I Hate Newspaper Columns

Imagine that you’re too dumb to be an essayist and too lazy to be a reporter but still have lots to say. Imagine that you have no big ideas, but you do have good common sense, a faultless moral compass, and a subtle wit (or so many have said — or at least thought, surely).

Imagine that you were only an OK student in college but have stockpiled a surprisingly large mental database of quotations from the great thinkers of Western culture, and often find cause to deploy them. Imagine that some medically unrecognized defect of the brain prevents you from ever noticing when you repeat yourself. Imagine that your wife has told you to please be quiet while she’s trying to watch the news, and by now you’re just about ready to burst. Imagine that you’ve mastered the art of the pithy, single-sentence paragraph.

You’re ready to be a newspaper columnist.

To inaugurate this new monthly column it seems best to acknowledge upfront that all newspaper columns are terrible. I’ll try my best to buck the trend, but just look at the esteemed New York Times, which presumably has its pick of our nation’s best political and cultural commentators and still manages, every day, to fill the bulk of its op-ed section with limp condemnations of the current president’s bad manners, Russiagate conspiracism, and stern lectures for campus “radicals” that’ll never be read by anyone in college.

Fortunately, after graduation, many of these same radicals will enter the “real world” and, in need of some trustworthy information that’ll help them understand this crazy place, will look to the Times. Here, they’ll read the important news of the day — only to have whatever they’ve learned instantly undone by some columnist’s mangled interpretation of the journalists’ hard-won facts. Eventually, the reader will understand that the entire range of acceptable adult opinion among the educated classes in America’s greatest city lies between the principled Never Trump right and the Clintonist center-left. The world will chug happily along.

Clearly, I’m not that happy about it. But before I set out to change the world, one Star-Revue reader at a time, it may be worth reexamining what not to do here. To that end, I’ve compiled my own personal collection of the 10 worst pieces from the New York Times’ stable of regular columnists in 2018 (in order of publication). For the sake of variety, no single writer appears more than once, a rule designed to ensure that David Brooks and Bret Stephens don’t bogart the whole list.

1. “Let’s Ban Porn” (2/10/18) by Ross Douthat
Douthat is in some ways a better writer than the other Times columnists, more adept at complicating his paragraphs with a kind of nuance, but his work is so deeply rooted in his own sexual neuroses that he’s basically useless for any reader who doesn’t share his particular high-minded terror of debauchery, his religious mania, and his fetishization of traditional WASP self-denial. His columns are not about the world — they’re entirely about Ross’s personal shame and discomfort.

The column expresses many concerns about porn but nothing about the logistics of the proposed legal maneuver. What qualifies as porn (as opposed to, say, art)? Who decides? What’s the penalty for violating the ban? Of course, if Douthat thinks it’s actually possible to banish internet pornography in 2018, he must not know much about the internet. It’d be like trying to get rid of music. Good luck.

2. “Memo to the President on Saudi Arabia” (3/6/18) by Thomas Friedman
A garrulous Midwestern version of Chance the Gardener in Being There, Friedman pens foreign affairs columns that somehow read more like eager Hollywood gossip, with every factoid about Syria or Iraq seeming to have come to him thirdhand and slightly damaged in transit. But in 2017, to write his glowing advertorial for Mohammad bin Salman, Friedman went straight to the source, fawning over the Saudi crown prince in a face-to-face interview that led him to cast MBS as a brave reformer whose main goals were empowering women, pushing back against Islamic fundamentalism, and rooting out governmental corruption. It was time to start feeling good about America’s strategic alliance with Saudi Arabia!

By 2018, Friedman must have realized that MBS might be a more problematic figure than he’d realized, but in “Memo to the President,” he doubles down on his support, with the caveat that if the United States doesn’t provide the right kind of guidance, the whole situation could go south. He understands that Yemen is a problem that MBS must “defuse,” but obviously still regards the U.S.-backed, Saudi-inflicted genocide of the Yemenis as an understandable response to Iran’s geopolitical power play, necessary to some degree to subdue the rebellious Houthis (to whom Iran in fact has only loose ties). Six months later, MBS authorized the dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and Donald Trump admitted that America doesn’t actually care how Saudi Arabia behaves as long as they keep buying our weapons.

3. “Barbara Bush: Fake Pearls, Real Heart” (4/21/18) by Maureen Dowd
One of countless examples of the liberal project to rehabilitate the blood-soaked but relatively courtly Bush clan in the tacky era of Trump, Dowd’s column celebrates Barbara for being a mean-spirited snob, passing off the icy aristocratic backbiting of a woman constitutionally incapable of empathy as wit. Dowd notes that Barb and H.W. were awfully disappointed to see their poor naïve son George’s presidency “hijacked” by Dick Cheney, a man of whom they disapproved very much, even though H.W. had made him Secretary of Defense.

4. “Radical Democrats Are Pretty Reasonable” (7/3/18) by Paul Krugman
When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez beat Joe Crowley, you may have wondered why pundits who had despised Bernie Sanders actually seemed pretty positive about her, despite a near-identical platform. The answer is that, as a lone socialist congresswoman, she didn’t seem to pose that much of a threat to the Democratic establishment, which quickly formed plans to capitalize on her popularity while gradually watering down her policy proposals to the point where they intersected with its own.

Here’s Krugman, who rather likes her: “Medicare for all is a deliberately ambiguous phrase, but in practice probably wouldn’t mean pushing everyone into a single-payer system. Instead, it would mean allowing individuals and employers to buy into Medicare — basically a big public option. That’s really not radical at all.” Krugman is describing the early version of Obamacare, before it got trimmed down by Joe Lieberman. This is not what Medicare-for-All means. Medicare-for-All means, quite simply, Medicare for all. It’s not ambiguous in the slightest. It’s single-payer. Krugman goes on to point out that, while he doesn’t support the Jobs Guarantee, some federal spending to generate employment in lean times (perhaps in the form of public-private partnerships, like the Obama stimulus?) can be useful.

5. “Airbnb Is the New NATO” (8/3/18) by Roger Cohen
A techno-utopian, deregulationist meditation on how apps, not governments, will change the world for the better, Cohen’s column postulates that Airbnb — a service that allows landlords to turn their properties into illegal hotels, thereby removing homes from the rental market and accelerating the housing crisis in America’s gentrifying cities — will (via bringing people together) defeat racism and xenophobia. Ironically, a 2016 study showed pervasive discrimination against black guests at Airbnb, with hosts denying their reservation requests at alarmingly high rates.

6. “Melania Trump Could Be Our Greatest First Lady” (8/21/18) by Frank Bruni
A former food critic who got reassigned to politics due to a clerical error that no one at the Times is willing to own up to, Bruni presents an insane fantasia that reimagines Melania Trump as a saboteur, working to take down her husband’s presidency from the inside. Using as evidence a few stray moments that looked a little like passive-aggressive marital snubs, Bruni speculates earnestly that Melania’s “increasingly clever” tactics could “set us free” from Trump’s regime, though he doesn’t specify how.

“I’m not sure what to make of that ‘I REALLY DON’T CARE, DO U?’ jacket that she wore on her way to a detention center for migrant children in Texas. It’s the ‘rosebud’ of our time. But what if the message was that she didn’t mind if we interpreted her behavior as a rebuke of her husband’s?” he writes. It must have been a slow news days for the Mueller investigation.

7. “The Materialist Party” (10/22/2018) by David Brooks
Most people think that the problem with politicians is that they’re all talk and that they don’t actually do anything to help the average person. David Brooks realizes that the problem with the Democratic Party is the exact opposite: they’re distracted by pragmatic issues like healthcare and the economy when they should be focused on moralistic rhetoric. “Their basic political instinct is that you win votes by offering material benefits,” he laments.

Brooks knows that what truly ails Americans isn’t poverty or disease; it’s a sick culture, defined by spiritual undernourishment, dysfunctional relationships, and mistrust. Any wrongheaded attempt to use policy to alter the supposedly “oppressive structures of society” would further erode our national unity. The only solution is an aggressive campaign of sanctimonious posturing of the kind that Brooks himself undertakes every day.

In order to shame Donald Trump and win back the public, Democrats must uphold “norms of honesty, decency, compassion and moral conduct” while offering absolutely nothing in terms of concrete proposals. “These days, culture is more important than economics,” Brooks wisely asserts.

8. “Forget Excuses. What Counts Is Winning Elections.” (11/7/2018) by Nicholas Kristof

Sad that the Democrats didn’t retake the Senate during the midterms, Kristof observes in his painfully banal column that the problem was too much leftism and that, as usual, Democrats must move to the center. This will always be the prescription, in all circumstances, forever and ever.

“One problem: Many Democrats live in an urban blue bubble, without a single Trump-supporting friend. Ever since the 2016 election, a progressive wing has tarred all Trump voters as racists, idiots and bigots. Not surprisingly, it’s difficult to win votes from people you’re calling bigots,” he remarks. Right, Nicholas: it was the progressive candidate, not the centrist one, who called Trump voters “deplorables.” It was the progressive wing that willfully abandoned white, rural, blue-collar voters in the Rust Belt. We’re the ones in the bubble.

9. “Election’s Over, Let’s Have a Rant” (11/9/18) by Gail Collins

Gail Collins is a lady who likes chatting about the news. Her perspective is a default New York liberalism, but her columns aren’t very ideological. Her real point is that news happens, and it’s fun to talk about it. But one position she does have is that voting for third parties is a bad idea. In November, it may even have cost Kyrsten Sinema her Senate seat! (It didn’t.) It isn’t worth litigating all of Collins’s bad arguments, but her column is notable for its apparent unawareness of the Times’ preexisting archive of roughly 10 million op-eds about the folly of third-party voters and for its refusal even to attempt to put a fresh spin on this trite, infantile take.

10. “Armistice Day and Our ‘Forever Wars’” (11/15/18) by Bret Stephens

Most of the Times’ columnists are just doofuses, but Stephens is genuinely a monster. His column begins with the startlingly ahistorical notion that the Allied Powers’ failure to insist upon a brutal, decisive victory over Germany in World War I empowered the latter, two decades later, to initiate World War II — when, of course, it actually was resentment at the humiliating terms of surrender imposed upon Germany in WWI and the severe economic burden it carried as a result that informed Hitler’s ambitions of European conquest.

From there, Stephens makes the case that, in order to achieve a lasting peace today, the United States and its allies (like Israel) must, for the benefit of all, put an end to their civilized wartime leniency and become willing to crush their opponents absolutely. The problem with America’s wars in the Middle East isn’t that they’re immoral and unwinnable; it’s that we’re not killing enough people — we chicken out too easily and forget that, if our enemies had the means, they’d gladly murder all of us (therefore we, who do have the means, should be able to do the same to them). Similarly, Israelis must embrace a full-scale genocide of the Palestinians if the two groups are ever to coexist happily.

(Editor’s note — If you don’t agree with the above, well, that’s the whole point of a column)