalists of every stripe. But there’s a question that should be asked in turn: Is Tony Soprano really in heaven?

No, because he's fictional, much like Heaven. But aside from the self-affirmation, the need for what some people see as Justice is very strong; people who feel they have suffered injustices all their life are overwhelmingly eager to inflict justice on others. Atlas Shrugged is filled with Ayn Rand's cries for justice, her pleas for understanding and appreciation, although with Rand, cries and pleas take the form of arrogant ranting. Those needs don't just go away because we are grown up and seemingly rational.

Situational Ethics

Somewhat shorter Ross Douthat: Gosh, Wally, wasn't the 1950s just swell? Sure they cheated at baseball back then too, but it was sports cheating at its best. Why don't we just forgive that scamp Roger Clemens for the sake of auld lang syne?

For a man who makes his living as a moral scold, it sure is odd to see him advocate ignoring the breaking of Charlton Heston's Ten Commandments. But maybe he just makes allowances for any situation that doesn't include a woman voluntarily having sex.

The Boy Stood On The Burning Deck

Little Ross Douthat performs before the Ladies' Auxiliary when it comes to his mother's house for tea. Master Ross doesn't understand why we allow all the poor brown people in the country when we could let in a rainbow of wealthy, educated people who can afford to migrate. Little Ross doesn't realize that Nanny and Cook and the gardener that Mother keeps calling Semental (even though he insists his name is Marco) are all employed at below-free market wages, or that the factories that keep Master Ross in velvet breeches and ponies is staffed by poor South Americans.

He's just a boy who knows very little about the world. It's not his fault his Mama keeps pushing him forward to lecture adults on things he doesn't understand.

Freaks and Geeks

Ross Douthat is a religious fundamentalist. It's difficult to believe that a man who is presumably sophisticated enough to make it through Harvard has a Bible-based view of the world, but he does. We can see where he obtained his practice of mealy-mouthed whimpering about smaller and smaller sins and religious issues but it doesn't excuse his actions. If life were a Monty Python sketch, Douthat would be the pet store owner, his religion would be the dead parrot, and the rest of the world would be the dead parrot's unfortunate owner. There's no point in reasoning with someone who has absolutely no intention of admitting he sold a dead parrot to fellow conservatives.

It’s been a melancholy summer for social conservatives. Their movement is fighting a rearguard battle in Barack Obama’s Washington. A cluster of family-values politicians — some of whom bunked down in the same Christian-sponsored D.C. townhouse — have spent the last few months confessing to extramarital affairs. And Sarah Palin ... well, you know how that’s turned out so far.

It's funny how the words "adultery" and "lose" are left out of this lament. Sarah Palin is greedy and not very bright. McCain could have picked someone less greedy and more intelligent, but--surprise!--McCain is greedy and not bright enough as well. Sixty percent of Republicans aren't sure or don't believe the evidence that President Obama is American. They are either too stupid to believe evidence or deliberately stupid so they will not have to question their beliefs. Conservatives are, understandably, very upset at being told that they are stupid, but since they can't change they can't learn and are forced to repeat their mistakes into infinity. When you won't let yourself learn from experience because it makes you feel bad about yourself you don't become smarter or wiser or more experienced or more tolerant. You stay stupid.

Speaking of the stupid:

Worst of all, nobody likes Judd Apatow’s new movie.

Don’t laugh. No contemporary figure has done more than Apatow, the 41-year-old auteur of gross-out comedies, to rebrand social conservatism for a younger generation that associates it primarily with priggishness and puritanism. No recent movie has made the case for abortion look as self-evidently awful as “Knocked Up,” Apatow’s 2007 keep-the-baby farce. No movie has made saving — and saving, and saving — your virginity seem as enviable as “The 40-Year Old Virgin,” whose closing segue into connubial bliss played like an infomercial for True Love Waits.

“We make extremely right-wing movies with extremely filthy dialogue,” Seth Rogen, Apatow’s favorite leading man, told an interviewer during the promotional blitz for “Knocked Up.” He was half-joking, of course, and it’s safe to say that you won’t see Apatow and his merry men at the next Christian Coalition fundraiser. But the one-liner got something important right. By marrying raunch and moralism, Apatow’s movies have done the near impossible: They’ve made an effectively conservative message about relationships and reproduction seem relatable, funny, down-to-earth and even sexy.

Aptow believes that loving his wife and valuing his family make him conservative. So does Douthat. That's a very self-flattering portrayal which just happens to leave out everything in Aptow's movies that conservatives see as signs of the Apocalypse: premarital sex, drug use, profanity, divorce, homosexuality, and an almost complete lack of religion in the lives of its characters. But hey, the main characters in the movies marry in the end (and when do they ever do that in Hollywood movies?), so the movies are conservative--as long as you ignore reality.

But there's a liberal snake in the garden, and it's dragging good conservatives straight to Hell.

More than most Westerners, Americans believe — deeply, madly, truly — in the sanctity of marriage. But we also have some of the most liberal divorce laws in the developed world, and one of the highest divorce rates. We sentimentalize the family, but boast one of the highest rates of unwed births. We’re more pro-life than Europeans, but we tolerate a much more permissive abortion regime than countries like Germany or France. We wring our hands over stem cell research, but our fertility clinics are among the least regulated in the world.

In other words, we’re conservative right up until the moment that it costs us.

Douthat's recommendation is, of course, more social shaming and punishment for moral transgressions. That's always his answer and that attitude plainly reveals his fundamental viewpoint: We are sinners and must be punished. This is a strangely un-Christian attitude. Jesus died for others' sins so they would not suffer. Douthat's Catholicism has a system of repentance and punishment for dealing with sins. Yet that's not enough for him. He wants his entire society to be as obsessed as he with sin and guilt and fear. He wants every facet of society to reinforce everything he believes, like all fundamentalists. He wants his personal view to be vindicated and triumphed at all times, and he has managed to convince The New York Freaking Times to do this for him. It's like hiring Jonah Goldberg as the president of Harvard or Megan McArdle as chief of the Fed. It's utterly inexcusable and ought to be an intellectual scandal.

With “Funny People,” though, Apatow is offering a more realistic morality play. This time, doing the right thing has significant costs — but you have to do it anyway. This time, doing the wrong things for too long has significant consequences — and you have to live with them. It’s the first Apatow film in which love doesn’t conquer all. And it’s the first Apatow film in which you get punished for your sins.

In that sense, “Funny People” is the most conservative of all his movies. That’s probably what American audiences don’t like about it. But it’s what makes this film his best work yet.

Aptow grew up the unhappy child of divorce and made two movies about lonely people who long for families. Wanting a family and wanting to be a good spouse and parent is not solely a conservative desire, and it's vain and self-indulgent to declare that only your tribe is moral or has good values. Somehow Douthat manages to ignore those sins while looking for others.

No Birth Control For You

Shorter Ross Douthat: I tried to have some sort of intercourse about Iraq but the Left was like a chunky Reese Witherspoon, masticating on Colin Powell's UN presentation and spilling its breasts out of its protests. I wanted to surge into Iraq but the Left wanted a premature withdrawal. If we withdraw, Iraq will swell into violence and give birth to a Middle Eastern abomination, one that even the Left can't abort.

Ross Douthat Is A Racist Moron Again

Ross Douthat tells us that affirmative action is now longer necessary because minorities can be successful and will soon be the majority anyway. He does not notice that if he keeps his mouth shut eventually he and his fellow whites will be eligible for what he constantly refers to as special treatment and unearned opportunities. Considering the intellectual depth Douthat is passing on to his offspring, they will need all the help they can get. He also does not notice that he is shilling for corporations who do not want to help the poor rise out of poverty.

Ross Douthat Died For Our Sins

Ross Douthat is angry with America, who has rejected his avatar Sarah Palin. They'll be sorry, oh yes, they will.

Here are lessons of the Sarah Palin experience, for any aspiring politicianwho shares her background and her sex. Your children will go through the tabloid wringer. Your religion will be mocked and misrepresented. Your political record will be distorted, to better parody your family and your faith. (And no, gentle reader, Palin did not insist on abstinence-only sex education, slash funds for special-needs children or inject creationism into public schools.)

Male commentators will attack you for parading your children. Female commentators will attack you for not staying home with them. You’ll be sneered at for how you talk and how many colleges you attended. You’ll endure gibes about your “slutty” looks and your “white trash concupiscence,” while a prominent female academic declares that your “greatest hypocrisy” is the “pretense” that you’re a woman. And eight months after the election, the professionals who pressed you into the service of a gimmicky, dreary, idea-free campaign will still be blaming you for their defeat.

All of this had something to do with ordinary partisan politics. But it had everything to do with Palin’s gender and her social class.

Sarah Palin is beloved by millions because her rise suggested, however temporarily, that the old American aphorism about how anyone can grow up to be president might actually be true.

But her unhappy sojourn on the national stage has had a different moral: Don’t even think about it.

Poor, poor Douthat. America rejected Sarah Palin a long time ago, preferring to vote for anyone but a Republican, but Douthat still feels the sting, for Palin was Douthat and Douthat was Palin. Palin was the only candidate in recent history that genuinely seemed to believe in the same things as Douthat. She is a fundamentalist and as long as she seemed to have political power, Douthat felt he had political power. She proved that you could believe in magic and witches and still become a national player. She proved that you could enforce your own religious beliefs on women and best of all--actually force them to carry their child to term, whether they wanted to or not. We won't know if Bristol wanted an abortion until the inevitable Mommy Dearest book comes out, but there is no question that Palin's career would be affected, if not ruined, if she let her daughter choose for herself and her daughter chose to have an abortion.

He was so close. So close to seeing his beliefs celebrated instead of mocked in the public sphere. So close to control, to power, to teaching those Pill-popping sluts to pay for their lack of godliness. Now it's gone, all gone. Sob!

Ross Douthat Is A Gullible Hack

The movie version of Dan Brown's Angels and Demons is out, and Ross Douthat can't control his loathing for the entire enterprise. The mass market paperback thriller and summer Tom Hanks vehicle, which have made millions of dollars, exist to push an agenda, says Douthat, practically vibrating with indignation.

Brown is explicit about this mission. He isn’t a serious novelist, but he’s a deadly serious writer: His thrilling plots, he’s said, are there to make the books’ didacticism go down easy, so that readers don’t realize till the end “how much they are learning along the way.” He’s working in the same genre as Harlan Coben and James Patterson, but his real competitors are ideologues like Ayn Rand, and spiritual gurus like Eckhart Tolle and Deepak Chopra. He’s writing thrillers, but he’s selling a theology.

[yap]

In the Brownian worldview, all religions — even Roman Catholicism — have
the potential to be wonderful, so long as we can get over the idea that any one
of them might be particularly true. It’s a message perfectly tailored for
21st-century America, where the most important religious trend is neither
swelling unbelief nor rising fundamentalism, but the emergence of a generalized
“religiousness” detached from the claims of any specific faith tradition.

[yap]

They reveal the growth of do-it-yourself spirituality, with traditional
religion’s dogmas and moral requirements shorn away. The same trend is at work within organized faiths as well, where both liberal and conservative believers often encounter a God who’s too busy validating their particular version of the American Dream to raise a peep about, say, how much money they’re making or how many times they’ve been married.

These are Dan Brown’s kind of readers. Piggybacking on the fascination
with lost gospels and alternative Christianities, he serves up a Jesus who’s a thoroughly modern sort of messiah — sexy, worldly, and Goddess-worshiping, with a wife and kids, a house in the Galilean suburbs, and no delusions about his own divinity.

Douthat's proof of this attempt to take Christianity away from him and give it to the immoral masses is an interview with Brown that reveals his purported "didacticism."

Q: You've written novels about a classified intelligence agency and an
ultra-secretive brotherhood. Are secrets something that interest you?

A:
Secrets interest us all, I think. For me, writing about clandestine material
keeps me engaged in the project. Because a novel can take upwards of a year to
write, I need to be constantly learning as I write, or I lose interest.
Researching and writing about secretive topics helps remind me how fun it is to
"spy" into unseen worlds, and it motivates me to try to give the reader that
same experience. Lots of people wrote me after Digital Fortress amazed that the
National Security Agency is for real. I've already started getting similar mail
from Angels & Demons--people shocked to learn about the Illuminati
brotherhood, antimatter technology, or the inner workings of the Vatican
election. My goal is always to make the character's and plot be so engaging that
readers don't realize how much they are learning along the way.

[snip]

[A]: I imagine some controversy is unavoidable, yes, although it's
important to remember that Angels & Demons is primarily a thriller--a chase
and a love story. It's certainly not an anti-Catholic book. It's not even a
religious book.

Brown explicitly states that the book delves into arcane Vatican matters to get the reader's interest. Most mystery and thriller writers do the same thing. The most entertaining mysteries teach you something new, or immerse you into a new world for a couple of brief hours. The mystery alone is usually not enough; it takes entertaining settings and characters as well. Brown's schtick is the Vatican, and there really should not be any confusion between a beach novel and religious dogma. Douthat manages to dredge up an unbelievable amount of indignation over a couple of popular novels.

Brown’s message has been called anti-Catholic, but that’s only part of the
story. True, his depiction of the Roman Church’s past constitutes a greatest
hits of anti-Catholicism, with slurs invented by 19th-century Protestants jostling for space alongside libels fabricated by 20th-century Wiccans. (If he targeted Judaism or Islam this way, one suspects that no publisher would touch him.)

And:

The “secret” history of Christendom that unspools in “The Da Vinci Code” is
false from start to finish. The lost gospels are real enough, but they neither confirm the portrait of Christ that Brown is peddling — they’re far, far weirder than that — nor provide a persuasive alternative to the New Testament account. The Jesus of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John — jealous, demanding, apocalyptic — may not be congenial to contemporary sensibilities, but he’s the only historically-plausible Jesus there is.

For millions of readers, Brown’s novels have helped smooth over the
tension between ancient Christianity and modern American faith. But the tension
endures. You can have Jesus or Dan Brown. But you can’t have both.

Douthat should unclench his fingers from around his Bible; nobody's trying to take Jesus away from him. Or trying to deny "Catholicism’s truth claims." They're making a buck and probably increasing Vatican tourist revenues. But Douthat feels "targeted" and "demonized," and calls Brown anti-Catholic twice. He grossly overreacts, defending his Faith from the scourge of popular fiction and summer blockbusters. How dare anyone say that his religion is not the one true religion?

I'm having a hard time seeing why Douthat is in the Times. The Villagers usually prefer their that moral scolding is a little more entertaining, a little more secular. Sex scandals or Democratic witch-hunts, not fundamentalist rants against heathen Hollywood. That's what Big Hollywoood is for, and I fail to see why the Times would use the imploding world of wingnut welfare journalism as a business plan.

Ross Douthat Is A Racist, Sexist Moron

Shorter Ross Douthat: We should pay for more police to watch and intimidate young black men so we don't have to pay for their incarceration.

Really. His solutions for the social problems of young black men are either police state or jail. Because, you see, young black men are criminals and what we need to discuss is the cheapest way to keep them from the rape and pillage that lives in the heart of every young black man except those he knows and therefore are acceptable.

God! The Times just hired a racist, sexist douchebag for its op-ed page! Can't the entire damn world see that and explode with disgust? Those "liberal bloggers" who praised him are morons.

What is wrong with this country, that such mediocre men can be treated with so much respect? That a Texas housewife with a blog read by six people realizes this, yet our elite do not?

Well, there I go answering my own question. The elite and its wanna-bes will always protect their own, to everyone else's detriment.

Ezra Klein: Congratulations to Ross Douthat, who will be replacing Bill Kristol at The New York Times. It's a great choice for many reasons, but what I've come to appreciate most in Ross's writing and look forward to most in his column is his deeply held and well-defended faith.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Ross Douthat is going to work for the New York Times as a columnist. Ross and I fight under different flags. But I expect he'll be at the Times, what he always was here--a swordsman of great caliber and greater honor. Here's to him. The roster won't be the same once he's gone.

Kevin Drum: Marc Ambinder reports that the New York Times has hired his Atlantic colleague Ross Douthat as an op-ed columnist. This is basically to take Bill Kristol's place as their #2 conservative columnist (alongside David Brooks) and it seems like a pretty good choice to me for a couple of reasons. First, Ross has a fluid, intelligent writing style that's well suited to the 800-word op-ed format. Second, he fits the post-Bush zeitgeist: he is, at core, a conservative Barack Obama.

Matthew Yglesias: I’d say congratulations are in order to Ross Douthat, the new hire at The New York Times. Dumping Bill Kristol in favor of Ross is a very smart move—probably the smartest one (Virginia Postrel?) the Times could have made—and will generate a conservative column that progressives will have reason to read and take seriously.

UPDATE: Oh for God's sake. Coates supports Douthat, while disagreeing with everyone Douthat agrees with. Idiot. You deserve your Atlantic position. Enjoy toadying to someone who calls you an exception to your inferior race.

Megan Congratulates

I apologize; this post will not say anything about morality, ethics, authoritarianism, or even journalism. I'm just going to enjoy myself in base emotional indulgence.

Megan McArdle "congratulates" Ross Douthout. While you read, remember that McArdle was up for the New York Times job, is around 36 years old, and is pressed for money. It's much more enjoyable that way.

Offering congratulations to my colleague, Ross Douthat, on his new job as a New York Times columnist seems almost redundant--he was so clearly the only man for the job.

Ah, so that's why your congrats is so belated. Redundancy, not bitterness.

If conservatism, and the Republican Party, can be rescued from their current crisis, I expect Ross to be the one swinging on a rope through the flaming wreckage to pull them to safety.

Because nothing says "man coming to the rescue" like a boy whose biggest talent is convincing people he's not actually a racist, fundamentalist professional moral scold.

That he has managed to become the leading voice of thoughtful conservatism at such an appallingly young age is a constant source of wonder to his colleagues--and crises of confidence in those who have meandered all the way to thirtiy without getting a New York Times column, or even leading a small band of Oakeshottian guerillas on a suicide mission against HHS.

Did I mention that McArdle is around 36? She expected to make six figures a year sitting on her ass in an expensive suit. Now she has to scramble for a living while in an economic downturn that she very publicly praised and supported, in her carefully hedged way. Now there are going to be years of Democratic economic advisers and she'll be in her forties before the Republicans come back to power. Douthat is 29, which means people in their thirties are the older generation. And what does McArdle have to show for her career? A stock portfolio worth half of what she paid for it, an over-priced rented house, an unemployed "roommate," a dog who eats his massive weight in kibble every day, and a car that can be opened with a can opener.

Of course, it's a blow for us--he will be missed from both the offices, and the website.

"Us"? Right.

But we have extracted a promise from him to visit regularly in return for our best wishes in his new gig.

That either means they'll miss him terribly or they're planning to blackmail him to get a mention in the Times.